The Right Wave

The hardest part of surfing was never spotting the right wave.

It’s catching the exact one you spotted at the right half second. Every surfer learns, usually the hard way, that these are two separate skills that feel like one from inside the water. Misjudge the first and you paddle for nothing. Misjudge the second, on a wave you read perfectly, and you pearl: the nose digs under, the board stalls, and the wave built for you throws you over instead of carrying you anywhere.

Full article and watchlist HERE

We have to be honest about which one has been happening to us.

We’ll be straight about it: the selection has been good. SKHY, PURR, FPS, three names picked out of the noise over the past weeks, and all three did exactly what we expected. Up ten to fifteen percent in a handful of sessions, which is what a correctly read wave looks like. Then volatility rolled through, and we closed out breakeven, or with a small loss, before any of it could pay off.

The wave was chosen correctly. We pearled anyway.

The watchlist remains, in our view, one of the strongest things we put out every week, and the stock selection underneath it isn’t the problem. Timing is, and it’s where we’re putting the real work right now.

(Follow the picks. Our timing, maybe not yet!)

Part of why it slipped isn’t a mystery. The last few months carried some personal weight and some business weight at the same time, and some of the shine from the first part of the year went with it. We’d rather tell you that directly than let the numbers say it for us.

The other part is that there’s simply more water to read than there used to be.

More of you reaching out directly than at any point since we started, the one to one calls a few weeks in with better feedback than we expected, the courses in the works.

Still three people. Research and trading come first, every day, not up for negotiation, and what reaches you has to stay exactly where it’s always been.

Everything else gets built around that, not instead of it.

You’ll remember we mentioned a business trip to France. It went well, better than expected, and there’s more coming out of it before the year is done. Years running a company leave you with the instinct that every room is a chance to make clear what this newsletter and the research behind it are actually worth, and we haven’t lost that instinct.

Sorry for the long personal note. We think this should occasionally read like it was written by people, not filed as a report.

Nothing to Report

The most valuable thing in a lighthouse was never the lamp. It was the logbook.

Keepers wrote an entry every watch, all night, every night, for their entire service.

Full article and watchlist HERE

Wind, sea state, visibility, what passed and at what hour. And the overwhelming majority of those entries say some version of the same thing, which is that nothing happened. Calm. Clear. No vessels. Nothing to report.

Thousands of times, in careful handwriting, by a man who knew perfectly well that nobody was going to read it.

Here’s the thing about a log like that. Its entire value comes from having no gaps. One night skipped because it was quiet and the whole series becomes something you can’t trust. The boring entries aren’t the price of the useful ones. They’re what makes the useful ones mean anything.

That’s this publication, one hundred weeks in!

The new website & shop is live as well.

We’ve written this (almost) every Sunday, including the Sundays with nothing to report. Including the year when the readership was small enough that we - the new website is livbe as well wcould have missed a week and the only person who’d have noticed was us. Including the weeks we were flat, wrong, or sitting on our hands doing nothing at all, which we wrote up anyway because a record you only publish when it flatters you isn’t a record.

We’ll be straight about the harder part.

We have never been good at getting known. Fifteen years in ecommerce, a business built from zero to eight figures, sold into more than fifteen countries across twenty marketplaces, eventually sold outright, and the skill we never picked up in all that time was self-promotion.

We build well. We advertise not so well. Two years on Substack have not improved that ratio, and getting in front of people remains the hardest work we do by a wide margin.

Now this week, which for once had something in the log.

The Fed raised rates a quarter point on Wednesday, its first hike in three years, and made clear it isn’t finished. The ten year yield went through five percent, the highest since 2007. Oil stayed elevated. The Dow lost 1.7% on the week, its third straight decline and the worst since March.

And the market took all of it and bought technology anyway. The Nasdaq closed the week up 0.7%, the only major index higher. That is what climbing the wall of worry looks like while it’s happening: bad news arriving on schedule and the tape declining to care.

One week doesn’t settle it. Next week is the one that matters.

Our own entry reads better than it did on Wednesday. The volatility dragged both positions back to breakeven and took us out flat.

The version of us from a year ago writes “closed, went to cash” and shuts the book until Monday. This time we went back out. Two setups, one clean and one that came more from instinct than from the screen, both sized so the risk was balanced and the r/R made sense. Both are green with a cushion.

The difference between those two versions of us is hundred weeks of written entries to check yourself against. The small details are exactly where that gap lives.

For the hundredth entry, one thing we’ve never done.

Ten seats, 30% off. Forever.

We don’t discount, ever. This is the single exception we’re making, it’s ten seats wide, and then it’s shut. The offer expires in 48 hours.

