House Delta — 2026-09-29

desk: house-delta date: 2026-09-29 forecasts: delta: p_trade: 0.12 direction: long conviction: low

Desk Plan — House Delta — 2026-09-29

Briefing reference: /Users/dadbot/Desktop/ClaudeBod/projects/dadbrain/Analysis/briefings/2026-09-29-pm.md PM: DELTA (independent read of my own desk — D3 superseded 2026-09-23; this is House Delta's own opinion, not a blend)

Regime Watch

data-infra/regime/current.json (read 2026-09-29, status: ok): as_of 2026-09-22 — SPY day flat (open-to-close −0.08%), above 50d, drawdown bucket <2% (−0.58%), VIX 14.21 LOW (<18). The file now lags the live tape by five sessions (09-23, 09-24, 09-25, 09-28 and today are not reflected). It is a dated read, not a stale-missing one — I name it as behind the tape rather than writing unavailable, the convention my last four plans used.

Consistency with House Delta's ## Regime Charter (desks/house-delta/CLAUDE.md, header still DRAFT — not ratified): consistent; no non-baseline tag is active. Walking the charter's own indicator list (item 5) against the file and today's live tape: spy_drawdown ≥ 5% — no (<2% at the file's read; Monday's SPY −0.38% does not approach it); vix_regime MID or HIGH — no (LOW; the file's 14.21 and today's live 16.04 both sit inside LOW (<18)); spy_vs_sma50 below 50d — not measured: the file's dated tag says above 50d (as of 09-22), and today's briefing carries SPY barely above its SMA20 (765.15) but no current SMA50 level, so proximity to that tag is unmeasured, not "close". Nothing in today's plan changes posture: long-only, intraday, flat by 15:30, one position.

Two readings worth naming precisely, neither a shift:

1. VIX stepped back down to 16.04 (−0.03 vs prior close 16.07) and remains deep in the favorable bucket. After last week's climb (14.14 → 15.18 → 16.13 → 15.67 → 15.36 → 14.87 → 16.07 on 09-28) the series has flattened near the top of LOW rather than breaking into MID — 13.96 points below my 30 hard skip and inside LOW (<18), my best-backtested LONG bucket (own tabulation: VIX < 18 PF 2.22, n=62; 18–28 PF 1.62). A tag change needs the same non-baseline tag for 5 consecutive sessions; the tag is still baseline.
2. A day after Monday's semis-led selloff, the constructive baseline is thinner but intact in the file's own terms. SPY closed 09-25 above its SMA20 (765.34) and printed 765.49 on 09-28 — now only 0.34 pts above its SMA20 (765.15), i.e. the broad-market constructive tag is marginal; QQQ 736.55 remains well above its SMA20 (721.89). The briefing describes a mixed, headline-sensitive tape, not a confirmed trend break.

Own-desk charter watches: rolling 6-month PF reads 1.648, alert OFF — carried as the demonstrated instrument finding (a fixed trailing-180d window holding the whole book is cumulative PF under another name; the on/off state is one trade's gross P&L against a fixed loss base); no escalation filed on the OFF print. Per-pair PF: AMD→TSM n=11, WR 45.5%, PF 1.346 (above 1.0 for the first time, no recovery declared), NVDA→ASML 2W/0L, +$264.42. Watch and report only — a persistent shift becomes a Desk Review proposal (recalibration / sit-out / new-mechanism), never an automatic change, and I touch no gate.

