This Thursday session lands on a day when the market has real news to digest after the close, with Apple and Amazon both reporting earnings that evening, so Bubba spends the front half of the show being deliberately hands-off with both names even as Amazon bounces nicely off a level he’d flagged a few sessions earlier. His logic is straightforward: whatever edge you’d get from guessing the direction of an earnings gap isn’t worth the binary risk, so both stocks stay on the watch list rather than the trade list.
The day’s best moment comes early, in the S&P. Bubba spots a setup, buys at 7406, and structures the trade so that part of the position comes off quickly for a locked-in gain while the rest rides with a trailing stop. He walks viewers through the mechanics step by step as it happens: move the stop to breakeven after the first scale-out, then nudge it higher twice more as the trade continues to work, eventually locking in a solid four-plus-point winner before getting stopped out on the balance. It’s a textbook demonstration of his day-trading philosophy of let winners run but protect what you’ve already made, and it ends up being the single largest profit driver of the session.
With that trade banked, Bubba shifts to setting up post-earnings-adjacent credit spreads in two names that had already reported. Meta, fresh off its own earnings the day before, gets a bullish put spread for Monday’s expiration, selling the 537.50 put and buying the 535 put for a $1.27 credit, a bet that the stock holds above the higher strike through the weekend. Microsoft gets similar treatment on the call side, selling the 447.50 call and buying the 450 call for a $1.07 credit, betting the stock doesn’t extend meaningfully higher into Monday. Both trades reflect a common thread in Bubba’s playbook: once a name has already digested its news, he’s comfortable selling premium against a level he thinks will hold, rather than trying to predict the next leg.
There’s also a short, unsuccessful flirtation with crude oil, where Bubba lays out specific sell levels around 84.40 and 84.60 but the market never quite gets there, a good example of how often he passes on trades that almost qualify rather than forcing them. He’s candid about it in real time, noting that crude never really triggered and that’s simply how it goes some days. Elsewhere on the board, names like Netflix, Nvidia, and Palantir get quick mentions and equally quick dismissals for lack of any real setup.
By the close, the day nets out to one clean day-trading win in the S&P plus two new credit spreads working into Monday’s expiration in Meta and Microsoft, a solid showing for what Bubba himself describes as an otherwise quiet tape. He wraps with his usual reminders about the daily Market 120 update and his Monday evening webinar, while flagging that the real fireworks, Apple and Amazon’s numbers, are still to come after the closing bell.
About Trading Live With Bubba
Trading Live with Bubba is a live-session show on the Tradier Hub YouTube channel hosted by veteran trader Todd “Bubba” Horwitz. Airing Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Bubba scans markets in real time, calls out credit spread and day trade setups, and teaches trading discipline through live narration.
