Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:21 $HOOD Rips Through 100
07:28 Trash or Just Frustrating? Less Is More, Including Size
10:37 GP: Only Chips & Memory Are Working
16:46 Repositioning, Big Money & $MSFT at the 200-Week
21:22 SpaceX's Valuation & Trash Market Mechanics
27:31 Space Leaders: $ASTS & $RKLB; XLC Looks Distributive
32:46 A Lost Decade? Disney & the Commonly Held Names
38:23 What Goes in a Kid's Account
44:35 $AVGO: Melt-Up or Distribution?
48:41 $NVDA's Range, Splits & AVGO vs. Marvell & Intel
55:57 $VST, VRT & Netflix's Range
58:32 Warsh's First FOMC: Rates Unchanged
1:00:37 Final Words
Market Hours #180 went out live on Wednesday, June 17, with Ben, Nick and GP, on Kevin Warsh's first FOMC day as Fed chair. Robinhood had ripped through 100 after the crew mapped out the trade the day before. GP called the market "trash" because only chips and memory were working. Nick called it frustrating. Ben stayed in the middle and needled them both. From there the show covered SpaceX's valuation and the IPO pipeline, whether a "lost decade" is real, what belongs in a kid's account, Broadcom versus Nvidia, and the rate decision as it came in.
Nick's setups, levels and trades
On Robinhood, Nick said all you needed were alerts at Monday's high and low. That gave a clean entry, and it was good to see it take out the 200-day. He thinks insider sales should mostly be ignored, while insider buys are worth paying attention to. He wouldn't call the market trash, just frustrating for some. After six months of chop and a rip off the spring low, they started saying "less is more" around weeks 12–15 of the range, and he said that applies to size as well as to how often you hit the buttons. If smaller size is what lets him hold and ride, that's what he'll do. He'd been going back and forth between sizing up and backing off because he thinks the move isn't over and the market is headed higher. He had the QQQs in a 700–750 range into the Fed. A little more chop wouldn't be bad, but it shouldn't drag on too long. One trader's trash market can be another's gold mine, depending on whose edge it rewards.
He sees the chop as repositioning, with money rotating into space, drones and AI for the 2030s. Big managers can't put on serious size on a breakout, so they buy inside the base, which explains the slow-drift backfills. The mag names got their wish and stopped going down. He thinks Microsoft is probably headed back to retest 350. On the weekly it's a massive range and "dead money," so it stays on his watch list. On the lost-decade talk, he thinks SPY is ultimately headed to 1,000 and that a lost decade is mostly fear-mongering. As long as trends inside it are tradeable, an active trader can play both directions. If SPY bottomed at 500 and rallied to 600, plenty of names would run 100–500% along the way. He'd tried to buy space names in his kids' account and ended up buying more QQQs.
On Broadcom, he said it was in melt-up mode, riding the 30- and 40-week near the 200-day. It needs to hold 386–387, the low of the June 1 weekly candle, and holding through the week would make a three-week tight. On Nvidia, he said you could argue a weekly breakout failure, since it was back inside the 165–210 range. The 30- and 40-week sit near 191 with a floor at 194, so 192–195 is the spot to add on weakness. Under 185–190, it's probably headed to the low end of the range, maybe with an undercut. He added that if a lot of SMH names start splitting and go into a sideways digestion, Nvidia probably does too. He likes the cooling names. VRT looked great, and VST had been going sideways for about a year and double-bottomed off a trend line. He wants it to reclaim 167 and clear about 175, which puts it back at the highs. His final word: optimism plays a big role, so develop your bias from the largest time frame you follow and zero in from there.
Ben's setups, levels and trades
Ben had been stalking Robinhood and wanted it back in the high 80s or over 100. He didn't trust the gap, but it was at 108, up about 12% on the day, after an Argus upgrade and a sizable insider buy the week before. He added Microsoft shares. It was holding the 200-week, and if it broke the previous week's low, those new shares were out: "you live to ride again." He said the same approach worked on ServiceNow: he trimmed under 125 and added back lower. On liquidity, he said it's not just SpaceX. Anduril, Anthropic, OpenAI and Discord are all coming, and the money for them has to come from somewhere, maybe crypto or the printer, which feeds his devaluation view. He pointed out that Google, counting both share classes, is actually the biggest piece of XLC and was holding up better than the rest.