Shared Market Read

• Event risk today: HIGH (briefing rating) — but no Tier-1 release today. The schedule carries 10:00 ET Conference Board Consumer Confidence (Sep, prior 89.4) and 10:00 ET JOLTS (Aug), both MEDIUM-impact and unverified-consensus, plus 10:30 ET Dallas Fed Texas Retail (LOW) and pre-open earnings (CCL, KMX, UEC). The HIGH rating is geopolitical/rates, not calendar: the US-Iran standoff is unresolved after Trump rejected Iran's proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and oil and Treasury yields are the transmission channels. The next hard skips are PCE Sep 30 (TOMORROW) and NFP Oct 2 (Friday); then CPI Oct 14, FOMC minutes Oct 7 (event window only), FOMC decision Oct 28. Firm-wide status GO; prior VIX close 16.07 ≪ 30; regular Tuesday session. Nothing on this calendar stands my stack down by rule — HIGH is a caution, not one of my four hard skips.
• Session character expected: news-driven, mixed, headline-sensitive, with no reliable pre-open directional bias. The watchlist's 06:51 ET snapshot showed S&P futures +0.02%, Nasdaq-100 +0.16%, Dow −0.04% — essentially flat, not a ≥0.5% broad move; the briefing states no trustworthy timestamped futures snapshot is available and wants the opening direction resolved by structure, not inferred pre-open. That neutrality is the operative fact for me: unlike Monday, the pre-open tier polarity is not clearly assigned, so both branches of my mechanism are reachable rather than one being pre-priced.
• VIX regime: 16.04 LOW (<18). LOW is my best backtest bucket and is the dispersion condition my mechanism needs; it carries no direction. Not near a tag change.
• Key levels (index context only — I do not trade the indices): SPY prior close 765.49, prior-day range 763.74 – 769.53, SMA20 765.15, ATR(14) 7.01; QQQ prior close 736.55, prior-day range 731.65 – 741.41, SMA20 721.89, ATR(14) 9.91. SPY is essentially pinned to its SMA20; QQQ's prior range low 731.65 / high 741.41 are the first real gap tests. Trailing ATR is not elevated, so an open beyond roughly ±0.5% (SPY ~3.8 pts = 0.55× ATR; QQQ ~3.7 pts = 0.37× ATR) is a genuine gap rather than noise.
• Macro backdrop: the same two pressures that have dominated the fortnight — crude higher on Hormuz supply risk and long-end yields elevated — pressing on the most rate-sensitive part of the market, with PCE tomorrow and payrolls Friday making this a high-information week and the live Iran headline a two-sided coin-flip rather than a signed outcome.
• Documented data gap (carried, and load-bearing today): neither firm input carries an instrument-level price print for any of my four legs. The briefing's chip line gives % moves only and the watchlist's mover snapshot is unverified. I attempted a direct instrument-level lookup as instructed — it returned only undated, unattributed quotes (Yahoo TSM ~452.20; a Robinhood page showing NVDA ~229.88 and AMD $607.17 / −3.72%; a Facebook post citing ASML ~$1768 pre-market / +3.1%) — none timestamped to 2026-09-29 and mutually inconsistent. I therefore adopt no pre-market level for NVDA, ASML, AMD or TSM, treat every one of those figures as indicative, unconfirmed and not a price, and confirm all four pair inputs live at the 09:30 cash open. This is not a formality today: the size and sign of the opening move is the single input that decides which branch of my mechanism is reachable, and I will not price it off an undated widget. Data-source gap documented: instrument-level pre-market data for this desk's complex is unavailable from firm inputs and could not be reliably confirmed externally.

DELTA — Lead-Lag Pairs (NVDA→ASML, AMD→TSM), LONG-only

Call: p_trade 0.12, direction long, conviction low. Setup present unlikely, stated in the mechanism's own terms. My signal is a leader's first-hour return off the 09:30 cash open, read at 09:55, versus ±1.5%: NVDA ≥ +1.5% → buy ASML at the 10:00 bar (primary, edge-carrying cell), AMD ≥ +1.5% → buy TSM (secondary). A leader ≤ −1.5% is my disabled-SHORT branch (ENABLE_SHORT = False) — no trade by rule, not a missed LONG, and it is the ledger's modal down-tape outcome (now 11 of 50 scored sessions). Today's pre-open state is genuinely mixed with no assigned gap bias; the semis complex was the weak leg into Monday's close (AMD −2.07% first-hour, logged short_disabled), so the base case is still the untradeable branch or a quiet no-signal tape, but a neutral open keeps the LONG branch live rather than pre-priced away.

Why 0.12, stated against my own bucket arithmetic. intelligence/plan-calibration.csv, my rows, as of today (50 scored days, 9 fires, unconditional realized fire rate 0.180, mean forecast 0.179 — the series is now near-calibrated on the mean):

0.12 sits at the low edge of my 0.12–0.15 bucket, whose realized rate is 0.286 on 14 days — so I am knowingly pricing below my bucket's realized rate, consistent with the discipline I set on 09-25 (hold the number below the realized rate of whatever bucket it sits in unless the pre-open state supplies a dispersion reason to go higher). No dispersion reason today: VIX 16.04 LOW and contained, trailing ATR not elevated, futures essentially flat. Two named upside routes justify not going lower than 0.12: (1) the mirror of the pre-consumed gap — my window starts at the 09:30 print, so a gap-down leader whose decline is spent at the open can print a positive first-hour read and fire, the 09-24 case (a gap-down that round-tripped into a +2.56% first-hour read, firing my largest Phase 3 trade, +$406.84); and (2) a two-sided Iran/Hormuz headline inside the first hour flipping oil, yields and high-duration tech fast. If neither appears — the base case — I expect no trade. I am not pricing off the recent 3-of-4-session fire cluster (a bucket fact, not a licence) nor off Monday's short-disabled tape.

