The 10am Magic Now Has a Face

It's the new smart money, retail - A look at the month end redux

Once again today, 10am marked the low of the day, thus far anyway:

I feel like I’ve been harping on this forever; it has become a regular feature of the trading landscape, a daily dose of home-printed QE with magical on the clock timing:

Well, we know know who is at least partly responsible for this pattern, and while you may have assumed it was/is a bunch of quants or pod bros, it’s actually the new smart money - retail:

Small lots of retail options trading with their own code, some plug in code, or some AI written code that operates at specific times, especially 10am. And then you can see, the 1pm and 1:30pm time frames I’ve been highlighting for a couple years now, where the market tends to roll over, or at least the rise is halted. Calls are sold for a profit and/or cheap puts are bought:

How do they know it’s retail? Well, when they removed the small lots from the executed trades the timed volume pattern evaporates into the ether: