If there’s a single sentence that sums up this episode of Trading Live With Bubba, it’s the one he repeats more than once: if there’s nothing to do, you don’t force it, you let it sit and let it trade. Recorded the Tuesday before the FOMC decision, this session is a masterclass in patience during a genuinely slow, low-conviction market, and it’s worth watching precisely because most trading content skips over what to do when nothing’s happening. Bubba opens by noting the market is bracing for the Fed announcement the next day, expecting a rate hike and possibly a couple more before year end given how crude oil has been behaving. His spreads have been on an excellent run — eight winners in his last eight spread trades between Tuesday and Thursday the prior week — but he’s candid that the day-trading side of the business has offered almost nothing lately because volume and volatility just aren’t there. Rather than treat that streak as license to get aggressive, he treats it as a reason to stay exactly as disciplined as before. What makes this episode genuinely useful for anyone learning options and futures trading is the sheer breadth of his live watchlist walkthrough. He goes ticker by ticker — Apple, Amazon, Circle, Coinbase, CrowdStrike, GLD, Google, IBM, Netflix, Nvidia, Palantir, the Qs, SPY, Tesla, USO, and more — narrating in real time why each one either does or doesn’t qualify for a trade that day. Most get a simple “nothing yet,” but a few, like Amazon and IBM, get flagged as setups worth watching for the next session, complete with specific strike and pricing considerations for put and call spreads. He also spends real time on crude oil, which is clearly the asset he’s most tempted to trade that day, floating a short at the $101 level but ultimately passing because it doesn’t meet his defined criteria for a qualifying setup. That restraint, repeated throughout the episode, is really the entire lesson: wanting to trade something and having a valid reason to trade it are two different things, and conflating them is how traders erode their edge over time. He ties this back to volume specifically, noting the S&P was trading barely a fraction of its normal daily contract volume that morning, which he treats as a hard stop signal regardless of what the price action looks like on the surface. There’s also a nice aside on account growth and position sizing, where he explains the psychology of scaling up size only as you earn it through consistent profitability, rather than jumping to bigger positions because a hot streak makes you feel confident. It’s a rules-based, almost protocol-driven approach to trading, executed the same way whether the market gives you a great day or a dead one, and that consistency is exactly why his spread record has stayed intact through slow stretches like this one. The episode wraps with Bubba noting he has two open spread positions expiring over the next couple of days, along with his usual invitation for viewers to email him directly if they want to sit in on some of his other live classes. For traders who struggle with the itch to always have a position on, this is a good reminder that sometimes the most professional move is simply watching the tape and waiting for the setup that actually meets your own rules. |
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.