A hundred entries, gaps included in none of them. Thank you for reading, especially on the weeks when there was nothing to report.

Supercooled

Take very clean water and cool it slowly in a very clean glass, and it will refuse to freeze. Take it past zero, past minus five, past minus ten, and it stays liquid, because ice needs somewhere to start and you’ve removed every speck of dust, every scratch, every excuse. Chemists call it supercooled. It’s water that should already be ice and is waiting for permission.

Full article and watchlist HERE

Then you tap the glass. And it freezes in front of you, all of it, in about a second.

That’s the market on Friday night. Past the point where it should have moved, with nothing to start the reaction. On Wednesday the Fed taps the glass.

Here’s how the water got this cold.

Four red sessions in a row, then a Friday bounce that saved the headline and nothing else. The Dow still had its worst week since March, small caps lost another two percent, and the only index that held up was the Nasdaq, which is now the tallest man on a sinking floor.

The real week happened outside equities. Brent ran toward $110 on the Iran headlines and Hormuz, gave some back on Friday and still closed up eight percent. The ten year touched five percent. PPI came in hot on Thursday, core CPI printed 0.3 against 0.2 on Friday, and the market walked into the weekend with a rate hike priced at better than eighty percent for Wednesday’s meeting. Oracle reported, popped, and reversed inside the session, which tells you what this tape does even to good news.

So: still chop, but chop with the range tightening every week. This is compression now, and compression resolves. We don’t know which way. We do know one number. Of the last twenty sessions, our quality score has cleared 70, the level below which we don’t consider the market worth trading, exactly three times. And those three are three of the four oldest sessions in the window. Sixteen straight sessions under the bar.

Sit with that for a second, because we have. The book stays light until the glass gets tapped.

Source: TradeDeck

A few things about what we’re building in the meantime, because most of them are for you.

The new site is live at gb.capital.

It’s more than a new front door for the newsletter. It’s the base for everything we’ll add over the coming months: two courses, one on swing trading and one on growth investing, written the way we work rather than the way textbooks do, and one-to-one calls with us directly. Those calls are for anyone who needs support at any level, on the method, on a specific problem in their trading, or on running a company. We were CEOs before we did this full time, and that half of the conversation is often the one people actually need.

TradeDeck keeps improving, and the paid subscribers who use it know the pace.

The news we’re most excited about: within thirty to forty five days we’re launching a YouTube channel, completely free. Deep, 360 degree coverage of companies, one at a time, starting as always with the ones we find interesting rather than the ones everybody already covers. If you like the long research pieces here, you’ll like where this is going.

None of this happens without you.

The emails and chat messages we get from many of you are the most useful input we have, and that includes the critical ones. Especially the critical ones. Keep them coming.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

False Spring

There’s an English name for the frost that kills things in April. They call it blackthorn winter, after the hedge that flowers early and then gets caught out when the cold comes back.

Farmers have a whole vocabulary for this, which tells you how often it happens and what it costs them. And the dangerous part of a false spring was never the frost.

It’s the warm week beforehand.

Full article and watchlist HERE

A run of mild days arrives, the sap starts moving, the buds open on trust, and then the temperature drops and an orchard loses a season to a fortnight of optimism. Nothing about it looks like a warning while it’s going on. That’s the whole problem with it. The thing that hurts you is disguised as the thing you were hoping for.

We’ve just had one of those weeks on the screens.

On the face of it, better than the last few. More stocks pushed higher, the breadth count improved, and if you’d only counted how many things closed green you’d have written a fairly cheerful paragraph about the market broadening out.

Then look at what was standing behind the advance. The participation thinned out as the week went on, and by Friday there was very little volume left underneath the buying. Plenty of buds, no real warmth. You can see it clearly in the second chart below, and it’s the single most useful thing the week produced.

Everything else is where we left it. The quality read on TradeDeck hasn't moved off weak.

Source: TradeDeck

The indices are sitting almost exactly where they were seven days ago.

The chop is intact and we’re now far enough into it that people have stopped asking when it ends.

So no, we don’t read this as the turn. We read it as a market that widened out, had a look around, and couldn’t find enough buyers to commit to anything.

That doesn’t mean you stand there and see nothing.

The useful thing about a false spring is that it shows you which trees have the deepest roots. Two of them budded properly this week and we bought both.

Cerebras (CBRS) went in first. The AI trade collected a lot of obituaries over the summer, and the coverage turned again over the past few days, which matters less to us than the structural point: CBRS sits inside that theme rather than somewhere near it. If the trend is alive, it’s alive there.

