Red is the New Black??? Tomorrow tells the story!

so you heard me out lol yesterday i posted about OXY calls before the monday gap and a bunch of you told me i was crazy. OXY opened up 7% premarket and closed up 2.4% even after the fade. my april calls are up 48%. cool. but that was the obvious trade. everyone figured out oil goes up when you close the strait of hormuz. congratulations heres the trade nobody is talking about yet and its the other side of the same coin target (TGT) reports earnings tomorrow morning pre-market. march 3rd. and i think this is going to be an absolute disaster that nobody has priced in because everyone is too busy watching oil tickers let me explain remember all those ships i told you about sitting in the persian gulf? 750+ vessels trapped? that wasnt just oil tankers. 170+ container ships are sitting there doing nothing. those container ships carry the stuff that fills targets shelves. spring inventory. seasonal merchandise. the stuff target needs to sell at full margin to make their quarter work but it gets worse. its not just hormuz. the suez canal has been disrupted since the houthis started hitting ships. so you have BOTH major shipping routes between asia and the US either closed or extremely dangerous right now. every major carrier — maersk, hapag-lloyd, CMA CGM, MSC — has suspended transits through hormuz. some of them already rerouted from suez months ago. now theres nowhere to go except the long way around africa which adds 2-3 weeks and costs way more container shipping surcharges are up $1500-4000 per container basically overnight. thats not a small number when youre target and you move millions of containers a year so heres the cascade that i dont think wall street has connected yet: 1. spring inventory is late. its either sitting on ships in the gulf or its taking an extra 3 weeks around the cape of good hope 2. late spring inventory misses the seasonal selling window. you cant sell easter decorations in may 3. missed seasonal windows mean forced markdowns. target has to clear product at a loss to make room for summer inventory 4. but summer inventory is ALSO delayed because the same shipping routes are closed 5. gross margins collapse. youre marking down old stuff while paying surge pricing to get new stuff this isnt theoretical. target already showed weakness BEFORE the shipping crisis. Q3 comp sales were down 2.7%. gross margin was 28.2% and trending wrong. foot traffic has declined for 10 straight weeks. goldman sachs literally downgraded them to neutral last week and cut their price target from $142 to $101 citing "discretionary category concerns and earnings downside risk" but heres the thing — none of that goldman downgrade factored in hormuz. that happened BEFORE friday night. the shipping crisis is a whole new layer of pain that hasnt been modeled into anyones estimates yet target is not walmart. walmart wins in a recession because people trade down to value. target lives in the middle — not cheap enough to be the trade-down destination, not premium enough to have pricing power. when gas prices spike and shipping costs explode, targets customer is the one who stops buying the $40 throw pillow and the $25 candle. those are targets margin products think about what management has to say tomorrow morning. they have to address the shipping situation. they have to give Q1 guidance that somehow accounts for the fact that their supply chain just got blown up by a war. what do they say? "yeah our containers are trapped in the persian gulf and we have no idea when theyre coming back but buy our stock" now i want to be clear — this is not a long term short-target-goes-to-zero thesis. target is a real company that will survive. this is a "the next 60 days are going to be absolutely brutal for their numbers and nobody has priced it in" thesis red is the new black. targets color is red. oil is black. the same crisis thats making my OXY calls print is going to crush targets margins. two sides of the same geopolitical trade risks — earnings could somehow surprise to the upside on Q4 numbers since most of that quarter happened before the strikes. management could sandbag guidance so hard that expectations reset and the stock rallies on "not as bad as feared." ceasefire could come tomorrow and shipping resumes faster than expected. and targets already down from its highs so some of this pain might be in the stock positions: TGT puts. taking profits if it gaps down hard, holding may expiration for the full inventory cascade to play out