He framed the space names as the future "Dow Jones transports of space": SpaceX and Rocket Lab as the UPS and FedEx, with ASTS somewhere in the mix. His kids' accounts are mostly SPYM and QQQM, which have plenty of volume, plus some SMH, and small pieces of Rivian, SoFi from single-digit buys, and recently ISRG. They also have their own crypto account. He doesn't trade in and out of it. On Nvidia, he didn't think it was broken: it was holding the 50-day on the daily and the 9-week on the weekly, though like Broadcom it was at a make-or-break moment. He noted that Jensen calling Marvell the next trillion-dollar company was a jab at Broadcom's Hock Tan. On Fed day, he watched the 10-year, bonds, the dollar and XLF, which he called "a great indicator on Fed days," as the decision came in unchanged. His final word: "Choose luck." Your mindset shapes how you approach the world.
GP's setups, levels and trades
On Robinhood, GP said taking it at the 99 level had you up 8–9% intraday without chasing. It looked like a stage-one reaccumulation breakout with follow-through, and an upgrade isn't why something moves, pent-up demand is. He clarified that "trash" was about trading, not his P&L: ARM and Dell, two of his largest positions, were near all-time highs. But the market was only working in chips, memory and related names. Lululemon, Nike, Starbucks and Home Depot "suck," and he had some short Lululemon puts that were deep underwater with until January to work out. Meta had been under its 200-day since November, and software was "utter garbage" apart from CrowdStrike, DocuSign and JFrog, while Palantir and Oracle lagged. Nvidia was being used as a piggy bank to buy AMD and Intel "at nosebleed levels." In the 9% drop two weeks earlier, everything got hammered with no relative strength, so non-participating names get crushed on the way down too.
SpaceX briefly being valued above Microsoft and Apple after listing at about $1.75 trillion, on roughly $15 billion a year in revenue, was his example of stupid market mechanics from a low float. He had expected the S&P to push toward 7,800–8,000 into the next week, but they sold Microsoft and Meta all morning, which he blamed on 0DTE options flow rather than organic selling. Monday's gap up had already been filled, and how fast a gap fills tells you whether buyers are supporting the breakout. ASTS looked like a quick double bottom off the 200 SMA, and Rocket Lab was retesting its prior all-time highs. Over three to five months, Rocket Lab had "taken the baton" from ASTS, which is still the alpha that moves 30–40% at a time. XLC looked distributive, with Netflix unable to find a bid. BlackSky ran into its pivot, and OUST was setting up but needed follow-through.
To him, the lost decade applies to commonly held names, not the momentum leaders. Disney looks like one of the biggest head and shoulders on the planet, and Home Depot, Microsoft and Apple haven't done much. Amazon was near 190 back in 2020, and many names topped around August 2020 with SoftBank's call buying. For a baby's 18-year account, he'd pick SPY. A 20-year-old relative asked him about her summer savings, and he suggested 70% QQQs and 30% SPY, dollar-cost averaged into her 60s, plus one or two stocks if she wants. His own modeling showed the QQQs outperforming the S&P since their inception. On Broadcom, he said it looked distributive: a high-volume volatility candle selling out of the breakout zone after it lost its Google exclusivity, so he wouldn't touch it, especially while Nvidia was lagging. He isn't bearish on Nvidia and doesn't see distribution there. He also called Jensen one of the greatest capital allocators of our lifetimes. Distribution takes time, as oil showed over two to three months. Intel's chart, after a 500% move in under a year, still looked gorgeous next to Broadcom's. He holds 8 to 10 positions at most, and expects Netflix to range for about six months, much as it did after its 2012 decline. His final word: balancing patience and participation will get harder as the market matures and gains concentrate, so find what works and "just say no to emos."
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