Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:37 A Green Candle: QQQs, 555 & the SQQQ Exit
03:43 GP: The JPM Collar & Market Mechanics
06:21 $HOOD's Haircut & $MSFT's Historic RSI
10:40 Ben: Conviction, Probability & Somewhere in Between
13:19 High-Flyers Breaking Down & Mega Caps Must Stop Selling
16:31 Six Months of Balance Means a Violent Move
20:10 VIX, Oil Correlations & Why Oil Isn't Higher
24:29 Nick's Triangle, 581 & $FSLR
27:46 $MU, $WDC, $GS & Fib Extensions on Memory
32:00 Source of Funds, IPOs & VCX
35:35 SpaceX at $1.5T & the Nasdaq Fast-Entry Rule
38:19 The Rip Through 6475 & $CRWV at 68
45:13 $NBIS, $ARM, $SATL, $AHR & Space
48:53 $AMPX, $FSLY, $CRCL & $MSFT's Capex
59:13 Final Words
Market Hours #172 went out live on Tuesday, March 31, the last day of the quarter, with Ben, Nick and GP. A green candle finally showed up after a brutal Thursday, Friday and Monday, and the market ripped through the SPX level GP was watching while they were live. GP explained the JPMorgan collar and the market mechanics behind the selloff, Ben argued for staying somewhere between doomer and optimist, and Nick laid out the QQQs levels that decide the next leg. They also covered why oil isn't higher, fib extensions on the memory names, SpaceX's IPO and the Nasdaq's new fast-entry rule, and a run through chat names from NBIS to Fastly.
Nick's setups, levels and trades
Nick said the 10-, 20- and 50-day on the QQQs were all rolling, with the 50 about to roll through the 200, so he expected some kind of bounce. "If not, this is a violent selloff." His first measured move to the downside was 555–556, and it hit the day before. He had an SQQQ position on and admitted he should have sold more into that target. He got stopped out of the rest that morning. The QQQs had gone from pure sideways chop to resolving down, and now sat in no man's land. Many high-flyers had just broken down within the last day or two, which he said is normal. He's watching the QQQs, the MAGs, the recent high-flyers and his alerts, and he thinks this is closer to the end than the beginning. One more leg down could act like a basketball held underwater, setting up a snapback. Using the triangle he built after their call with Cookie, timing from when the range began in September puts a bottom this week. Shifting it to the October pivot high points to late April or early May. The level to watch is 581: if the QQQs reclaim it and hold, there's a good chance they head back to the highs. If not, they roll and take another leg lower.
First Solar had pulled back under the 200-day, broke down the day before and then reclaimed its 187 pivot low. A reclaim of 203 would make it look like a double bottom or a Livermore-style shakeout. He thinks this is a tough spot because the high-flyers just broke their ranges, but those trades can reverse quickly with a pivot-low reclaim. Western Digital was still inside its 240–300 range. Micron wasn't, and a reclaim of 350 would give you a spot to trade against. Longer term, after a monster run, a pullback into the 200-day isn't a bad thing: "We want the market to behave how we want it to behave, in the time and fashion that we want it to, and the market's just not going to do that." Goldman looked like it was putting in a higher low off the 200-day, with 855 the pivot to reclaim on the way to the 50-day, and he called it a name he loves to trade. He figured Dell was just breathing after a strong run while money moved into what was working that day. He'd bought some CoreWeave at 69 the day before.
From the chat, he liked NBIS: it sold into the 200-day and had been holding with higher lows. 100 is an easy level to trade against either way, the range runs from about 75 to 130–135, and on a breakout 200 probably acts as a magnet. ARM held its flatlined 200-day and took out the prior day's high, so that candle works to trade against. It's yet to break out of a roughly 100-point base, and above 180, he could see a run toward 300. SATL had a cup and handle building, pierced the prior day's wide-body candle, held the 20-day and had another pivot at 6.80. He'd cut it under about 3.94–4. AHR looked fantastic, with a cup-and-handle-ish breakout wedging into the 250-day. Rocket Lab and ASTS were both grinding or wedging into a rising 200-day, with the prior day's candle to trade against. He called AMPX an animal, and he likes it if it can retake 16.80. On Fastly, he'd use the prior day's candle: it reclaimed the 10-day and held the 20. A cheater entry is through 29, or chase it through 31. As a hot momo name breaking out of a stage-one base, it probably has more juice if the market keeps running. He also flagged AAOI. His final word: the market could go either way, so pick your spots, be disciplined, and give yourself room to leg in and leg out.
Ben's setups, levels and trades
Ben said he'd treated the last six months as buying opportunities but could have bought lower than where he bought expected breakouts, including ServiceNow as it kept dripping lower. Buying in a range that then breaks down "doesn't make you feel good," and having more optimism than most doesn't mean he doesn't feel it. "The market's designed to test your conviction." If he came on and said the biggest probability was to the upside, he'd be lying. With a convoluted macro picture and market-by-tweet, "probability kind of goes out the door." That doesn't mean you have to be a doomer or brimming with optimism, and somewhere in between is the practical place to be. People he talked to that weekend were feeling the hit in their 401(k)s, and he reminded them of this time last year. He hoped they'd pulled the beach ball underwater, but he didn't yet see a reason for it to shoot back up. He agreed with GP that the world is worse than when Russia invaded Ukraine: "we're in a world war without anyone calling it a world war." His old line applies: "ride the bull and pet the bear." Follow the trend, but act with caution when it turns, and leg in and leg out instead of going all in or all out.
