Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:14 Ben's "Island Top" & Nick's Fibs
04:59 GP: 637 Has to Hold
07:07 FOMC, Mag Earnings & "Nothing Structurally Changed"
08:47 GP: Software, $MSFT & the Question-Your-Soul Day
12:32 Nick: Mag Names, $AMD, $AAPL & $MSFT to 530–550
15:43 Big IPOs: Where Does the Money Come From?
17:20 GP's $ARM 2x Trade, $TAN & Solar
24:16 Speculation vs. Investment: POET & Taking Profits
28:02 Indices vs. Names & Euphoria Tells
31:55 Nick: Closer to the Beginning, 602 Line in the Sand
35:37 GP's Trades & $COIN's Range
39:58 NYC Meetup & the McClellan at Neutral
47:58 Regional Banks, $NBR & Biotech
52:22 Low Floats, Volume Rules & $AXGN
56:38 $RIO, Mega Caps & Final Words
Market Hours #174 went out live on Tuesday, April 28, with Ben, Nick and GP, on a red day just before FOMC and the Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta earnings, with Apple due Thursday. Ben came in "obnoxiously bearish," joking about an island top and pointing out that nothing macro had changed. GP said he no longer cares about the indices because the opportunity is in individual names, and Nick made the case that this move is closer to the beginning than the end. They also covered software and Microsoft, the IPO wave, GP's solar rotation into TAN, COIN's range, regional banks, biotech and how to trade thin names.
Nick's setups, levels and trades
Nick kept dragging his fibs as the QQQs broke out. Ideally they hold about 620–630: the .382 from the recent low was 623 and the .236 was 640. "We ran hot," so the market needs a moment to breathe, and any mean-reversion trade there would probably be short-lived. He'd get "uber bearish" under 610, the low of the gap candle above the 50- and 200-day, roughly 8–10% lower. A move back into the range would look like a breakout failure. He later said he was "pretty comfortable": the QQQs hadn't even tested the 10-day, and all the moving averages were stacked and curling. The market went through a six-month range, took out the lows, snapped back and took out the highs, so now it needs to digest. People who missed the move off the lows "should be praying for some type of digestion here." A deeper pullback to the .38 could happen if the mags get dinged on earnings and gap down, then rally all day. If the QQQs fell back into the range, he'd likely get trail-stopped out of most positions, but he'd bet on a higher low, with 602–602.50 as his line in the sand.
He thinks the mag names are an easy trade right now: Microsoft, Amazon and Google look great, and only Netflix still looks bad. In the IGV, CrowdStrike, NET and RBRK stood out. He was steering clear of small caps, and even of space and drones, because leaning into the heavy hitters felt like the place to be. "Easy money, trend is up. You just got to find your entries." If you missed AMD, the 270–300 pocket is the load zone. Apple's weekly could close as a three-week tight at the top of a descending channel into the 200-day. In his view, Microsoft has an easy run to 425 and another 50 points or so before 470–490 acts as resistance, and the channel's measured move points back to the highs around 530–550. On the IPO wave, he'd trim across the board to raise dry powder rather than sell out. He said he tends to give money back when he gets heavy in solar, but he likes FSLR's island bottom just under the 200-day. If it creeps sideways toward 210 and gaps, it would catch his interest. On a red gap-down day, if you weren't planning to take gains, who cares about the price action? Consolidation just lets you accumulate.
He said the McClellan had come back to neutral at about 23. In an uptrend, you want that pullback to neutral to hold before turning back up. On thin names, he borrowed a tactic from Dio: throw small, very low bids against a moving average the stock respects, like the 10 or 20 when they're converged and tight. His scans require about 300,000 shares of average daily volume, though 500,000 is probably better. On AXGN, he liked the daily setup against that day's candle. On the weekly, it was pushing toward all-time highs, with trouble near 46. If it bases there and flips to all-time highs from a deep base, it could probably run to 100 first. He also flagged OXY, and Ben noted it was running headlong into its downtrend.
Ben's setups, levels and trades
Ben opened by showing a "gorgeous island top reversal," joking that the market was headed to zero on a low-volume, short-covering mean-reversion rally. Underneath the jokes, his point was that the market rallied without anything structural changing. There was still a war, oil was above $100 a barrel, the Strait of Hormuz was closed and global oil was being depleted, with a new Fed chair likely the only macro change. "It's a big week," with FOMC and four mega-cap reports the next day. He said the truth is usually somewhere in between, and he wasn't calling for a drop below 637, but he had to be skeptical of the light volume. He thinks the semi selloff was probably overdone, and any rally led by semis is a good thing "until it's not," since "the same thing that leads you up is the same thing that can lead you down." The SMH was on lower volume, and he was "nibbling the edges on some puts." He asked GP whether, with three or four big tech IPOs coming in the next weeks and months, the money would come out of the QQQs. That's the old UNH question they'd kicked around with Lex: to keep buying, you have to take profits somewhere.