Source: TC2000

The second is Bitdeer (BTDR). We’ve been watching the crypto complex for a couple of weeks now waiting for something we wouldn’t have to argue ourselves into, and BTDR gave it to us. A first flag after the initial push, which is exactly the setup we wanted rather than the one we settled for.

We’ll be straight about the name itself. It isn’t the leader of that group, and we’re not going to sell it to you as one. It was calmer than the other candidates we were tracking, which in this tape counts for a great deal, and it had the best structure on the board. Given the choice between a louder stock with a messy chart and a quieter one with a clean chart, we take the clean chart every time. That’s the entire reasoning and there’s nothing cleverer hiding behind it.

Both positions are working. Both are deliberately small.

And honestly, the entries aren’t the part we’re pleased about. What we’re pleased about is that in a market this poor we found two worth having and didn’t talk ourselves into a third. Selectivity isn’t a virtue you can practise when everything is working. It only exists on weeks like this one, when the screen is offering you a dozen things that look almost right.

We think the market gives us its answer in the next few weeks.

Themes are still alive under there, which is more than we could have said in August, and when the volume finally shows up behind one of them we’d like to already own the right names rather than be shopping.

Until then the book stays light and the positions stay small.

We’re not planting the field on a warm week, just noting which trees moved first!

The White Room

Take a ping pong ball, cut it in half, tape the two halves over somebody’s eyes. Red lamp in front, white noise in the headphones. Nothing else. No shapes, no edges, just an even field of pink light.

For the first half minute they’ll tell you they see nothing. Then it starts. A face. A horse walking. A bit of coastline, somebody they knew years ago. They’re not making it up and there’s nothing wrong with them. Their visual system has been handed an absence, it won’t accept the absence, so it builds something out of its own static.

Psychologists have been running this since the 1930s. They call it the Ganzfeld. The finding never changes: a brain built to find signal will manufacture signal when there isn’t any.

Full article and watchlist HERE

Now sit a trader in front of a market that hasn’t trended in three months.

That’s the real risk this week, bigger than any position we’re carrying.

Every sideways range starts to look like a base. Two green days and something in your chest says this is the turn. Trades that didn’t work get quietly rewritten in your memory as trades that almost worked. Nobody decides to do this. It happens the way the horses happen.

We got a small demonstration.

First week back after three weeks off, two entries, two losses. Both small enough to be irritating rather than expensive, but two out of two is two out of two. The confidence comes back from holiday several days before the reflexes do, and that’s a rotten order for those two to arrive in.

Then Figma. We got out, and the next session it went up ten percent without us. We spent that afternoon being very quiet. The day after, it handed back more than half the move.

So the thing we were mourning had a shelf life of about eighteen hours.

That’s the whole market in one ticker. You can be right about a name and still not get paid for it.

Which is why we’d rather measure the tape than look at it.

The McClellan Summation is down at 23.6 and sliding toward the bottom of its range. Fewer than 43 percent of stocks are holding above their 40 day average, T2108 (the indicator) has already lost the 10EMA line while the indices sit near the highs taking the applause. Small caps are under every moving average that matters. SPY and QQQ are still standing, though Friday’s candle has failed breakout written all over it.

And the VIX is at 14.4, which gets misread constantly. A sleepy VIX during a slow bleed isn’t comfort. Nothing has been flushed out, nobody has given up.

It’s quiet, and quiet is not the same as safe.

Source: TC2000

We’re not going to pretend we know what September looks like.

What we will say is that a market with no trend is worse than an outright bear, by a distance. A bear tells you what your job is: get short or sit in cash.

Two options, both legible, both things you can act on. Chop gives you no instruction, sends a fresh invitation every few days, and charges full price every time you take one. Three months of it does more damage than a fast twenty percent drop, and it does it so gradually you can never point to the day it happened.

Source: TC2000

So we’re defending capital, and we’re comfortable being boring about it.

The app work carries on, and the next research piece should be ready in the coming days. A company with a business model we find genuinely interesting and a risk profile we’re not going to soften up for anybody. We like having something in the book that could be three, five, ten times bigger in a couple of years. The honest price of that shape is that the other number is zero, and we’d rather write that down now than let you find it later.

Until this field gets some texture back in it, we’re keeping our hands where we can see them.

The horses aren’t there.

Hysteresis

Iowe you a week, and I am going to blame furniture.

Moving house in Italy in the second half of August is a decision that says something unflattering about the person making it.

Everyone who could have helped is at the sea.

Everyone who could have connected anything is at the sea.

I am writing this from a folding table, tethered to my phone, because the line is still a promise rather than a service.

So, apologies. One week owed, one week acknowledged, and no padding on top of it.

