Independent Researcher in Quantitative Derivatives. Founder of CrossVol Research.
Brent broke 100 dollars for the first time in two months, and then every instrument that prices risk quietly disagreed with the panic. The curve unwound, the options desk bought puts into the rally, refiners sold off into a record crack, and tankers stayed flat through a live supply shock. Only diesel held. From where I sit on the desk, the complex voted the spike was temporary. Published 25 July 2026 by Djellal Djouad.
Spot VIX sits at 16.23 and looks calm, but VVIX at 93.53, a steep futures contango into the low 20s, an upward-sloping call skew that reaches 112 per cent implied vol at the 40 strike, and a 272,603-lot open interest wall at the 65 call all point the other way. From the desk, this is what the tape looks like before a short-vol unwind. My read on why I expect another volmageddon, and how the structure has to be traded off futures, not spot.
The Kospi jumps more than 7 per cent on SK Hynix and a cooler US CPI takes a July Fed hike off the boil, but the crack spread is screaming a different story, China grows just 4.3 per cent, the Rhine is running dry, and the euro still cannot contest the dollar. From the desk, a real reprieve sitting on top of unfixed structural cracks. Published 15 July 2026 by Djellal Djouad.
Trump reimposes a full naval blockade at the Strait of Hormuz and Brent trades above 85 dollars for the first time in a month. July Fed hike odds jump from under 10 per cent to roughly half. And a quiet structural shift in Japanese capital flows threatens the marginal bid for Treasuries. From the desk, three separate stories are converging into one trade. Published 14 July 2026 by Djellal Djouad.
The rotation beneath US equities has not stopped, it has gone granular. Small caps lead the S&P 500 by the widest margin since 2003, the equal-weight index is beating the cap-weight, and inside tech the crowd is rolling from chips into hyperscalers. From the desk, this is churn without a directional break, and Q2 earnings is the anchor that decides it. Published 13 July 2026 by Djellal Djouad.
WTI back near 74 dollars and Brent near 79 after a fresh weekend of US-Iran strikes. One-month call skew is trading roughly 18 vols over puts on both benchmarks. From the desk, the options market is pricing a hard Hormuz closure as a live tail, not a remote one, while Kuwait quietly slashes its selling prices. Published 13 July 2026 by Djellal Djouad.
VIX at 15. OVX at 41. GVZ trading like tech vol. Managed money flat on gold, exiting crude, crowded long copper. Silver compressing the gold-silver ratio from above. Five different narratives on the same desk screen at the same close. The trade is the geometry of the disagreement.
AA-rated hyperscalers now represent 52 percent of the Bloomberg US IG index. The IMF, BIS, BofA, Moody's, Ray Dalio, Norway's sovereign wealth fund, Man Group and options markets are all telling you the same thing at the same time, using different languages. They rarely do.
Four convergent fault lines in private credit, BDCs, AI capex, and Bermuda reinsurance are forming around 2024-2026. When two move simultaneously, the shock is non-linear. The pro-side decomposition drawn from The Coming Crash (Djellal Djouad, 2026).
BlackRock's HLEND has capped redemptions at 5 percent for the second straight quarter against 13.3 percent of share requests. Blackstone has joined the same limit this quarter. The 5 percent NAV cap is now the industry standard for the $1.8 trillion private credit market, exactly as documented in the Convergent Faults working paper.
A-book vs B-book mechanics, the five friction layers, the funnel pyramid, FXCM 2017, Alpari 2015, MyForexFunds 2023, ESMA 2018. The pro-side audit retail FX brokers do not want you to read. Sourced from FX Traders vs Brokers (Djellal Djouad, 2026).
Sixteen tankers off Oman with transponders dark. Two million barrels a day leaking out of the Gulf instead of seventeen. Oil down 30 per cent from the war peak. The market is pricing resolution. From where I sit on the desk, this is not a crisis that resolves. It is a stalemate that neither Iran nor the United States can publicly fold on. Published 10 June 2026 by Djellal Djouad.
Five Bloomberg, Barron's and MT Newswires reports of 9-10 June 2026 trace a closed financing loop linking Oracle, Apollo, Blackstone, Broadcom, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and former crypto-miner datacenter operators.
Ten Jupyter notebooks on options pricing, gamma exposure, and FX volatility, freely available on GitHub.