Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:18 Oil's Round Trip & Thanks to Riley
02:55 QQQs: The Fourth Test of 595
03:57 GP: The Range Didn't Break & Put Decay
06:35 How Nick Hedges: Points of Extreme
09:17 $ORCL Earnings, $NOW & $PLTR
10:55 Semis vs. Software & $ORCL's 200 SMA
12:52 XLE: Where's the Low? $CVX & Gas Prices
16:33 Chat Names: National Presto, $DRS & SanDisk
19:13 Parabolas, $GLW & Momentum Gambling
21:24 $HIMS, Novo Nordisk & $RIVN's Tesla Moment
28:49 Ben Sells $NET; $U, BlackSky & $CRWV
33:45 $AMZN's All-Time Trend Line & $CRCL
36:29 $DOCN, Honeywell & Drones for Good
39:42 $CHWY & an AWS Spin-Off?
46:14 $RBRK, $NET, $CRWD, $NVDA & $TEM
55:48 Quantum, Software Into $ORCL & $TSLA
1:04:23 Final Words
Market Hours #170 went out live on Tuesday, March 10, with Ben, Nick and GP. Nick was back and feeling better, and Oracle reported after the close. After a scary Sunday night in futures, the market was nearly back where it started, with the QQQs bought up a fourth time at the bottom of the range in week 27. GP shrugged off the scare and argued that put decay could fuel a reflexive rally. Ben explained why he sold his Cloudflare and what he's buying instead. They went through XLE levels, Hims after its Novo Nordisk deal, Rivian's possible "Tesla moment," Chewy, cybersecurity, Tempus and Tesla's options flow.
Nick's setups, levels and trades
Nick said the QQQs were still in the range, on roughly their fourth attempt in this consolidation to break below 595, and each time they got bought back up. He hedges by day trading the QQQs or SPY, recently with puts or the leveraged ETFs, and only at points of extreme. A couple of weeks earlier, buyers couldn't push through 614–615, the 50% retracement of the recent selloff. If you thought the market would stay stuck in the range, that was the first place to short a bounce. He rarely holds hedges overnight. If the market could hold the day's low, he thought things looked good technically, especially ServiceNow pulling into its 10- and 20-day. For Palantir, he wanted 146–148 to hold, which Ben noted lines up with the 50-week SMA. On Leonardo DRS, he liked it a lot and would be a buyer down to about 43, and also on strength against the high.
On Hims, which he rode up before, he liked the island it put in on the weekly and the pop above the 200-week. He isn't hyped to get involved yet, but he'll set alerts at the high and low of this week's candle and might throw on a starter at the low. He really wants it to climb above 23–24, the low of the prior range, and hold. That could send it back to the mid-40s, and then it could base and absorb selling near the old range highs. It's been a bumpy ride, and the igniter candle the prior Monday was a momentum trade, not a statement about the company. On Chewy, he'd just posted a chart. On the weekly, it looked like a giant inverse head and shoulders, but a starter needs the longer-term moving averages recaptured and curling up, or it could become dead money in a $20–50 stage-one range. "The real trade starts when 50 gets busted," though there's a trade back to about 48–50 before that. He said his attention was scattered and he's only putting on small starters.
Along with the IGV, he liked Rubrik, a beaten-down cybersecurity name back at the lows of its prior range after spiking its 48 pivot low. He likes NET a lot, which had a floor at 180 and kept flirting with that pivot, and thinks CrowdStrike could V out. "It's time for cybersecurity." Among quantum names, IonQ and Rigetti stood out, and he'd pick IonQ, though there are better-looking setups. Set an alert at about 48–49 and ignore it until then, to see how it behaves pushing into the 200-day and whether it builds an inverse head and shoulders. He noted that even long-term Rigetti holders who bought around a dollar were still huge winners. On Tesla, the monthly is the chart to watch, teed up on its 12- and 18-month moving averages. On the daily, it's trapped in a 390–480 range until it breaks one way. He still likes the setup on every time frame and wants it to hold about 380. His last word: welcome to week 27, "let's hope we resolve this range to the upside" and make trending great again.
Ben's setups, levels and trades
Ben thanked Riley for the previous week's conversation and said he loves learning things he's unfamiliar with. Nick's inverted triangle was "holding up like a champ." On the QQQs, buyers were showing up at the bottom of the range in week 27, and he was fully deployed but still "not bullish enough." On hedging, he asked why anyone would short a range that isn't showing signs of breaking. You need a break one way or the other to have conviction, or you've wasted money. He'd rather use an inverse or leveraged ETF than options, which decay. ServiceNow's 15% bar the week before, after an investor presentation, got him nearly back to breakeven, and he expected it to give some back. He doesn't trade the XLE, but if he wanted a discount, he'd start around 52–53, with the 50-day at 52 and the weekly nine nearby. He'd be about half deployed by 51 and put the rest in at GP's 48. He liked Randy's National Presto pick and said he wouldn't wait for a retest of 138.
During the show, he closed his Cloudflare position on an upside stop. It was one of his biggest winners ever, from about $20 to $200. He'd sold most of his shares already, and there wasn't enough left in the position to justify keeping it over something more speculative. He still loves the company and thinks NET has at least another 10 points. Around 220 it could hit trouble, and it tends to overshoot and settle, as it had twice before. He still holds Synopsys and ServiceNow in software. After the conversation with Riley, he bought BlackSky when his alert at 23 filled the day before, and he'll add more there and on a range break. His other buy was CoreWeave, the one piece of his AI-infrastructure stack he didn't own. Brad Gerstner's Altimeter took it from no position to its ninth-largest holding last quarter, buying in the 60s and low 70s, and Jensen bought around 73–74. "I'm already betting on AI winning... why am I not betting on who's building these things?" He wanted it to chop in its wedge a bit first, with a lawsuit update and Synopsys and Nvidia investor showcases coming the next week.