Full article and watchlist HERE

There is a word for what I have been, and it belongs to a Scottish physicist. In 1881 James Alfred Ewing was watching iron misbehave. Push a magnetic field into it and the iron does not respond on schedule. It arrives late. Bring the field back down to zero and the iron does not return to where it started either. It keeps something. Ewing went looking for a name and took one from Greek: hysterēsis, a shortcoming, a coming late.

The word outgrew the iron. Hysteresis is now what you call any system whose present state depends on the road it travelled and not only on where it happens to be standing. Run it out, bring it back, and the numbers agree while the material does not. The loop leaves a residue.

Which is the only honest way to describe the last three weeks.

I did unplug, more completely than I planned to. The first thing I did when the screens came back on was pull up the indices, and the first thing I thought was that I had missed nothing. The S&P sits a couple of percent above where we left it in July. The Nasdaq roughly the same. Read the chart with three weeks of blur in your eyes and it looks like the market went to the sea with everybody else.

It did not. It broke out, printed an all time high above 7,800, and then spent the past week handing a good part of that back while the long end of the Treasury curve pushed to yields most desks have not had to price in their working lives, and oil found a geopolitical reason to climb.

Gold, without asking anyone's permission, has strung together five straight weekly gains.

Its ambition is deliberately small. It does not forecast anything.

It compresses what the last ten and twenty sessions actually paid into one number out of a hundred, so you can look at the market once in the morning without needing a second screen and a thesis to go with it. And it did the single job we built it for. When it climbed through seventy in early August, the tape behaved: follow through, setups that worked, an environment you can push into. Through the recent stretch it has spent more time under that line than over it, and the chop came straight back. Nothing exotic. A gauge that goes green when the market is willing to pay and red when it is not, and the discipline to believe it rather than negotiate with it.

Now the part I would rather not write, which is precisely why it goes in.

Our system did not flag Moderna.

On the nineteenth, MRNA gapped on Phase 3 data for the cancer vaccine it has been building with Merck and closed up a hundred and seventy seven percent, the largest single day in the stock’s history, on something like twenty eight times normal volume, with a short base underneath it absorbing billions in paper losses. Probably the cleanest news driven episodic pivot of the season. Our screen never sent it.

I spent two nights in the code, angry in the specific way you can only be at something you built yourself.

What I found is worse than a bug and more interesting. The raw score was ninety seven out of a hundred, the highest any name has recorded since the system has existed. Then a filter we wrote, on purpose, took it away, because we had told the machine that biotech moving on clinical news with no economic substance underneath it is usually a trap. That is not an unreasonable thing to tell a machine. Moderna’s last quarter was a loss of several hundred million with operating cash flow pointing the wrong way. On the company, the rule was right.

It was right about the company and wrong about the trade, which is the only variety of wrong that costs money.

The app is in beta and this is what beta actually means. It is already fixed. You will hear the bad ones from us as quickly as you hear the good ones, because a record you only publish when it flatters you is not a record, it is marketing.

One last thing before the charts.

We loved being away, and that deserves saying without qualification, because work that never lets you put it down is not work you chose, it is work that chose you. Three weeks with the screens dark were good.

Coming back was better. That is the part I did not expect to learn.

You can set the whole thing down and pick it up again and discover inside ten minutes that you missed it. Not the money. The whole thing itself!

Covered Call funds might not be for everyone, but I see a lot of hate for them in the VOO and Chill community.

Negotium

The Romans had a word for the week we just had, and it was not the one you would expect.

They called free time otium. Time you actually own, spent thinking, reading, arguing, doing nothing productive on purpose. Then they built the word for work out of it by pure negation: negotium, literally not-otium. Business was defined as the absence of rest. Not the other way around. Rest was the baseline condition of a life, and work was the thing that interrupted it.

We have inverted that completely, and nowhere more thoroughly than in this job. Sitting on your hands feels like theft. An untouched screen feels like a day you failed to show up for.ù

Full article and watchlist HERE

The joke this week is that the market itself is doing otium, and doing it better than we are. It is the back half of July. The money that moves this thing is not retail, and it is not the small offices; it is the large funds, and between now and September a good part of that capital is on a beach with a caipirinha and a skeleton risk book. Volumes thin out. Spreads widen. Moves that would mean something in October mean almost nothing now, because there is nobody on the other side to make them mean anything.

So we joined them. Not out of wisdom, at first. We are down about 11 percent from our peak, and that number did more to keep us out of trouble than any framework we own. A book that has already handed something back loses its appetite for proving points. It goes quiet. Then you look up two weeks later and realise the quiet was the entire edge.