Sizing vs. event risk: standard — 0.75% single-position risk, one position at a time, no parameter adjusted. HIGH event risk is geopolitical and rate-driven, not a scheduled binary, so it is not a hard skip; VIX 16.04 is ~14 points below my 30 skip; and my hard 15:30 flat plus a 2.0× ATR(14, 5-min) stop bound the exposure inside the session with zero overnight and zero weekend carry. I am not inventing a thin-tape size-down, a headline buffer, or a widened stop off a headline read — the discipline my peer-review disposition asks of other desks applies to me first. Two mechanical notes that follow from the design: (a) with PCE tomorrow morning, today is the last full session before a hard skip; if a signal fires today it is a normal, fully-sized intraday trade flat long before PCE exists; (b) the 10:00 ET Consumer Confidence and JOLTS prints land right at my entry bar and inside my holding window, so they can stop me out but cannot stop me in — no entry buffer is warranted, and I add none.

Session-character fit: poor-to-neutral. My mechanism needs a large idiosyncratic first-hour leader impulse that the laggard has not yet followed. A mixed, headline-driven tape can supply impulse — but the visible weak leg into the open is my own complex, and the briefing offers no signed pre-open direction. What today does not supply is the precondition of the tradeable branch: a semi complex being bid and a leader moving up ≥1.5% off the open. That asymmetry is why 0.12 sits below my bucket's realized rate rather than at the 0.180 unconditional.

Key levels (mine only): the only load-bearing numbers are each leader's first-hour return off the 09:30 cash open, read at 09:55, versus ±1.5% — NVDA ≥ +1.5% → buy ASML (primary, edge-carrying, live 2W/0L +$264.42 — unseen since 2026-08-03, ~8 weeks); AMD ≥ +1.5% → buy TSM (secondary, n=11, WR 45.5%, PF 1.346). NVDA ≤ −1.5% or AMD ≤ −1.5% → disabled-SHORT branch → no trade by rule. Index gap-framing only: QQQ 731.65 / 741.41 (range), SMA20 721.89, ATR 9.91; SPY 763.74 / 769.53 (range), SMA20 765.15, ATR 7.01. Carried data gap: the non-firing pair's first-hour value is still unrecorded on traded days (the near-miss logger writes per-pair blocking notes only on no-trade sessions), so if today fires on one pair, the other pair's proximity to ±1.5% is unmeasured, not distant — a one-line logger fix I will not touch inside a planning task.

Invalidation / no-trade reasons (all binding today):

1. Leaders opening down ≥1.5% = the disabled-SHORT branch → no trade by rule. This is the modal outcome for a semis-led down tape (11 of 50 scored sessions carry no_trade:short_disabled) and remains the first thing Monday's tape points at.
2. Any intraday VIX ≥ 30 closes consideration (16.04 now, ~14 points away).
3. A gap-down leader that keeps extending rather than stabilising in the first 25 minutes — my window needs the leader moving up; a continued decline is neither a signal nor a bounce trade. I do not buy the laggard against a falling leader on any read.
4. Hard skip PCE Sep 30 (TOMORROW) — not today, but today is the last full session before the skip, and NFP Oct 2 follows; the next two sessions after today are structurally closed to me.

Watch items (informational only — not entry signals):

1. Whether the semis stabilise at the open or extend Monday's decline. This is the entire swing factor in my 0.12: a leader that stabilises and reclaims the opening range inside the first 25 minutes is the 09-24 template (positive first-hour read → LONG fires); a gap that extends with yields still rising is the 07-24 / 08-19 template (short_disabled, no trade). I read the leader's sign, not the index's level.
2. Whether energy-vs-tech leadership holds after the open. The Hormuz/oil-and-yields bid is what keeps my complex the weak leg; if that leadership stalls and tech reclaims, my window opens; if it holds, it does not.
3. The leader-vs-basket residual, again the discriminator. On the 09-21 / 09-24 fires AMD's first-hour return net of basket was purely idiosyncratic (+3.36pp / +2.28pp vs SMH); 09-22's win was sector beta (+0.08pp vs SOXX). A broad complex bid riding the basket remains the stand-down shape; a leader-specific impulse is the confirming one. Read only — never a trade trigger.

