What Happened Today?
Friday January 30, 2026
I said yesterday the options market would be loopy today.
I started participating in the stock market in 2001. From 2001 through 2020 the number of times that a regular middle class person with a completely average and modest brokerage account could become a centi-millionaire or billionaire was zero.
Technically, there was one such setup if you count bitcoin. But, that would have taken you more than a decade which seems almost pedestrian compared to more recent events.
Not to burst the Wall Street machine’s myth (ie. Buffett, Munger, Dalio, Marks..) here. But, it was just not possible. You could get to a comfortable retirement through investing but not to real wealth.
It’s not that there weren’t 4000-10000% moves it just they never happened in anything retail could trade or were too illiquid buy enough to matter. I am sure someone will remember one but I don’t remember any.
The only way a regular person could go from zero to Forbes-listed was to born rich and then get free shares from being a CEO of a company.
But since 2020, there have been three such moments in the market.
The first was short everything before the COVID shutdown - this would have taken a week/month. The second was, off course the obvious one, the GameStop short squeeze - which took a few months to play out. And the third was today.
Short silver. If you started trying time this trade when I started it took three weeks to play out and then happened in hours.
In theory, you could have changed your life in 5 hours if you were patient or lucky.
Today was a 9 sigma event - for gold and gold only fell 10%. Silver fell 30%. So let’s say 10 sigma just for a nice round number. When you are talking moves like this normal distributions aren’t real so the comparison is moot, but let’s say 10 for funsies.
That would be an event that occurs once in a septillion days. That is a 1 followed by twenty zeros.
Followed by three more zeros. That’s all. Just kidding. One more year.
Divide this number by 250 (trading days per year) to get how many years that is.
A lot of people aren’t going to get this how absurd this is. So how about an analogy? That would be like having a 16+’’ penis.
COVID was a 5-7 sigma event, GameStop likely was 9-10. The stock market is only (depending on your perspective 150 or 400 years old) and just a little 5 sigma event should only happen once in 3 million days. Which is once in ~13000 years. Futures have been around for 2000 years or so, but still these events should never happen.
And we’ve had three in the last six years.
Today silver made go-poof over a trillion dollars. Trillion. Trillion, with a T. Imagine if Switzerland just decided to not work for an entire year collectively. They unplugged… everything too. That is how much $1T dollars is. It’s an entire country in lederhosen taking a year off work.
Here is the thing though, I don’t see any reason to believe this is the last such event. Maybe the last one for silver? But, who knows? Maybe next week it does it all over again? It ran from $40 to $118 in 6 months. It still has ~$37 more to fall to get back to $40 and even at $40 silver is still way too high. Remember, platinum fell 75% in 2008.
With all the changes to the market (no commissions, globalization, lack of real price discovery, memes and emojis, etc) I think predicting that there will be another 5+ sigma event is as obvious at statement to make as saying Trump isn’t actually tan.
And here is the amazing thing. People out there are going to catch one of these trades then get on a plane, lose their luggage with their laptop and cell phone, so they can’t check their accounts while on the beach and when they finally get their baggage will have made generational wealth.
My point is Keith Gill is not going to be the last person working a 9-to-5 to turn an IRA into generation wealth. We are in a new world. One were sitting and waiting and going big is the proper course of action.
If Alex Honnold can climb a building with a rope I know there are many people strong enough to make a trade and the close the laptop for a few days and wait it out.
And I can’t fucking wait for the next movie about those who do… and aren’t on NDAs.
Here is updated chart for ETF:$SLV. The last Δliquidity event was at $40.00.
MACRO:
Trump nominated Kevin Warsh to be Fed Chair. My family is from PA and we clean our clothes by warshing them so I approve.
He is not a fiscal hawk - contrary to the media pundits. He isn’t a dove. He is an appliance you plug in and it makes you happy.
More Epstein stuff came out and guess whose name is in those files? Kevin’s father-in-law.
PPI came in hot. Call me shocked.
MICRO:
Someone asked me for a chart on Figma. So here you go.
We are currently holding both calls and puts on silver. Longer term puts and the calls are for next week. And will continue to trade it until it returns to sub $20.
If you like our risk/event charts they are available in chat via subscription. This subscription fee covers the cost of running all this code. Amazon Web services and data plans are not cheap.
As always, if you think there are spelling errors update your dictionary to the latest version. Happy speculation!
— AJ