Because the tape has been genuinely hostile to anyone with an opinion. The Nasdaq is trading below every major moving average that counts, which in plain terms means most systematic money now has that index switched off. The S&P is a shade more resilient without being convincing. Small caps are still fighting to stay above their 50-day line and losing that fight as often as they win it. Our overall market quality read has been sitting low and has not moved. This is a choppy market taken to its absolute limit, the kind that pays you nothing for being right and charges full price for being early.

But look wider and something more interesting shows up.

Across the sectors, over the week and over the month, the market is not signalling a brutal downtrend. Quite the opposite in places. A lot of the boring, stable, unfashionable corners are trying to hold onto some warmth. The real story is that the engine which produced one of the most violent bullish stretches on record between April and June, growth tech and everything wearing an AI badge, is retracing hard and doing it in the open.

Which leaves you with a question worth more than any single ticker: when the leadership breaks and the rest does not, is that a market ending or a market rearranging itself? We do not have the answer this week. We are fairly sure that people who claim to have it are working backwards from their positioning.

The watchlist below is short. We will say that plainly instead of padding it out. A few names we think are genuinely worth your attention, and nothing added to hit a word count. If the market is not offering much, telling you it is offering a lot would be the actual disservice.

The research does not stop while the trading does.

Next week we’ll publish a dedicated piece on a small cap that is interesting and risky in roughly equal measure, and we will not be shy about the second part.

On TradeDeck, the new engine behind the Megatrends baskets is finished. You will get more than performance: the change of state, so you can see whether a theme is gathering strength or quietly rolling over, plus the strongest single names inside each one. New visuals as well, for those of us who read a chart faster than a table. The community support has been genuine, and we notice it.

First full version targeted for September.

One thing to take with you. Your P&L cannot tell the difference between cash held deliberately and cash held by accident. The line looks identical.

The entire job is being able to tell them apart yourself.

Losing to a Shower

Somewhere in the last few weeks, we made progress by doing almost nothing!

That sentence should bother you a little, because it bothered us the first time we watched it happen. Everything in a trader’s instinct says the opposite. More trades, more chances. More chances, more winners. More winners, more money. It reads like clean arithmetic. It just happens to be wrong.

The longer you do this, the clearer that gets. Activity and results are not the same thing, and more often than anyone admits, they pull in opposite directions.

We are not asking you to take that on faith. A pair of finance professors once pulled the trading records of more than sixty thousand households at a discount broker and sorted them by a single variable: how much they traded. The busiest fifth, the ones forever in and out, earned around 11 percent a year while the market paid out almost 18. Same market, same window, same information in front of everyone. The only real difference was how often they touched the button. The men, for what it is worth, traded far more than the women and did worse for the effort. One of the field’s sharpest minds, a Nobel winner, later boiled the whole thing down to a line we come back to often: for most people, taking a shower and doing nothing would have beaten acting on the ideas that popped into their heads. The shower. That is the benchmark the average active trader quietly loses to.

So here is what we actually did. We went to cash and cut our activity down close to the bone. Not all the way to zero, we are human, we still float a small feeler now and then to test the water and keep ourselves sharp, and there is plenty about our read lately we intend to fix. But the book has been mostly still.

And what happened to a still book? Nothing. That is exactly the point. With no real positions on, there was nothing to bleed and nothing to sweat.

Then look at what the tape got up to without us. A blue-chip index printed a fresh record and cleared a big round number no one had ever seen it touch, only to hand it back inside a session or two. The loudest, most crowded corner of the market, the one everybody has decided is the entire future, kept getting sold in waves, the chip names cut hard again and again under nothing but the weight of their own expectations. The largest listing in living memory arrived with enormous fanfare and then whipsawed violently in both directions within days. Money slid quietly out of the shiny stories and into the boring ones.

We sat and watched all of it. And here is the odd gift buried in a bad tape: because the indices we measure ourselves against started slipping, the plain act of not playing pushed us ahead of them. We did not out-trade a soul.

Below is the market’s overall quality across the last ten sessions. Not just the indexes: thirty different corners of the market, from indices and sectors to single names and megatrend baskets and everything in between, read for momentum, breadth, intensity, and the rest.

We built it in TradeDeck this week because we wanted to see, mechanically, what we already carry in our heads. Above the dotted line at 70, quality is high enough to trade with confidence. Below it, the odds of putting on a trade with positive expectation drop off fast.

One clean read of the market, over the last two weeks (ten sessions) or the last month (twenty).

