Strategy & Tactics

September 2, 2026

The key for asymmetrical profitability shows up in trend dynamics. It shows up in trading days that are hit with an accelerant, something unexpected: the short squeeze that came after the 1987 stock market crash, when bonds rallied significantly, squeezing all the shorts. I know personally some of the big names were short that day in T-notes. Larry Williams, for example. One of his traders was a good friend of mine, Ralph Vince.

The point is we want the force of the move to be one way and a high rate of change. Bottom line, we are always looking for asymmetrical opportunities, and there are many of them today, that fit the high-reward, low-risk situation. But we are looking for an accelerant, and thus far it has not hit.

Being able to achieve a modest 50 percent, maybe a triple, over several months is a nice return, and to do it like the pros, doing that on each of our trades with a small percentage of risk capital, beats the S&P average return. However, Strategy and Tactics is looking for something bigger than that. We are looking for 10 times, 20 times in a very short period of time. It is our formula for calculating market structure that will get us there, and we also know they occur at most three or four times a year. We have already seen one with the outbreak of the tariff situation back at the beginning of the year, into March 30.

For those of you who were not around back in the 80s or 90s, a more recent example is the Trump upset in November 2016, when he won the election and the market went down early in the Globex session in a thin market. Shorts got trapped and squeezed overnight when the liquid markets came back in. That is the type of high rate of change, that momentum surge, that we are looking for in Strategy and Tactics.