Desk book state (carries forward, unchanged by today's plan). Cumulative +$566.45 across 13 LONG trades, 7W/6L, WR 53.8%, gross PF 1.648; SPRT n=13, LLR +0.976, CONTINUE (+1.969 to CONSISTENT-WITH-BACKTEST, −3.920 to DEGRADED). NVDA→ASML 2W/0L, +$264.42 — the edge-carrying cell, starved ~8 weeks (unseen since 08-03), which is regime-shaped, not a gate problem (VIX < 18 is my best bucket and inside it the tape is quiet). AMD→TSM n=11, WR 45.5%, PF 1.346 — above 1.0 for the first time on three consecutive wins, no recovery declared (one of the three, 09-22, is measured sector beta); the 09-05 stop-calibration diagnostic read NO and remains pending TEMPER cadence-ratification via the 2026-09 Desk Review. Rolling 6-month PF 1.648, alert OFF (instrument artifact, above). SHORT re-enablement rejected 2026-07-15 — live gate stands; the governing path (30 LONG trades at PF ≥ 1.5) is at n=13, 17 trades from even being decidable. The stand-down argument (a complex-wide AI-chip bid reprices leader and laggard on one factor) stays live and provisional; withdrawal needs AMD→TSM PF > 1.0 at n ≈ 15+ (now n=11).

Operational item (desk-top, carried): runner-health-2026-09-25 recorded delta: completed, daily artifact present, state ok — two consecutive clean sessions after six watchdog flags in September; 09-28 produced a normal no-trade row. But the ledger-freshness post-run check is still unwired, so a clean run is being observed by me, not verified by the pipeline, and the firm-wide 09-25 verdict was REVIEW on other desks (SURGE, TRACE) for the same failure class. My 0.12 is scored against trades.csv: if the watchdog trips, no row is produced and the forecast is graded against a pipeline absence rather than a tape outcome — a REVIEW state, never a strategy stand-down and never a near-miss.

Plan Filed

• Filed: 2026-09-29 04:58 PDT (pre-open)
• Frontmatter forecasts complete for every active member: yes (delta — p_trade 0.12, direction long, conviction low)
• Briefing event risk confirmed: HIGH (geopolitical/rates, not calendar — no Tier-1 today); 10:00 ET Consumer Confidence (prior 89.4) + JOLTS + 10:30 Dallas Fed Retail only; next hard skips PCE Sep 30 (TOMORROW), then NFP Oct 2, CPI Oct 14, FOMC Oct 28; VIX 16.04 LOW (<18), −0.03 vs prior close 16.07; SPY 765.49 / SMA20 765.15 / ATR 7.01 / range 763.74–769.53; QQQ 736.55 / SMA20 721.89 / ATR 9.91 / range 731.65–741.41; futures essentially flat (S&P +0.02%, Nasdaq-100 +0.16%, Dow −0.04%); firm-wide GO; regular Tuesday session
• Verdict: Setup present unlikely — p_trade 0.12, direction long, conviction low. The pre-open state is genuinely mixed with no assigned gap bias, but the semis complex was the weak leg into Monday's close, so the base case is my disabled-SHORT (untradeable) branch or a quiet no-signal tape; firing requires a leader up ≥ +1.5% off the 09:30 print. 0.12 sits at the low edge of my 0.12–0.15 bucket and below its realized rate (0.286 on 14 days) — deliberately conservative, with no dispersion reason to lift it. Two named upside routes justify not going lower: the mirror pre-consumed gap (09-24 case) and a two-sided Iran/Hormuz headline. Standard 0.75% sizing, no parameter adjusted; hard 15:30 flat and 2.0× ATR(14, 5-min) stop bound all exposure inside the session. Binding gate = leader first-hour return at 09:55 vs ±1.5%; modal no-trade path = leader ≤ −1.5% → disabled-SHORT (11 of 50 scored sessions). Documented data-source gap: no instrument-level print for NVDA/ASML/AMD/TSM in firm inputs; a direct external lookup returned only undated, mutually inconsistent quotes (TSM ~452.20, NVDA ~229.88, AMD 607.17/−3.72%, ASML ~$1768), none timestamped to 2026-09-29 — no level adopted, all four pair inputs confirmed live at the cash open.

No trades taken.