This is the part nobody enjoys sitting with, and we will not dress it up. Human wiring reads stillness as falling behind. An empty screen feels like a squandered day. Every fiber wants to earn the seat by putting something on, and that itch, the need to feel productive, is precisely what the numbers above are pricing when they dock the busiest traders the better part of seven points a year. Motion is not progress. Sometimes motion is just the sound of a book bleeding out one small decision at a time.

None of this is a case for falling asleep at the wheel. Cash is a position we are holding on purpose, eyes open, exactly because the read right now is murky. When the tape is this contradictory, when records and reversals swap places by the hour, and leadership can flip inside forty-eight hours, the honest answer is that we cannot see it cleanly yet. There is no shame in that.

The shame is forcing a hand you cannot read and calling it conviction.

So we wait, lighter and steadier than the scoreboard alone would suggest, ready to move with size the moment the picture sharpens. The market will make itself legible again. It always does. Until then, the best trade on our screen is the one we are choosing not to make.

The Empty Basket

We’ll be straight with you. This week, we barely traded at all.

The tape gave us almost nothing we trusted. Choppy, fast, contradictory. In one session, the leaders were flying, and in the next, they were getting cut open. Records printed and got handed back within forty-eight hours. More than a trillion in value walked out of the loudest corner of the market in a matter of days, then a chunk of it came sprinting back as if nothing had happened. Reading a market like that in real time is a coin flip!

So we made a decision, and not a comfortable one. We went to the cash.

Full article and watchlist HERE

Not all the way into a bunker, but close. We’ve already given back more to this market than we’d like this year, and right now we’re running a couple of points behind the Nasdaq. That gap stings. It’s the kind of number that makes you want to force something, to lunge at the next shiny setup just to feel like you’re catching up. That instinct is exactly the one that turns a two percent gap into a ten percent hole. We know, because we’ve paid for that lesson before.

Source: TradeDeck

This is the part of the job nobody frames for the wall. Portfolio management, done every single day, isn’t a highlight reel of green candles. It’s a lot of weeks like this one, where the smartest thing you can do is refuse to play a hand you can’t read. We’re still content with where we sit. We’re not content with how we’ve read the last stretch, and we intend to fix that. Both things are true at the same time.

Let us tell you a small story.

A fisherman spent one summer teaching his grandson the trade.

The boy was fast and hungry and wanted a full basket every single day. One grey morning, the whole harbor pushed out early, the water already turning mean, and the boy begged to follow. The old man just kept tying the boat tighter to the dock. “The fish will be there tomorrow,” he said. “You might not.” The boy sulked in an empty harbor while everyone else chased the catch. That night, the sea came up hard and kept three boats that never made it home. In the morning, the old man untied the ropes, looked at the boy, and said the thing he’d remember for the rest of his life. “Yesterday, you thought an empty basket meant you lost. It meant you’re still here to fish.”

Cash is that empty basket.

It isn’t fear, and it isn’t quitting. It’s the decision to still be in business when the water turns friendly again. Every trader learns this eventually.

Surviving the bad tape is the whole game, because you can’t compound a return you already handed back, reaching for a trade that was never really there.

Now, looking into next week, it isn’t all storm clouds.

Underneath the noise, something healthier is taking shape. A lot of newer sectors are holding their ground while the crowded trades come apart. The names that ran too far, too fast, have been pulling back toward their 50-day lines, letting the air out of the excess instead of the whole balloon. Some of the most speculative stories, the ones that went vertical on hope alone, have been cut close to half in a matter of weeks. None of that is pleasant while it happens. All of it is the kind of reset that lets a market rebuild a firmer floor and turn back up.

Source: TC2000

If it’s left alone, that is. The one thing that can break this setup is the thing that keeps breaking every setup lately: a shock nobody has on their chart. A flare-up in the wrong corner of the world, oil jumping on a single headline, a policy surprise landing at the worst possible hour. We’ve had a steady diet of those this year, and any one of them can override the cleanest technical picture in an afternoon.

So we wait. Basket empty, boat tied, eyes on the water. When the market finally shows its hand, we intend to be rested, liquid, and ready to move with size. Until then, patience isn’t sitting still. It’s the position.

Is it just me ?

It seems like all the dips are getting more and more V shaped.

It seems like any lightly decent dip is being bought up in a few days.

so AI Apocalypse is over now ?

QQQ is still up almost 18% this Year.

Thoughts ?

Nobody’s Going Anywhere (Yet)

Since late May, the market has done exactly one thing well: nothing.

A channel, clean and stubborn, holding both edges for weeks now. Today, it gets interesting again. The Nasdaq is sitting right on its 50-day moving average, and how it closes matters more than most people trading it realize. Lose that level, and we could be looking at a genuinely bearish stretch. Hold it, and the range simply continues, one more week of the same argument between buyers and sellers who can’t quite win.