He liked GP's TAN idea and noted that March 2026 was the first time in history renewable sources overtook non-renewables in consumption. He thinks renewables have more legs than they get credit for, even with the administration pushing fossil fuels. He told the story of a friend who bought POET around $6 and was patting himself on the back. Ben reminded him that taking profits doesn't mean you stop believing in a stock, "if you don't take your money, somebody's gonna take your money," and then Monday morning happened. You can hold two thoughts at once: treat speculative positions as speculative and long-term investments as long-term. If he had to hold one name for 10 years, he'd probably pick Amazon over POET. He called Randy in the chat a great sentiment gauge, since Randy is always positive and now said he was worn out, after the market chopped six months, hit new lows and then pulled back from all-time highs. "It is whipsaw action." He also said UNH looks fantastic, with some big gaps. On BlackSky, a name GP put on his radar, he made "a nice little coin" without catching the maximum profit. It was retesting its breakdown.
Ben laid out the plan for the New York trip: he and Nick fly in Sunday, GP lives across the river in Jersey, and they want to meet viewers and watch basketball whether or not people come to Cashtags. He invited anyone in the chat who understands crypto to come on a Tuesday show and explain what it'll take to go higher, because he's "at a loss" and calls it a distraction. In his closing word, he talked about process and scars, told people to go touch some grass and some dirt, and said his tater towers were up for gardening season.
GP's setups, levels and trades
GP said 637 has to hold on the QQQs. It's the top of a six-month range, and one or two days under it is fine, but if it breaks and doesn't reverse the next day, "that's game over for the QQQs." Another six months of range would be too much. He thinks oil is in a head and shoulders and will get destroyed while people wonder why with the war still on. He no longer cares about the indices because they aren't tied to the stocks he trades: while they did little, ARM, Dell and DigitalOcean set up and outperformed by a long shot. To him, software is the opportunity and Microsoft leads the pack, though after almost four straight weeks of rallying, it was still 50 points under its daily 200 SMA. Unity stood out more, with relative strength all the time. His lesson: in every major bottoming cycle, there's one day that makes you question your soul. Last week ServiceNow got hammered on a double beat and the IGV fell about 5–5.5%, often on something positive like a strong report. Since then, there hasn't been a lower low. He expected traders to try the same with Microsoft, about 10% of the IGV, by buying puts on narratives like OpenAI missing revenue, and he didn't think it would work.
He bought ARM and its 2x ETF a few weeks earlier. He still holds ARM fully as a core position but used ARMG to trade. He bought ARMG at 11.20 and sold most of it at 22–23 within six days: "That's 100% on equity in a week, and if I'm not taking profits, I'm an idiot." That money went into First Solar and TAN, because he's "always looking to see where the puck's going." TAN's monthly has gone nowhere for three to five months while building volume inside a massive base, and at some point the narrative swaps from nuclear to solar. Enphase reported that night, with First Solar due that week too, so it could be a make-or-break week for solar. TAN's largest holdings are NXT, then FSLR, ENLT and Enphase. He also pointed to HASI, a sustainable-infrastructure holding breaking a multi-year downtrend and pushing out of its base around 40, the COVID highs. It might be a six-month play, because "FSLR trades like crap 103 days out of 100." With markets this fast, he said, you can't get married to positions, though he likes to give a trade about three months.
He said index hedges and protection haven't worked in eight or nine months. It took mega caps sitting 40–50% under their 200-days for the QQQs to fall 10%, and most of the recovery came in four days. He built ARM and Dell while the market broke down and was now selling ARM 40–50% higher, building where he sees opportunity and ready to pull the escape lever when things get euphoric. His euphoria tell on chips was someone comparing Intel to Micron's run from its dot-com highs to 500, ignoring that Micron's first attempt failed and fell from 157 to $61 over nine to ten months. On the day, he bought Meta for a trade but expected to get stopped because the NQ looked like garbage. He had Tesla trades on, and he'd added FSLR and TAN the day before. COIN was in week nine or ten of a range, and it had sold off from about 211–212 six or seven times in nine weeks. He'd grabbed it at 166 when it touched the earnings low. He said Wall Street has "ruined the entire crypto universe" since October 10, and as a long-term Tesla holder, he knows what five to seven years of nothing feels like.
He thinks biotech holds the cheapest of the best names, with BBIO reporting that day and names like OKUR, as an alternative to chasing chips, energy, OKLO, Bloom, Rocket Lab and ASTS. The sector hasn't gone anywhere since 2015 and could be a quiet AI beneficiary through faster research. On low-float names like BlackSky, which can have 10% days on nothing, buy smaller with wider stops if you're holding, or keep size and expect to get stopped a lot. He's building volume filters into his models, because wide bid-ask spreads on thin names are asking for trouble. He admitted to a mistake: he put in an order for 50,000 shares of TTDU and then realized the day's total volume was 126,000, half of it his. Now he won't trade a stock if he's more than 10% of its volume. On RIO, after its run from 74 to 95–96, he expected consolidation, then lost track of it with so much opportunity in tech. Coming into 2026, the call was to avoid the mega caps, which wouldn't offer 100% moves, and at one point Microsoft was at $2.7 trillion while Nvidia was near $5 trillion. RIO is on his list if there's a pullback. He liked regional banks, with multi-decade bases still at or under their GFC highs after 17 years: FITB, CLBK, FRST, Cullen/Frost (CFR), ConnectOne and the KRE broadly. He also flagged NBR (Nabors). On China names like BABA, his view was "pop trade and then fade for the rest of the next three months."
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