Tickwind Weekly
A short, data-first look at the US market week — built from SEC filings, Cboe options data, and CFTC positioning. No tips, no targets, no hype.
Wednesday is the whole week
Three separate things collide on Wednesday, July 29: the FOMC rate decision, then Apple and Amazon both reporting after the close. Add Microsoft and Meta on Tuesday afternoon and roughly a fifth of the S&P's market cap reports inside 72 hours, with a Fed decision wedged in the middle.
The full week, as it stands:
Day | What lands |
|---|---|
Mon 7/27 | Visa, PayPal, Boeing, Arm, Seagate |
Tue 7/28 | Microsoft, Meta, Qualcomm (all after close) |
Wed 7/29 | FOMC decision · Apple, Amazon (after close) · Mastercard, Comcast |
Thu 7/30 | Exxon, Chevron, Regeneron, Altria |
Fri 7/31 | Berkshire Hathaway · US Employment Cost Index |
Last week: semis cracked, Apple didn't
Friday's tape had a clear split. Memory and semis took the damage while Apple went the other way:
Last price | Day change | |
|---|---|---|
Micron | $921.06 | −6.83% |
SMH (semi ETF) | $561.22 | −3.29% |
Nvidia | $207.07 | −0.81% |
SPY | $738.90 | +0.11% |
Apple | $333.05 | +3.57% |
Micron also traded the second-highest dollar volume of any US name on our feed that day — about $930M — behind only SPY. A 6.8% drop on that kind of turnover is a repricing, not a drift.
Elsewhere in the tape: MaxLinear −21.5%, and on the other side LiveWire +70.6% and Safety Insurance +41.9%.
Prices and volumes are from the IEX venue and are delayed — ranks reflect what trades on our feed, not consolidated tape.
Options flow: everything was same-day
Friday's most-traded contracts were almost entirely SPY options expiring that same afternoon — 0DTE, in other words:
SPY $738 put — 742,339 contracts against 8,079 open interest (92× OI)
SPY $739 put — 596,905 contracts against 5,652 open interest (106× OI)
SPY $737 put — 657,540 contracts (77× OI)
NVDA $210 call — 614,796 contracts, 7× OI, implied vol 83.5%
When volume runs 90-100× open interest, the position is being opened and closed inside the session — it says nothing about anyone's view on next month. The one contract on the list that isn't a same-day SPY trade is that Nvidia call, and its 83.5% implied vol is the number worth remembering going into a week this crowded.
Cboe data, ~15-minute delay.
Positioning: leveraged funds are short, and covering
From the CFTC's Commitments of Traders report (positions as of Tuesday, July 21 — the data is published with a lag):
E-mini S&P 500 — leveraged funds net −322,865 contracts, but that's +42,137 from the prior week. Still heavily short, covering at the margin.
Nasdaq-100 — net −74,690, and −10,527 on the week. Shorts added here, not covered.
VIX futures — net +3,098, down 7,091 on the week.
Two different directions in one week, into a Fed meeting.
What the big funds bought
From 13F filings for the quarter ending 2026-03-31. These are filed roughly 45 days after quarter end, so this is a snapshot of the past, not current positioning:
Broadcom — 12 funds added, 5 trimmed
TSMC — 11 added, 7 trimmed
Meta — 11 added, 5 trimmed
Alphabet — 10 added, 7 trimmed (Berkshire among the buyers)
Three of the four are semis or semi-adjacent — bought in a quarter that ended four months before last week's selloff.
Filings worth a look
Three companies filed reports last week whose text contains the phrase "substantial doubt" — the standard going-concern language:
Summit Therapeutics (SMMT) — 10-Q, filed 7/23
HeartSciences (HSCS) — 10-K, filed 7/23
Atlantis Glory (AGLY) — 10-Q, filed 7/24
One caveat that matters: this is phrase matching on the filing text, so it also catches sentences that deny substantial doubt. Treat these as "go read the filing," never as a verdict.
One number
106× — Friday's SPY $739 put volume relative to its open interest. Nearly 600,000 contracts traded against fewer than 6,000 held overnight.
Tickwind is free. Everything above comes from SEC EDGAR, Cboe delayed options data, CFTC, and IEX-venue delayed quotes — the sources are named on every page. Nothing here is investment advice, and no figure is a forecast.