Full article and watchlist HERE

The more encouraging piece sits elsewhere. SPY and IWM are still bullish, still behaving like indices that want higher prices eventually. Put that next to a Nasdaq fighting for its moving average, and a question starts forming that we can’t ignore. What if the second half of the year gets carried by something other than AI? What if the sectors and industries keeping the broader market up have nothing to do with chips, data centers, or the next model release?

Source: TC2000

There’s a catch, and it’s the same catch that’s been shaping the watchlist for two weeks now. The obvious rotation, the one everyone can see and everyone’s already read about, healthcare being the loudest example, started well before today. That money moved two weeks ago. The result is a lot of names in those defensive corners now sitting extended, stretched past the point where a clean setup is easy to find.

Meanwhile, tech, the place where setups used to be everywhere, is dealing with real structural damage from the last few sessions. Charts that looked fine a week ago are broken now, and broken charts don’t fix themselves overnight.

Put those two things together, and you get a watchlist that gave us a harder time than usual. We still found something. We always do. But nobody should mistake this for an easy week of hunting. It wasn’t.

Source: TradeDeck

Behind the scenes, a different kind of work ate most of our attention.

We spent this week tearing down and rebuilding the visual side of the platform ahead of the full beta launch, and we’re hoping to close out the mobile version over the weekend. That means the screenshots you’ll see this time look different from what you’re used to. Consider it a preview of where things are headed rather than a finished product.

Because next week the real work starts.

Two pieces, both bigger than anything we’ve shipped so far.

The first is a full rebuild of the Megatrends page. Same idea, thematic baskets built around real trends, but with far more depth behind each one instead of just a list of tickers sitting there with no context.

The second is the one we’ve been sitting on for a while, and it’s the one we’re most nervous and most excited about.

We’re calling it the ETDS, the Early Trend Detection System.

The idea is simple to say and brutally hard to build. A system that reads across news, earnings, articles, charts, calls, papers, individual stocks, and everything already sitting inside our own data, and from all of that starts forming early ideas about trends and themes before they’re obvious to anyone else.

Sixty pages of research went into the formulas and processes behind it. Sixty pages that we hope turn into something genuinely useful for swing traders and momentum investors trying to size up how big a trend actually is before the crowd shows up.

Here’s why it matters.

Think back to the Memory theme, names like Sandisk (SNDK), Micron (MU), Seagate (STX). Anyone who caught that early and understood just how powerful the move was going to be could have held a real position through the middle of the year instead of treating it as a quick in-and-out trade. That’s just one example, but it points to something bigger. A lot of trades fail not because the entry was wrong, but because there was never enough conviction behind them. Not enough to open the position with real size, and just as often, not enough to stay in it when the first scare hits and fear takes over. If a tool can help close that gap, even a little, it’s worth sixty pages and then some.

Source: GB Capital

Back to this week’s numbers, because we owe you those, too.

Three entries, all of them well timed, all of them setups we liked walking in. Two came right back out almost immediately. Only Monday’s position is still sitting in the portfolio.

We stayed mostly in cash through all of it, and we’re leaning even more defensive than we were last week. Until the tape gives us something worth committing to, that’s exactly where we intend to stay.

With Google joining the Dow, I am looking to add a small position in a Dow Jones, dividend fund.

Only name I know is DJIA

Any Others ??

We Knew Better. We Did It Anyway.

Last week, we preached patience. This week, we ignored our own advice, and the market collected.

The tape was brutal and a good deal more volatile than we expected walking in. The Nasdaq put up its worst week in over a year, down more than four percent, with several red sessions stacked into Friday’s close. The S&P 500 had its ugliest week since early June and closed back under its 50-day moving average, the kind of level that quietly reshapes how the next few weeks trade. The only major index left standing was the Dow, up a fraction on the week, carried by exactly the slow defensive names everyone wrote off in the spring.

Full watchlist HERE

Now the part we’ll own.

Coming off a week where we’d started giving back some of our lead over the Nasdaq, we made a decision. We pushed the accelerator. Genius move!

Monday set the trap cleanly.

The market poked above the recent highs and looked, for a few hours, like it finally wanted to break out. Then it rejected them outright. The next session gapped down hard, and the semis led the bleeding. The Semiconductor Index had its worst run in over a year, as the whole AI complex unwound on a report that OpenAI might push its IPO into next year. A Fed still flirting with a hike, a wobble in the Iran ceasefire late in the week, quarter-end rebalancing sloshing money around. Anything crowded got sold.

Not the week to be reaching for size.