On drones and flying vehicles, he sees an exponential curve as AI makes people smarter. He especially likes the medical uses, like a drone getting a stroke patient to a hospital faster, or finding a loved one with dementia who drove off. He keeps an AirTag in his parents' car. On Chewy, he'd use the low as a stop, lighten up in the overhead "war zone" and hold a moonbag for the top of the range. If it can't get past 34, you won't get 45. He floated an idea from a conversation with a friend: Amazon isn't really a retailer, it's AWS, so what if Amazon spun off AWS, a reverse IBM–Red Hat move? He admitted it wasn't fully thought out, and VPA in the chat pointed out the synergies. He called the people expecting Nvidia to crash "FinTwitches," and said he doesn't follow the crowd, because if you just buy the index, you should expect market returns. He had a stink bid on CrowdStrike at 300. His closing words: it was his oldest son's birthday and his anniversary with Mrs. Bags, and he's grateful to be a husband and father.
GP's setups, levels and trades
GP put oil's sweet spot at about the 60s to 75. He yawned at the Sunday-night futures scare because the bottom of the range didn't break. "The amount of power they need to deploy to just get it to the bottom of the range and not break it is monumental," and if all that volume and all those headlines can't break it, "goodbye shorts." To him, the whole range has been technical: puts brought the market down, but anyone holding big portfolio protection was eating the decay. As puts monetize, you can get a reflexive rally that potentially takes out all-time highs, which he thinks is going to happen, and then possibly a rug pull. Either way, it would take something monumental to dislodge the range. He doesn't love a market led only by semis: "I want to see the day where semis and software just get along." There was no reason for Microsoft to be down. It sat about 20% under its daily 200 SMA, Oracle was about 80 points below its 200 SMA at 220, and Nvidia was right at its 200. If Oracle popped 30–40% into its 200 SMA on earnings, don't be surprised.
He said the XLE was about to break the nine SMA it had ridden since the start of the year for the first time. It might retest its breakout the way IWM did, a healthy 10–15% correction, and since "they just love max pain," it could reach 48, the nine-month average and the range highs. Overall, he thinks it legs higher. Chevron and Exxon make up about half the XLE. He liked CVX and had seen rumors it could raise production 80%. He was annoyed that gas prices jumped days before oil did. On DRS, he passed because it's an IPO without a base. Reddit was the cautionary tale, looking like a breakout and instead double-topping. On SanDisk and other parabolas, like EWY, SLV, GLD and EWJ, he said they weren't breaking down, just trying to find a base. In memory, GLW stood out to him as a picks-and-shovels supplier in AI infrastructure, but after running from 32 to 160–170 in under a year, buying there is "gambling," not high probability. He traded RGTI on its first breakout but avoids zero-revenue names once their momentum dies.
On Hims, he called Novo Nordisk "a taco master" for suing it for months and then partnering with it, which says a lot: why choose Hims if anyone can disrupt the space? It wasn't expensive even at the highs. It was valued at maybe one to two times sales, growing 30–40% a year with no real debt and heavily shorted, back in the same zone he talked about two years ago. Like TTD, it tends to pop to the 50-day, get slapped, retest the nine-day and then go. Rivian popping over its 50-day, even as sellers hit it, is a stronger setup, with the 50-day curling up, and he thinks it's on the verge of its "Tesla moment." Mass production could shift it toward profitability, which drove Tesla's 2019 gap-and-go. At about a $21 billion market cap next to Tesla's $1.5 trillion, it doesn't seem expensive, and TD Cowen issued a buy that day. He suggested Unity as a Cloudflare replacement, comparing it to Wayfair's run from about 19 to 120. Software setups like Unity and NET are "quick and vicious retests of bases" that could be massive.
The surprise to him was Amazon, which checked back to its all-time trend line, held and had an island look. He bought Circle for himself and his dad around 62–63. He sold his own before earnings and held his dad's, "and he's having his last laugh as always." He expected a battle around 73–74 and didn't want people getting excited until it clears 74, given the apathy in crypto. DigitalOcean kept shining while software got hit, and Honeywell had a massive base just starting to break out. On Chewy, his case was against 24–25, about 3% risk, holding the backtest of the December 2023 pivot high. Amazon is Chewy's problem, but buying near the bottom of a base gives you a potential trade to the mid-30s, though it hasn't shown a character change. On the spin-off talk, he said the same logic applies to Google and YouTube, and noted that GE broke a 24-year downtrend after selling off its businesses.
He'd put on a Tempus trade with a bid around 70–71, risking about a dollar. It has rejected 75 for a year and a half, and he won't be a long-term holder until it clears 75 for more than three days. Software was picking up into Oracle's report, except Microsoft. CRM was down $8 that morning for no reason before recovering to down $2. He thinks buyers might be anticipating Oracle breaking its downtrend. The last month and a half looked like heavy accumulation in software, and to mark it up, they need a catalyst, which could be Oracle. Or Oracle could be the reason everyone sells. He thought the last leg down was software's final flush, noting the IGV was back at its 2021 highs. He's hoping for an everything-up market, because a bifurcated one is what creates bears. On Tesla, it only breaks out with a gap-and-go. It's controlled by options flow, notional values in the billions, so a gap forces those positions to cover. Even a product delivered ahead of schedule got no reaction, and every morning thousands of calls get sold. He signed off with a happy birthday, a happy anniversary and a happy daylight saving time.
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