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Trading Through Week Four Of Epic Fury

Portfolio Armor's Photo
by Portfolio Armor
Saturday, Mar 28, 2026 - 7:12

An anthropomorphic bull and bear looking out over the Strait of Hormuz.

Trading Through Week Four Of Epic Fury

The biggest development this week was that the war’s economic effects became harder to ignore, even as the political signals continued to suggest this conflict is more likely to be measured in weeks than months. Oil stayed elevated as traders priced the risk of prolonged disruption around the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Gulf energy complex, while the market swung back and forth with every new headline about negotiations, deadlines, and military options. At the same time, President Trump kept pushing back his deadline for striking Iranian power plants, said talks were going well and that the Iranians wanted to negotiate, and rescheduled his delayed summit with President Xi for mid-May—moves that all imply the White House still expects this war to be brought under control relatively soon, even if the path there remains messy.

That still matches our basic view. Before this war started, we hedged against it. And this week, as we noted in Betting On The Iran War Winding Down, we pivoted from hedging to positioning for volatility to cool off over the next several weeks.

We also kept adding bullish exposure selectively on this pullback, because our base case remains that, by the time the options we’re buying mature, we’ll be on the other side of this conflict.

What We Bought On The Panic

Some of the names we added this week reflected exactly that mindset. We leaned into a memory-related name after a panic selloff tied to the market’s latest “TurboQuant” scare, taking the view that the combination of war fear and AI-memory fear had created an opportunity rather than a reason to flee.

We also added exposure to a couple of biotech names—one a more commercial-stage story with improving fundamentals, the other a more classic catalyst setup—along with a couple of Market Watchers names in payments infrastructure and semis.

In other words, we weren’t trying to buy everything indiscriminately. We were trying to buy selected businesses and themes where the panic seemed larger than the actual deterioration in the underlying story. At the same time, we also had four full or partial exits from previous trades this week. 

This Week’s Exits

This week’s exits are below:

Options

  1. Put spread on Credo Technology Group (CRDO -1.22%↓). Entered at a net credit of $2.61 as part of a 4-leg combo on 12/3/2025; exercised and assigned on 3/27/2026. Loss: 100% of max risk (92% on premium collected). Signal: PA Top Names.

  2. 4-leg hybrid combo on Photronics (PLAB 1.30%↑). Entered at a net debit of $3.10 on 2/13/2026; bought-to-close the short call at a net debit of $0.20 on 3/5/2026, exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 3/20/2026, and sold the long calls for $3.10 on 3/23/2026. Profit: 87% (return on max risk: 33%). Signal: Market Watchers.

  3. Put spread on Intuitive Machines (LUNR -8.45%↓). Entered at a net credit of $1.61 as part of a 4-leg hybrid combo on 2/9/2026; exited at a net debit of $0.20 on 3/25/2026. Profit: 88% (return on max risk: 42%). Signal: PA Top Names.

  4. 3-leg combo on TechnipFMC (FTI 2.64%↑). Entered at a net debit of $2.05 on 11/20/2025; exited the put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 3/23/2026 and sold the calls for $17.50 on 3/23/2026. Profit: 744% (return on max risk: 216%). Signal: Chartmill.

One Lesson From The Blemish

One thing worth noting about this week’s exits is that the only real blemish was CRDO, and that one may say as much about our process at the time as it does about the stock itself. When we entered that trade on 12/3/2025, we weren’t yet applying our RSI + Setup screens to new PA Top Names trades—we were only applying them to follow-on Top Names trades and to non-PA names, such as our Market Watchers names. Had we been using those screens then, we might not have taken the CRDO trade at all. We had just exited a profitable CRDO trade the previous day, the stock had spiked, and its RSI had jumped as well. In other words, that new trade may have been less a fresh opportunity than a case of us reaching back into a name that had already made its move.

The Bigger Pattern

The other three exits tell a different story. PLAB, LUNR, and FTI all show the value of scaling out of these structures systematically: peeling off short calls and put spreads when we can, and then letting the longer-dated bullish leg do the rest of the work. In FTI especially, that patience paid off in a very big way.

More broadly, this week’s exits are a reminder that our best results tend to come when we combine a strong underlying thesis with disciplined entry filters and preset exit orders—rather than chasing a name after it has already gotten extended.

If you'd like a heads up in real time when we place our next trades, you can sign up for our trading Substack/occasional email list below.

And if you think we're wrong about the war winding down, and you want to hedge against it getting worse, you can use our website or iPhone app to scan for the optimal hedges for that. 

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.
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