Promise Me You’ll NEVER Do This By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily In This Digest: - How my former mentor cleaned up in the April crash…
- Follow his most prized research for free this next week…
- Why he’s warning of a market sea change not seen in 55 years…
- The stupidest bitcoin play I’ve ever seen…
- Big Tech is locking in a nuclear-powered AI future…
Back in 2017, I got the privilege to work with master trader Jeff Clark… It was less than a year after getting my bachelor’s in English literature, and a few months after starting my career as a proofreader in the incredible business of financial research publishing. My manager at the time was about to depart the company, and they needed someone to take a big, important task off their plate. It was to manage and publish the research of master options trader and technical analyst, Jeff Clark. My first question was, “What’s an option?” Tempus fugit… The next five years were a mentorship I will never forget. Not just in options… but in writing, in work ethic, and in keeping a cool head when markets go nutty. Jeff has been trading the markets for more than 40 years. That’s a rare level of experience these days, especially in the realm of options trading. And the way Jeff trades options is just so different from what you see everywhere else. It’s all about highly calculated risk, using systematic approaches that always put the odds in his subscribers’ favor. For the proof, look no further than the track record Jeff makes publicly available on his website: every single trade since I started working with him in 2017. Below are, specifically, all the trades Jeff has recommended to his Delta Report subscribers since Liberation Day (you know, that day that began the worst stock market sell-off since the pandemic panic): 
Three short put trades into the steepest part of the decline, where traders could have collected 76%, 91%, and 90% in premium all in the span of four trading days. Then, two strategic long call trades for 81% and 97% gains as the market began to recover. Did you make five profitable options trades in a row for an average return of 87% during the last two months? If you followed Jeff, you probably did something like that. And that, of course, is only if you followed his Delta Report trades. In his live trading blog, Delta Direct, Jeff recommended quite a few more… 
Out of 13 trades, 11 were profitable and all but one were double digits. The two losers only gave up a little more than a dollar in option premium per contract. Note the names. Jeff traded gold miners (GDX), consumer stocks (TGT, DECK, C), tech (AMD, MRVL), and the broad market (SPY). The guy’s no one-trick pony. He watches the whole market and finds the setups that matter. Here’s the great news for you… To celebrate the coming integration of Jeff’s system into TradeSmith as part of his Delta Report service, we’re letting anyone who’s interested access Jeff’s live trading blog, Delta Direct, for 100% free for the next week. I don’t think this has ever been done before. People have paid thousands of dollars over the year to access this research. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) And from today through next Wednesday, we’re making this invaluable resource available for free. Click this link to find out how you can access Delta Direct for free for the next week, including any new trades Jeff publishes. As I’m sure you’re wondering, here’s how he does it… Apart from his decades of experience and market intuition, Jeff holds two aces up his sleeve. For one, Jeff uses a proprietary system of technical indicators that deliver exceptional setups when they come about. We recently put that system through an extensive backtest here at TradeSmith and found that its bullish setups had a 10-year win rate of 72%. Bearish setups saw a win rate of more than 69%. Over the last year, the forward 21-day returns from winning trades across both setups saw an average return of 5.85% – a very solid return for a strategy with such a high win rate. If you’re frowning at that number, remember that Jeff understand options – their risks, rewards, and the right ones to trade – better than anyone I know. He takes great care in explaining all of these concepts in plain English so his subscribers can confidently leverage their best ideas for better gains using options. And as you’ve seen, Jeff uses options to great effect, leveraging the small gains this strategy provides on equity into much bigger short-term gains. But that’s not all you should know about Jeff’s research right now… You might have noticed how well Jeff does during times of volatility. That’s because if volatility is an options trader’s friend, it’s Jeff’s best friend. More volatility means higher options premiums, which is especially useful if you’re selling options as Jeff often does. Not to mention that Jeff has a long track record of warning his readers before big market downturns, most recently back in late March during the inaugural episode of the TradeSmith Roundtable podcast. (Don’t worry, more is coming soon.) And if you ask Jeff, we haven’t seen the last of volatility in 2025. Here he is writing to his TradeSmith’s Market Minute subscribers yesterday morning: Look at this chart of 30-year interest rates… 
Long-term interest rates peaked in 1982, with the 30-year Treasury bond yielding 14%. Rates then declined for the next 40 years – hitting as low as 0.4% during the COVID crisis in 2020. But look at what has happened in the last three years. The 30-year Treasury yield broke out above a 40-year declining resistance line. […] Interest rates entered a new, long term bull market – meaning Treasury bonds entered a bear market. Rates are 60% higher today than they were in 2022. They’re 1,100% higher than they were at the bottom in 2020. In other words, the cost of borrowing money is 11 times greater today than it was five years ago. In Jeff’s view, the Treasury bear market that began in 2020 and accelerated in 2022 is ushering in a market regime that could mirror one of the toughest periods in the modern age, the 1970s. If this turns out the way Jeff suspects, it will be a disaster for savers and investors… but an absolute gold mine for traders with a system that can take advantage of short-term dislocations in the markets. Jeff will be speaking all about this sea change trend in a webinar airing next week, called the Countdown to Chaos event. I highly suggest you sign up here and attend. There you’ll learn how Jeff’s new system is perfectly suited for the market he sees coming… And until then, don’t forget that you can test-drive Jeff’s latest ideas in his live blog for free. Learn how here. Shifting gears… This just ticks me off… Let me lay some groundwork. I like bitcoin. I think it’s important and will only grow in importance. People will almost definitely own bitcoin 10 years from now, and will probably own it 100 years from now. I think it will hit the $1 million price milestone and keep going from there. Once you understand the mechanics of bitcoin, this kind of thing just starts to seem inevitable. Suffice to say, I think investors should own some in their portfolio. Depending on your conviction and your risk tolerance, that might be as little as 5% or as much as 50% or more. But what you should NEVER do for ANY investment is take on stupidly high-risk leverage in order to acquire it. That’s where I differ from proponents like Michael Saylor, who has made the leveraged bitcoin trade seem like free money and not the risk bomb that it actually is. He’s raised more than $7 billion via convertible debt to buy bitcoin for his company MicroStrategy, which now goes by Strategy (MSTR). As we’ve covered in the past, this has put MSTR’s stock as somewhere in the vicinity of a 2:1 leveraged bitcoin trade. At one point, Saylor suggested that anyone who’s not putting all their wealth into bitcoin is a fool. He took it further, saying people should leverage their homes and businesses to buy bitcoin. It used to be something of a joke. But now, there’s a company that promises to let you do something like this. Out of an abundance of caution, I won’t share the company’s name here. But from what I gather, it promises to take a “financial interest” in some portion of your home equity, give you some cash in return (not even necessarily to buy bitcoin), and lay claim on all the price appreciation of that equity. If it sounds like a rotten deal, that’s because it is. It’s also a complicated deal – another red flag. Is it a loan? Well, they claim, “There’s no new debt [and] no monthly payments” involved. You simply trade the financial interest in your home equity for cash. So whether your house goes up or down, or if the bitcoin goes up or down, there’s (theoretically) no default risk. If you decide to sell your house, they get paid. Naturally, the fees for all this are not disclosed on the website. And the whole thing is obfuscated under a thick, corporate layer of “Trust us, this is a great idea!” I shouldn’t need to spell out just how bad of an idea this it, but I will anyway. For one, you should never purchase risk assets, whether it’s stocks or bitcoin or anything else, on borrowed money. And clearly also not any kind of arrangement that puts other assets – especially relatively illiquid assets like real estate – at risk or that keeps you from benefiting from their appreciation. That’s just bad risk management and bad life choices. For two, this feels dangerously new – and finicky financial arrangements are not the kind of thing you want to alpha test. I will always recommend buying bitcoin. But I will never recommend buying it on leverage… or whatever the heck this is. As with all things in life, stick within your means. You should own the amount of bitcoin that you can manage without putting yourself into debt. If you’re already in debt, the priority is to pay off that debt, not to acquire more debt (more risk) in your life with the hope of a speculative investment going up. One last piece of big news: META goes nuclear… Longtime readers of mine might remember me talking about nuclear energy back in late 2023. Back then, I said it was an underappreciated energy fuel that was just starting to get popular again. Later on, I showed how nuclear was the inevitable solution to the massive energy needs presented by an AI-powered future. Since then, many nuclear power stocks have risen in value – some more than others. But this week marked a big surge in the shares of Constellation Energy (CEG), which just locked in a 20-year contract with Meta Platforms (META) to supply nuclear-powered energy for AI datacenters. This deal tells us that Meta sees nuclear power as a viable and necessary energy fuel for AI not just now, but until at least the year 2045. That, in no small way, is the beginning of a trend… not the peak and certainly not the end. Especially since Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other Big Tech names have signed similar deals, too. Keep an eye on the nuclear front, and it wouldn’t hurt to own a few names in the space while you’re at it. Constellation (CEG) is an obvious beneficiary, but Nuscale Power (SMR), Oklo (OKLO), and Cameco (CCJ), which I profiled in my initial piece, have also had pretty solid runs since I put this idea on your radar. And stay tuned for Thursday’s Daily in which Jason Bodner will share his thoughts on nuclear, including any institutional interest in the stocks that his Big Money Index detects. To your health and wealth, 
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily | 
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