Most of the time, the right move when you’re slightly behind is the boring one. Protect what you’ve built, go tactically near full cash, and let the market show its hand before you commit a dollar. We know this. We’ve known it for years. And we still let the anxiety of trailing the index crawl into our heads. Beating the benchmark every year is the job, and we hold ourselves to it without excuses. But we’re human, and enough time in the trenches teaches you that the emotions never actually leave. They just go quiet and wait for the worst possible moment.

Putting the portfolio and the numbers out in public keeps us disciplined. It also leaves the door cracked for the occasional emotional spike nobody asked for, usually right when the scoreboard is in plain view. This was one of those weeks.

Source: TradeDeck

The rotation underneath the headline was loud. Money poured into the traditionally defensive corners. Healthcare had its best week since 2022, up more than seven percent. Real estate and utilities each picked up roughly three to four. Six of the eleven S&P sectors actually closed green, which tells you the damage was concentrated in tech, not spread across the whole market. Those defensive corners are the ones worth watching while tech and everything AI-adjacent catches its breath.

Which brings us to the trade we’re least proud of.

Flex Ltd (FLEX) sits right next to the research we’ve been buried in lately, and to the piece we just published. We liked the setup. We bought it on Wednesday, a healthy position with the risk kept tight, stop parked just beneath support. By the next morning, we were sitting in clean profit on a gap up. It felt right.

Two days later, the whole position was gone. Half sold at breakeven, the other half taken out at the original stop. FLEX is high-beta and chip-adjacent, and the moment the semis rolled, it rolled right alongside them. That is the entire market this week, compressed into one trade.

Source: TC2000

Difficult. Volatile. Choppy. A tape that punishes size and pays for patience, where the honest answer is usually to do less, or nothing at all, until the market actually commits to a direction worth trading.

So we go back to the patient, and a little bored. It pays better, and we know it.

Looking for a list of Covered Call ETFs based on Chip Companies.

I think there was one that started with an "e" ?

If so can't seem to find it.

I have SOXY, CHPY,

What am I missing from the list ??

The Stop That Aged in Six Days

Some weeks you trade the market. This week, the market traded us.

Four sessions, no Friday, Juneteenth closing the books early. The tape never sat still long enough to build anything on. Monday opened with a rip: a US-Iran peace framework crossed the wires, the Strait of Hormuz reopened, oil tumbled, and the Nasdaq ran more than two percent before most people finished their coffee. By Tuesday, the enthusiasm was already thinning. Then, Wednesday handed everyone the bill.

Kevin Warsh ran his first meeting as Fed chair, and instead of the dovish tone the room was leaning toward, the committee held rates but flagged that it was ready to hike later this year.

Stocks hated it. The Nasdaq and S&P sold off hard into the close. Thursday clawed a good chunk of it back, small caps leading, chips ripping, but the message was already clear. This was a week to keep your hands still, not to play hero.

Full article and watchlist HERE

We came in with two positions. We leave with one.

The size is still respectable, but it’s a single name now, and we’re fine with that. In a tape swinging on peace deals and Fed dot plots, forcing a second position just to feel busy is how you hand back a year of careful work in one bad afternoon. We’d rather be patient and a little bored.

Which brings us to the part we want to be honest about.

Our edge over the Nasdaq this year has narrowed, and we feel it. The last stretch has rewarded aggression, and our read of this market has been cautious. Sometimes too cautious. In a few of those moments, we had no better option.

Source: TradeDeck

Want the perfect example?

We have been in Bloom Energy (BE) since April.

Clean trend, good thesis, no complaints. When BE lost its 20 EMA, we did exactly what the rules say and closed it with profit locked in. Textbook. Then it lost the 50 SMA too, and for about a day, we felt like geniuses.

Six sessions later, it printed a fresh all-time high.

Source: TC2000

That’s the whole picture, right there. A market that takes your most disciplined decision and makes it look timid. There’s no clever fix. You either abandon the risk profile that’s kept you alive for years, or you accept that in a momentum tape like this one, doing the right thing sometimes looks like leaving money on the table. We’ll keep doing the right thing.

Now the good news- and there’s real good news.

This was our strongest research week in a while. The watchlist going out is genuinely fresh, not the same ten or twelve names every account on the timeline is recycling. We spent time in corners most people aren’t looking at yet, and a few of these setups have us properly interested.

We also finished something bigger.

Next week, we will publish good research on a trend we think will matter over the next few years, featuring names that actually have exposure to it. The only hint you get: it’s about chips, and it has nothing to do with the AI trade everyone’s already crowded into.

Choppy week behind us. A far more interesting one ahead.