Weekly Review — Week 20, 2026

Regime read

The week felt liquidity-led more than narrative-led: index levels held a range, but breadth and follow-through were uneven. Gaps that used to extend often faded by midday, which is consistent with a market where positioning is light and dealers are hedging gamma rather than chasing direction.

I did not treat the first breadth/price divergence as a fade signal. That was the right restraint—two prior weeks punished mechanical mean-reversion when macro headlines were still in play.

What I changed

• Trimmed gross exposure Tuesday after the second gap-and-fade in five sessions. The issue was not conviction on direction; it was paying for optionality in a tape that stopped paying trend holders.
• Raised the bar for adding beta into Friday unless breadth confirmed the move by the close. This is now written as an explicit checklist item in the weekly prep doc (private memo).
• Kept single-name risk limits intact; most pain was in second-line names where my liquidity assumptions were too optimistic for the size I wanted.

Lessons (durable)

1. When realized vol runs below implied into a dense event calendar, my edge is often not in directional bets—it is in sizing discipline and not turning scratches into full-size losers.
2. Second-line liquidity needs a separate pre-trade gate: if the name cannot absorb my exit at 2× average spread without moving the book, the trade is a Tier 3 memo item, not a public summary bullet.

Next week

I am watching whether realized vol reverts toward implied after the event stack clears, and whether credit confirms any equity bounce. I will not add gross until breadth and vol agree for two consecutive sessions.

Related public framing: see the risk budget and sleeves framework on this pillar for how weekly trading maps to the larger allocation picture.

The private memo holds levels, sizing, post-mortems, and rule-change diffs—use the button below if you have access.