Positioning View

Trend — where the stock sits in its own cycle: the Weinstein stage, how long it has held that stage, how far it is from its 30-week line (the cushion, and the chase risk), and its 3-month move.

Futures positioning — today’s price move paired with the change in open interest. Long buildup is price up with OI up (fresh longs); short buildup is price down with OI up (fresh shorts). We require the OI move to be at least 1% so the label reflects real positioning, not a rounding tick — but its size describes how much activity there was, it does not predict the outcome. Into the final week before expiry, open interest falls as positions roll to the next contract, so this read is least reliable then; cards flag it when 6 days or fewer remain.

Options — what the current-month chain is pricing: implied volatility at the money (how big a swing options are charging for), the one-sigma expected move to expiry, the put/call balance, and where price sits against max pain. This is the layer that tells you whether a move is already priced in.

Alignment combines one sub-score per lens using a geometric mean, so a single weak lens drags the total down instead of hiding behind two strong ones. It measures how completely a name expresses the pattern, nothing more. Scores compare within a side only: the long and short sub-scores are defined differently, so a short’s 70 and a long’s 45 are not the same measurement.

What it is not. Alignment is not a probability of profit. When we backtested this framework its forward returns matched simply being invested, and the weights behind the score are a judgement call rather than something fitted to results. Everything here describes the present state; none of it predicts what happens next.