Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:14 The Knicks' Title & GP on Never Quitting
04:49 QQQs After an 8% Pullback & the 10-Day EMA
07:21 GP: Still Trashy, $MSFT Like a Meme Stock
18:42 Hard to Hold: Fast Rotations & 1,620-Point Drops
22:49 Undercut and Rally: Technicals in Reverse
27:55 Will Chips & Memory Round Trip?
31:59 Options Priced In, LEAPS & Defined Risk
36:32 $HOOD: Wedge, Island & the 9-Month MA
43:41 $VST: The 140 Floor & 155 Entry
47:18 GP: $ARM, $DELL, Metals & SPX 8,000
49:58 $HNGE, CLOV, $DOCU, $FSLR & Biotech
58:42 Nick's Picks: $CEG, $GE & $ISRG
1:01:46 Final Words & Changes Coming
Market Hours #179 went out live on Tuesday, June 16, with Ben, Nick and GP, after a week off. GP was celebrating the Knicks' first championship in more than 50 years, at the expense of Ben's Spurs. The QQQs had bounced hard off a pullback of about 8.25% with a big Monday gap up, then gave some back. GP still called the price action trashy. That started a long conversation about holding winners when technicals seem to work in reverse, whether chips and memory will round trip, and why options are harder to use right now. Then came setups in Robinhood, Vistra, Constellation and GE, the day before Kevin Warsh's first FOMC as chair.
Nick's setups, levels and trades
After the snap back to the highs, Nick expected some digestion and chop, though a straight breakout wouldn't surprise him. On the QQQs, the 10-day EMA was the line in the sand. Price was holding the high of the June 5 candle, and if it crept back into that candle, the next spot was about 704–705. "I feel for the shorts," he said, waking up to get ripped. He said he kind of liked Home Depot here. How you handle momentum rotation comes down to your strategy, personality and time frame: if you're in the zone and in step with the rotation, keep pressing. He'd found keeping up with the in-favor names relatively easy because he tuned out TV and curated his socials hard. He keeps a watch list of about 1,500 names and said he spends more time resetting alerts than trading. For a longer-term investor, a lot of the momo names are "shiny objects."
He said undercut-and-rally patterns have been so powerful because candles get undercut by a hair to run stops and then reverse. Technicals aren't failing, "they sort of are [working] in reverse," like a head and shoulders that plays out as a bear trap. So he sets stops against individual candles and wide-range igniting bars instead of big built-out patterns. ASTS was his example of shitty price action: a big igniting bar on Thursday, then a full round trip on Friday's SpaceX news. Holding a runner basically means ignoring the day-to-day action as long as a chosen moving average or price holds. He doesn't think chips and memory will round trip like 2020 growth stocks. A 50% correction is possible, and the tell he's watching is when a lot of them start to split. Until then, you keep pressing short-term measured moves as they stair-step higher.
He's in Robinhood. It held the high of the May 29 high-volume candle and built a descending wedge, with a fourth point near 93. Instead of a fifth leg down to about 53–55, it put in a higher low and then broke his more aggressive trend line from the April 20 high. It had an island bottom that day, though it filled the gap, and an inverse head and shoulders with a neckline around 93. That measures roughly 25 points, to about 115. The flat 200-day could act as an ankle weight. On Vistra, the weekly had a floor near 140. On the daily, every time the low of the March 20 wide-range red bar was reclaimed, price popped back to that candle's 166 high, and it was repeating. A doji with short-term moving averages curling under price made about 155 an entry, risking the prior day's candle. If he's going to get stopped out, he'd rather it happen sooner.
He took Constellation Energy through the prior day's high, above 260, trailing with the 10-day, and wants it back above 300 and breaking out. He loved GE. It built a head and shoulders that he'd posted as more likely a bear trap given how hot the names were. Even on a break he'd have looked for a long in the 230s, and it took out the right shoulder and was making highs, with a stop at the prior day's low. He also liked Oscar, HIMS and GH, and was watching ISRG's Friday candle as a possible higher low. Taking out the 20-day would be a change of character. He also flagged Airbnb's big IPO base: "if OPEN's going to go, Airbnb's going to go." His final word built on GP's: the quickest way to find your flow is to step into a place of gratitude.
