The chart imagines that Friday’s impressive selloff was just the start of significantly more weakness to come. But notice that the worst case is 6795, a 10% haircut that wouldn’t even qualify as a bear market. This scenario is a step ahead of reality, however, since the downtrend has yet to trigger a conventional sell signal at the green line. If that happens, we will have been onboard from within a hair of the top, since we purchased SPY 720 puts for 0.89 near the high of the previous day’s rally. Although the options ended the day a few cents underwater, they vaulted to more than twice our cost when stocks opened sharply lower on Friday. Even better, taking some profits off the table early in the session gave us room to buy more puts toward the end of the day, when they 22 May 720s came back down to 1.00. (Please note that Rick’s Picks recommends buying options only when we expect them to at least double in price quickly, usually within two hours.)  The cherry on top was their exhilarating surge to 1.65 in the final 30 minutes of the session, when stocks dove. A comment I’d made in the chat room an hour earlier explicitly  anticipated this: “With crude quotes not backing off as they usually do,” I wrote, “can you guess which direction the stock market will take when the obligatory, end-of-week nitwitting commences?” Loaded with cheap puts, we’ll be looking forward to Monday’s opening instead of dreading the effects of rising oil prices, an ominous breakout in interest rates, and whatever other troubling headlines greet the day.