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Remember Inception? The 2010 Christopher Nolan film where Leonardo DiCaprio plays a thief who steals secrets from people’s minds while they dream.
The twist is that the line between reality and dreams becomes so blurred that it is nearly impossible to tell what is real.
We explored this same question in a recent Fast Company piece on how AI and modern markets are blurring the line between information and anticipation
That is what the modern market feels like for most retail investors.
Rumors, rhetoric, and anticipation move prices in unpredictable ways. Add constant political and macroeconomic noise, and it can feel like the odds are stacked against anyone without inside access or institutional tools.
But there is one set of data that consistently cuts through the noise.
The options market.
Options offer a clearer window into institutional thinking because they force commitment. Unlike stocks, options expire. They impose timelines. They expose urgency.
That is why shifts in put to call ratios and institutional positioning often reveal risk before it shows up in headlines, earnings calls, or public commentary.
And increasingly, AI systems are learning to read those shifts faster and more objectively than humans ever could.
On October 9th, Prospero’s Net Options Sentiment on QQQ collapsed from a bullish 33 to a bearish zero in minutes.
There was no headline. No Fed speech. No earnings catalyst.
Just a sudden, aggressive shift in positioning.
We flagged it immediately and shared it publicly on X. The following morning at 10:30 a.m., the signal was still pinned at zero. We issued another alert warning that a potential market reversal could be forming.
Thirty minutes later, President Trump posted about escalating trade tensions with China.
The market sold off sharply.
Some fintech commentators noticed our early warnings. Not everyone was convinced. One user, @cyberdaddy, wrote:
“Today’s selloff was 100 percent correlated to China tariff threats, which were impossible for any person or algorithm to foresee. This was random luck.”
But this was not an isolated event.
Earlier in the year, we observed the same pattern in SPY. Net Options Sentiment rolled over sharply, signaling defensive positioning well before prices reacted. We warned readers in our March 3rd newsletter, titled “Don’t Trim the Hedges,” days before a major market drawdown tied to escalating geopolitical stress.
In both cases, options positioning shifted before the narrative became public.
If positioning moves before news breaks, what does that mean?
Is AI learning to detect fear before humans articulate it?
Or is information flowing earlier, faster, and more diffusely than it ever has before?
Decades ago, market insight traveled slowly and privately. Today, risk perception spreads instantly through social media, professional networks, private research channels, and algorithmic pattern recognition.
Subtle changes in expectations can ripple through portfolios long before a headline confirms them.
The result is that institutional hedging often shows up first in the options market. AI simply listens more closely and without bias.
After revisiting the data, @cyberdaddy followed up:
“After doing more research, the de risking and drop in options sentiment likely occurred for logical reasons your model identified. The China export control announcement on October 8th probably drove defensive positioning among firms tracking geopolitics closely. I jumped the gun. I was wrong.”
That admission gets to the heart of the issue.
Whether the shift was driven by early risk awareness or better synthesis of existing information is almost beside the point.
What matters is that positioning changed before price followed.
And the data captured it.
The word inception means a beginning.
That feels appropriate.
For the first time, AI is not just helping retail investors interpret markets. It is granting access to the same positioning signals institutions rely on to manage billions of dollars.
The market no longer waits for headlines. It moves on anticipation.
And AI is learning to hear those whispers.
Ready to see what institutional money is doing before the story breaks?
Download the Prospero app on iOS or Android for real time Net Options Sentiment alerts and AI powered signals.
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Stay ahead. Daily updates with 27% better returns than S&P 500 with a 54% win rate vs. S&P 500 benchmarks on close to 5,000 picks since inception in 2023.*
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