Ben's setups, levels and trades
Ben pointed out the pullback from the all-time high to the low was about 8.25%, right inside the 5–10% range they expected. "Winners keep winning": select mega caps and the high-beta memory and neocloud names were the ones moving. His approach is to build part of a position in stage one if it's something he really believes in, without overextending. He'd traded in and out of ServiceNow to lower his basis and thinks software eventually gets a bid. He can't sit at the terminal all day, so he puts lump sums in five to eight names and lets them appreciate. Nvidia, held since November, was up about 20%, which looks like dead money next to Micron and SanDisk. He doesn't trust a parabolic move to stay parabolic. For him, the memory trade requires a YOLO mindset. Buy now and take a 30% correction, and you're underwater until it repairs, and eventually a hyperscaler will slow its spending. He doesn't think that happens soon, but he wouldn't plant a flag now.
He bought Intuitive Surgical, ServiceNow, Microsoft and Google on Friday and added on Monday. Robinhood was next on his list. He didn't buy the gap up, wanted a check-back into the 80s range off the channel midline, and otherwise would play it over 100. He held one share of Vistra as a placeholder in the 140s. It needs to close above the convergence of weekly moving averages, which it had done only two or three times, and over 171–172 "it's game on." On crypto, he stood by his call two Wednesdays earlier that Bitcoin was near the bottom of its range. He said Warsh would deliver lower rates because that's what the administration wants, and lower rates mean crypto goes. He clarified that GP wasn't calling for a cut at that meeting, only for the door to open to that conversation. He thanked everyone and said they'd keep the show going.
GP's setups, levels and trades
GP opened with the Knicks: "no quit," and "Knicks, peace and love," a motto he sewed in sixth-grade home economics. "Luck favors the prepared" and "teamwork makes the dream work." On the market, Monday finally broke out and then did nothing from 11 a.m. to the close. Microsoft went from 460 to the 380s "without flinching," a $3 trillion company acting like a meme stock. What's weak stays weak and what's strong stays strong. Chips and memory get sold every night and bought every morning, and SpaceX had briefly cleared Apple's and Microsoft's market caps. Breadth was actually expanding, and RSP's prior week signaled Monday's pop. Still, Microsoft, Meta and Home Depot had been under their 200 SMAs for a long time, and he saw a lost decade in commonly held names like Wynn, Home Depot, Nike, Starbucks, CVS, Lululemon, PayPal and Block. Nike had a possible island bottom, but rotation kept going to chips and memory.
Even investors were struggling to hold, he said, with 20–30% swings in a day or two and hedge funds like Ackman rotating fast. The correction from October 10 to March 30 took about 30 weeks to drop 10%, and then the market dropped 9% in three or four days. The NQ fell 1,620 points without a 200-point bounce, bounced 980 and dropped another 700. He blamed more algorithms. Even within a hot sector it was bifurcated: SanDisk kept running while Micron kept pushing and getting hit, so you can't hold runners until they prove themselves. Options are heavily priced in. Micron weekly 1,200 calls cost over $5 with the stock at 981, so it needed a 25% move in a short week. His Microsoft January 400 LEAPS went from about 29 to about 80 and back to about 29. CoreWeave closed at 100 the day it joined the Nasdaq 100 and then had a monster day. He prefers 2x ETFs because they don't decay and you know right away when a pivot fails. If you use options, define your risk: rather than $10,000 in shares, risk $2,000 in calls.
On Robinhood, he said the 9-month moving average was at 99.63 and pointing down with the stock at 96, so he'd wait for a monthly close and enter back above 99. He liked the monthly's back-to-back dojis at the breakout, but too many downtrend names had filled gaps and gotten destroyed. He hadn't sold any ARM or Dell after their pullback and would trim only on a double top off their two-year base breakouts. He's also in CoreWeave and Circle. Metals were leading, bottoming first and barely budging on red days. He expected the SPX above 8,000 by the next week, with a measured move of about 490 points off the "quick and dirty" drop, and noted the 7,620 high hadn't been taken out on the SPX but had on the ES, and futures usually lead. HNGE was "an utter beast," and he also pointed to CLOV, DocuSign and HIMS, which he's just holding now. He sold his First Solar trading shares, bought at 196, around 280 and kept his core from the 130s. He said Reddit was showing relative strength and pointed to OPEN. He expects Warsh to open the door to rate cuts. With AI and cheaper rates, cash-rich, low-multiple biotech like Moderna could reprice, and XBI was coiled. Circle is low-float and fully tied to crypto. When they went after Zcash, the best-acting coin, he read it as a sign of a crypto bottom forming over time. His final word: "Gratitude, not attitude, gets you further in life than most people can imagine." He also said changes to the video side were coming, possibly a new platform and probably a new name.
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