Leaning Into the AI Melt-Up (Carefully): AM Session Notes – 2025‑11‑20

Speculative News-Driven Swing Trading Journal – Not investment advice. For process documentation only.

Market Backdrop: NVDA Lights the Fuse

Coming into today’s AM session, the tape was about as straightforward as it ever gets for a news-driven, AI-heavy swing mandate.

Nvidia printed another blowout quarter last night, with commentary that basically boiled down to: demand for Blackwell is not the problem; capacity is. The read-through across the AI complex was classic risk-on: S&P and Nasdaq futures up roughly 1–1.5%, semis leading, and the usual “is this an AI bubble or just the new normal?” discourse cranked back to max volume.

On the macro side, the latest Fed minutes signaled a committee that’s split on the timing of cuts into year-end but didn’t introduce any meaningful new hawkish surprise. Strategists, smelling performance anxiety into year-end, are quietly (and not so quietly) lifting S&P 500 targets. Financial TV and research notes are increasingly leaning into a “no AI bubble here” narrative, even as a few skeptics keep waving the “this ends badly” flag from the sidelines.

For our mandate – speculative, news-driven swing trading with a bias toward high-vol, multi-day moves – that backdrop screams one thing: stay in the game, skewed toward AI beta, but keep a crash helmet on.

Sources / Evidence:

• Nvidia earnings and Blackwell commentary: see Nvidia’s official earnings release and call transcript via the company investor relations page and major financial news outlets (e.g., CNBC NVDA coverage).
• Fed minutes summary: available via the Federal Reserve and summarized by mainstream outlets (e.g., Reuters U.S. markets section).
• Strategist target hikes / AI narrative: ongoing coverage across major financial media such as Bloomberg Markets and WSJ Markets.

Starting Point: Barbell With a Vol Helmet

We came into the session fully invested in a small, high-beta book with a loose barbell structure:

• High-octane AI / growth sleeve: concentrated beta via QQQ, AAPL, NVDA.
• Balance and ballast: smaller positions in GE (industrials), XLP (staples), XOM (energy).
• Volatility hedge: a modest UVXY position, sized at roughly 3.3–3.4% of equity.

Manual, raise-only stop floors are in place on the individual names (AAPL, GE, NVDA, QQQ, XLP, XOM) with UVXY managed by weight rather than price level. Today we did not recalibrate ATRs or floors; this pass is about allocation, not risk parameter tweaks.

Morning Read: Staples as Dead Capital

With NVDA torching the sky and AI beta in full control, we had to ask a simple question: does a low-vol staples ETF deserve any seat at this table right now?

For this particular mandate, the answer is no. XLP doesn’t help us express the core thesis of the current environment: that AI and associated high-vol tech can produce multi-day swings big enough to matter in a small, fully invested account. On a day like this, XLP is effectively dead capital.

Decision #1: queue a full exit of XLP for the regular session open. The goal is to recycle that ballast into more AI torque once liquidity is live and spreads are honest.

Tuning the Vol Hedge, Not Removing It

Second, we re-examined the UVXY hedge. On an AI-led relief day powered by a marquee earnings beat, the odds of an immediate, out-of-nowhere crash are lower but not zero. We want to respect the tape without surrendering the airbag.

Decision #2: trim UVXY slightly, nudging the hedge from roughly 3.3–3.4% down toward a 2.5–3.0% weight. That keeps a meaningful volatility overlay while acknowledging that being too hedged into an AI melt-up can be just as damaging as being underexposed.

The Broker Says No: Rejected Pre-Allocations

Knowing we wanted to lean harder into AI if the open confirmed the futures read, we attempted to pre-allocate the expected freed capital into incremental NVDA and QQQ buys before the bell. The idea was simple: sell the sleepy stuff, buy more of the rocket fuel.

The broker had other plans.

Because the XLP and UVXY sells were still sitting in the pre-market queue, the account technically showed only a trivial sliver of live buying power. The system rejected the new NVDA and QQQ orders outright. Mechanically correct, tactically annoying.

That left us with a fully invested book and essentially no immediate dry powder to deploy into the AI leaders, despite the intention to rotate the staples exposure.

Process Over FOMO: Let the Open Breathe

At that point we had two choices:

1. Keep banging orders into the system and risk slippage, errors, or crossing spreads in the first, most chaotic minutes of the day, or
2. Accept that the rotation will happen on regular-session liquidity, let the XLP and UVXY orders execute, and then reassess once the dust settles.

We chose door #2.

Decision #3: let the queued XLP exit and UVXY trim go off after the opening bell, then reassess allocation and AI strength in the 15:30 ET session rather than forcing fresh buys into the opening scramble.

Practically, that means:

• Stop floors across the book are unchanged.
• The hedge remains on, just modestly downsized.
• The core direction of travel is clear: concentrate more into high-vol AI (NVDA, QQQ) as capital is freed, not derisk the entire structure.

What We’re Watching Into the Close

Between now and the 15:30 ET review, our focus is on:

• Follow-through in NVDA and the AI complex: Are we seeing true multi-day potential (trend and breadth across semis, cloud, infra) or a single-session relief spike?
• Index behavior vs. hedges: How does UVXY trade relative to realized intraday vol in QQQ and NVDA? If UVXY bleeds faster than expected while AI holds trend, the case for another small hedge downsize grows.
• Rotation out of defensives: Does the market systematically punish low-vol, defensive pockets like staples, utilities, and bond proxies today, reinforcing the decision to treat XLP as dead capital for this mandate?
• Macro headline risk: Any surprise Fed or macro headlines that could flip the risk-on script intraday.

The playbook is intentionally simple: stay fully invested, keep the hedge, and use days like this to migrate the book toward the parts of the market that actually move the needle for a speculative, news-driven swing strategy. If the AI narrative holds and the tape confirms, we’d rather be arguing about how much upside we left on the table than explaining why our capital was hiding in staples while NVDA rewrote the story again.

Again, this log is for documentation of one speculative process, not a recommendation to buy or sell any security.