On source of funds, his thesis is that when the big IPOs come, money has to come out of other names and go into SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. The last time notable IPOs flooded the market was 2021, right before the 2022 leg down, though he wasn't calling for another 18-month bear market. With SpaceX already valued around $1.5 trillion, not every name can stay elevated. He said that starting May 1, 2026, the Nasdaq's rules allow fast entry after 15 trading days instead of three months and drop the 10% free-float requirement, which looks like prep for SpaceX. If it lists May 4, 15 trading days lands on May 22, putting it in the QQQs by May 26 after Memorial Day. He'd called the Twitter-into-xAI-into-SpaceX merger path months ago as Elon's game plan, and joked about Elon allotting 30% of the offering to retail. On CoreWeave, he debated adding the day before. It hadn't closed a week below $70, so he took a shot at 68: "If I'm wrong, I'm wrong."
On the mega caps, he said investment years typically take 18 months to two years to play out, but these investments are unprecedented. The hyperscalers are racing to build the best model at scale, and the first to come out on top wins. At Stocktoberfest, he heard how far ahead Google might be, and now there's talk of Siri moving to Gemini. Jensen, Elon and Bezos are all fully engaged in AI and talking about an age of abundance. They have to talk it up, but consider what happens if they're right. He shared his tweet: capital intensity doesn't mean bad returns. Amazon spent about $50 billion building AWS, margins compressed, and AWS became Amazon's most profitable business. Tesla followed a similar path, so the 18-month playbook isn't a rule. Since the family was on spring break, his closing word was about time: "You can make a lot of money, but you can't make a lot of time." He also asked viewers to vote for Nick and GP for community member of the year at the Cashtags awards at the NYSE on May 4.
GP's setups, levels and trades
GP said the market was doing something it hadn't done in six months, going green, while names had been destroyed underneath the whole time. Netflix looked fantastic, and Meta looked good, though Microsoft was still weak. He described a sequence of events: as the market weakened, it got closer to the JPMorgan SPX put collar, and market mechanics took over. The short put strike was 6475, and the collar rolled off that day. Below the strike, dealers have to sell futures to stay delta neutral. He pointed viewers to a video from Vol Signals on Twitter, which he'd shared on StockTwits, for the details. He'd heard rumors that the strategy moves to futures hedging, which could mean much bigger impacts. Whatever happens with the quarterly calendar flip, he thinks the path is cleaner from here. If bulls pushed the SPX above 6475, he expected "fireworks in whatever direction," with dealers having to buy futures on the upside. Retail can't overpower 7,000-contract hedging flows, so you wait it out. Midway through the show, the SPX ripped above 6475 on a report that Iran's president was ready to end the war with guarantees. He said these were "major reclaims across the board," and an SPX close above 6600 that day would be huge.
He called the February–March selloffs exhausting, with 30–70% moves down in stocks. HOOD fell from 152 to about 63.52, a roughly 70% haircut, after a 30x run from $6.81 to 153. Microsoft's decline wasn't as deep as 2008's, but it came in six months instead of about ten, with its weekly RSI under the Black Monday, GFC and COVID lows. He repeated his line from six months of shows: "Markets will not go up if the mega caps don't stop selling." After being mostly in cash for those six months, he said the selloff had made the mega caps attractive. This is real-world AI spending from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and even Elon, not the metaverse. Six months of balance, with heavy distribution at the low end, doesn't resolve into a simple retest of February 2025. Either it's a violent false breakdown or this is the acceleration, potentially even back toward the tariff lows. He doubted it, given how much force it took just to get 10% down. He read crypto's apathy, trading in a tight range even during this market move, as a possible forecasting tool. He warned that a falling VIX doesn't always mean the market goes up, since it can mean people stop buying puts and just trim. Oil going down doesn't have to mean stocks go up either.
On oil, he asked why, in a worse world than 2022, it hadn't taken out the Russia-Ukraine high of 131 and topped out around 119–120. His answer: people see economic weakness hurting demand more than the Strait of Hormuz closure lifts price. "If there's no one buying oil, no one cares about a strait." Oil is a parabola too. It already had its 40% cut, and the question is whether that was the first leg before a final blowoff. The market has been full of parabolas, like Palantir, HOOD, Rocket Lab and ASTS, while Microsoft hadn't gone anywhere since 2021. On the memory names, he said they're cheap on current and next earnings, but the market is pricing two years out. Drawing fib extensions from key pivots, like Micron's from the 2009 lows, these charts hit the 161 or 261 extension and were done for a while. So did silver and HOOD. Nvidia was the rare exception because it doubled earnings from $6 billion to $11 billion quarter over quarter and kept going. Even long-term holders should treat those extensions as places to trim or sell two-year LEAPs. He called the VCX IPO pump people "so starved for action" and said most buyers will be holding the bags. He questioned who buys a SpaceX IPO at $1.5 trillion after 20 years private, and compared it to Elon's SolarCity deal. SPACs, he said, exist because their financials couldn't pass an IPO road show.
He pointed to Circle's perfect 61.8% retrace off its earnings breakout, tagging the two-day post-earnings high of 90.60, as a solid trading level. On Microsoft, it went from a little over $4 trillion to about $2.6 trillion while still producing about $80 billion in free cash flow against $100 billion in capex. Asked by Ben about investment years, he said that in AI, 18 months is a long time to drop the ball, so these companies have to invest and execute at rapid speed. He added that Tesla's base took six years: the 2013–14 breakout was retested in 2019. His final word, while visiting his niece with his dad: "It's all about family. Always has, always will be."
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