Trade Alert: Betting On A Crackdown

Bullish trades on three companies likely to profit from the crackdown on urban crime I anticipate after the killing of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte.

Iryna Zarutska, as drawn by Doug TenNapel.

A New Basket For A Likely Crackdown

When I wrote this earlier post about Charlotte, investing angles weren’t top of mind.

With a little distance, though, a clear thesis has come into focus:

1. The murder of Iryna Zarutska and the public response are likely to catalyze a national crackdown on crime.

2. The GOP will probably introduce a tough crime bill with significant funding and run on it in the 2026 midterms if it doesn’t pass sooner.

3. That bill will likely include funding for additional prison capacity and mental-health institutions—to get dangerous repeat offenders off the street and address chronic under-capacity on the behavioral side.

What we’re buying

• A detention & offender-supervision operator (with electronic monitoring capability) that should benefit if federal/state capacity expands.

• A leading behavioral health systems operator—the most straightforward public way to play a build-out of psychiatric beds if policymakers lean into treatment capacity alongside incarceration.

• A public-safety technology platform (hardware + cloud software) that tends to win when agencies step up visible enforcement and digital evidence workflows.

How we’re positioning the timeline

Policy → procurement → revenue takes time. So we went as far out as listed expirations allow on these positions to span the 2026 political cycle and the first waves of budgeted spend.

Why not just buy calls?

Options are expensive in these names. We structured the trades to harvest elevated implied volatility—lowering our net cost and break-evens while keeping risk defined. (Paid subscribers: as usual, I cover the exact expirations, strikes, fills, and exit orders in the premium section.)

Today’s First Crackdown Trade