Schwab Network on $TLT (Nov 4, 2026)
Bearish on bonds via a TLT January 15 80/75 put spread costing $1.10, break-even near 79. He expects bond selling to take time, up to 72 days. Confirmation would be TLT below its 21-day EMA with RSI under 50; converging moving averages near 81 cap it, with little upside until about 86.
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You have chosen "TLT", the "iShares" Treasury Bond Fund with a term of 20 years and above, as your first choice. Why did you choose it? Yes, I will start with a bearish trade in the bond market in general.
Therefore, I chose the TLT exchange-traded fund instead of just looking at bond futures. I actually like "TLT" because you can limit the risks in the deal.
Therefore, I will indeed make a deal that takes advantage of this if those bonds start to see more selling activity. But I will extend the deal until the options expiry date on January 15.
The reason for this is that the deadline is 72 days from now, and I think it will take some time for this deal to bear fruit, right? So you really can't just step in and say that bonds will immediately fall from here.
This is not like trading in Apple stock. It is also not like trading some of the short-term deals that we usually do. Bonds may take much longer to show results. Therefore, in the January 15th options, I will buy put options at a price of 80.
I will sell put options at a price of 75. Thus, the put option spread becomes a $5 bid and a discount cost of $1.10. This deal in the TLT fund, as I said, takes 72 days and we need some selling activity, but at a cost of $1.10, I think there is a lot of time and opportunity in this deal.
correct. Level 79 is what I have highlighted here. This is roughly the break-even point for that deal. Therefore, this bearish trade is looking to break below this gap zone that we saw earlier in this rally.
Going back a little, we had a descending trend line here that we can see was broken and then became support here. In the short term, our lowest point at 76.43 was the point where things hit rock bottom.
Then we formed another upward trend line here in white. From there, we moved somewhat sideways after failing to break through these old peaks at approximately the 82 level. So this is the kind of setup we have here, a bit of casual movement on what has been a rather interesting day so far.
We also have another gap down here at 80.47. Therefore, there are some horizontal levels that also need to be monitored. When we think about the moving averages we are tracking here, we have three of them very close to each other: the 5-day, 21-day, and 63-day exponential moving averages, all of which come around the 81 level here.
Therefore, converging moving averages provide us with a suitable convergence point to monitor. If we see any significant movement above or beyond that level, it will then become a support or resistance level to be monitored in the future.
Now, we are in a situation where the Relative Strength Index (RSI) is trending downwards. We have broken our green upward trend line. The shift is now starting to show here with our red downtrend line.
However, we are still above the midline at the 50 level. So, if you have a bearish outlook, you would like to see the price start to fall below our 21-day exponential moving average, which represents a month of trading activity, and the Relative Strength Index (RSI) drop below 50 in conjunction with that to establish a more bearish move here.
Now we can see that studying the volume profile gives us an intense trading area here between 81 and 83. There isn't much to expect upside until we start to move back up here around the 86 level.
Another small node appears here at approximately the 77 level.
Good. We are now at the 81.35 level, up about a third of a percent for the TLT ETF.
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