Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “What causes the stock market to fluctuate?” The simple answer to me is only one word and that’s expectation and if we were to expand this out to just two words, it would be future expectation. I think this concept is a little hard for people to wrap their heads around, especially if you’re new to stock trading or stock investing or new to options trading. You’d think to yourself that the market is a tool to value something right now, but it’s really not. The market is always looking towards the future. That’s why if you actually dig into stock market movements and what actually drives the market, it rarely has anything to do with what actually happen today. It’s all based on what might happen in the future based on any sort of data or information that we learned today. For example, the FED interest rate decision that is coming up or that has already happened and what their commentary is for future interest rate hikes or not interest rate hikes can be a much bigger driver in the market than other people expect and again, it’s always future-looking, forward-looking expectations. If people think that stocks are going to do well, well then they’ll buy stocks assuming they do well. If they think that something is going to come down the line like a trade deal or a trade war or some other thing that is going to hamper the growth of business, they will start discounting that right now even though that thing has not happened in the future. Even though that thing may not happen in the future the way that we expect, just the fact that the markets are always forward-looking, looking towards that forward expectation, they will start discounting stock values now. For example, if we thought that the FED was going to increase rates to 19% per month, then obviously, people would start changing the price of stocks today even though the FED may or may not increase rates to that level and that’s just an arbitrary number just for exaggeration purposes. But that’s what people are going to do. They’re going to start discounting stocks today based on that expectation depending on how many people share that same view. I think what again, ultimately causes markets to move is forward expectation. Where we start to see re-pricing happen very, very quickly is when we learn new information that was not expected. These create these wide volatility events, these huge swings, these black swans and that is purely caused by a misalignment in expectation and reality. I think that’s a really interesting point because if you realize that when something happens and it could be exactly what the market thought was going to happen and then it’d be a no new situation when the market did not see something coming better or worse, that’s when you actually have really big moves in the market. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.