Good morning, folks. It’s Saturday, 8:30 AM Chicago time. Welcome to the Deep Dive. I’m Russell Clark, and this morning we’re doing a full autopsy on one of the most deceptive, frustrating, and expensive weeks of 2025 so far. Grab your coffee, because we’re going deep.
Let’s start with the numbers.
The S&P 500 closed the week at seventy four eleven. That’s right — seventy four eleven. On the surface it looks like we went higher, but if you were paying attention, you know this market was a meat grinder wearing a smiley face mask. The VIX finished at eighteen point five eight. Not low enough to feel safe, not high enough to give you the proper warning. Gold punched through four thousand seventy one dollars an ounce. That’s not a bull market anymore, that’s a screaming monetary panic. Oil settled right around eighty nine dollars. And Bitcoin? Bitcoin closed the week near sixty four thousand seventy one. Still acting like it wants to be digital gold until the next risk-off wave kicks it in the teeth.
Now let’s talk about what actually happened this week, because the price action lied to a lot of people.
Monday opened with pure euphoria. We gapped up hard on more AI nonsense and the usual suspects — Nvidia, Super Micro, Arm — all ripping. Retail piled in like it was 2021 again. By Tuesday afternoon that entire move had been given back. Wednesday we saw the first real institutional trap of the week. Big boys ran the VIX futures lower, crushed the put buyers, then dumped the indices right into the close. Classic.
Thursday was the bloodbath nobody wants to talk about. We had a quiet morning, then between 1:15 and 2:45 Chicago time someone hit the sell button with size across every single sector. Not just tech. Everything. The kind of selling that doesn’t come from retail. That was institutions derisking ahead of Friday’s payrolls while keeping the VIX suppressed so the options gang on the other side got absolutely torched.
And then came Friday. The jobs number was a joke, as usual. Headline beat, but the internals were rotting. Yet the market ripped higher anyway because that’s what it does in this era — bad news is good news until it isn’t. By the close we were back near the highs and a whole new crop of retail bulls were born, completely unaware they just bought the top of a distribution week.
So let’s call it what it was.
This was a textbook institutional trap week. They let the momentum crowd run it up early, they let the dip buyers feel smart on Wednesday, then they flushed both of them violently on Thursday before giving a participation trophy rally on Friday so the headlines look friendly. Same game, different week.
What worked this week?
If you were short the Russell 2000, you printed. Small caps got destroyed relative to the S&P. If you were long gold miners or physical gold, you ate. If you were long the dollar or short certain emerging market currencies, you smiled. Defensive sectors like utilities and consumer staples held up far better than they should have. And if you were sitting in cash? You were the smartest person in the room.
What failed miserably?
Long AI names at these valuations. I’m tired of saying it but apparently it still needs to be said. Nvidia is now trading at fifty-two times sales. Fifty-two. That’s not a multiple, that’s a religious experience. The momentum crowd that piled into anything with “AI” or “quantum” or “robotics” in the name got absolutely gutted midweek. Crypto traders who bought the Bitcoin rip on Monday and held through Thursday got wrecked. Growth at any price is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.
The options crowd got slaughtered again. The amount of 0 DTE call buying on Wednesday and Thursday was historic. Dealers were short gamma and when they flipped, they flipped hard. A lot of people who thought they were “just trading” lost five, six, even seven figures in forty-eight hours. I saw the tears on Twitter. Some of you need to stop.
Let’s talk about the institutional traps
