Chapters
00:00 Intro
03:10 QQQs: Still a Range & an Inverse Head and Shoulders
05:51 Nick: Trading Wide-Range Bars on the SPX
10:44 The Weekly: Week 10, a Three-Week Tight & the 8–12 Week Rule
12:50 Chat Charts: $TEM & Nick's $GILD Starter
17:47 $NTNX: Inverse Head and Shoulders & Backfill Entries
21:57 GP: $DELL vs. the Momo Names
25:40 $IBM: GP's July 300 Calls & the Measured Move
31:55 XBI, $HNGE & a Beetlejuice Market
36:13 $ASTS & $RKLB: Gaps, Wedges & Deep Retraces
41:37 The KOSPI Correlation & $DOCU
46:17 2x ETFs, Crypto & a Tour of Charts
53:16 $RIVN's Offering, $META, $MSFT & monday.com
58:32 Final Words
Market Hours #185 went out live on Tuesday, July 7, with Nick and GP. Ben was out and expected back the next day. The night before, futures had dropped on every U.S. goal in the World Cup match, and the market was still stuck in the balance it had been in since June 2. The QQQs were in week 10 of their range and sitting on the 50-day. While the momo names that ran in April and May were getting hammered, Dell and IBM stood out. Nick walked through how to trade a range bar by bar, GP made the case for leaders setting up at the top of their ranges, and they ended with a tour of chat charts and Rivian's offering.
Nick's setups, levels and trades
Nick said they have the same breakout-or-breakdown conversation in every range, and you shouldn't bank on a breakout until it comes. The QQQs still looked like a small inverse head and shoulders to him. When they took out the low and the 50-day that morning, he thought they might roll hard, but they held, and the mag names looked good. On the SPX, he showed how he treats a wide-range bar like a high-volume candle: extend lines from its high and low and you can see price ping-ponging inside. A reclaimed pivot low gives an easy short-term entry, with a stop under the candle's low and some size peeled off if it pierces the 50% mark. Each gap down to the 50-day that sellers couldn't push lower was another signal stacking up. He said on StockTwits that he doesn't like green Mondays, because they take away the Turnaround Tuesday play.
On the weekly, another chop week would make a three-week tight on the 50-day. After the rip, it looked like a sloppy high tight flag or bull flag. Most consolidations in a short-term trend last 8–12 weeks. If it runs past week 12, price just needs more time to build cause, "that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to zero." A pullback to the .382 would look fantastic and to the .5 would look great for the indexes, even if individual names got obliterated. Losing the low and the longer-term moving averages "sounds miserable."
From the chat, TEM held up without a fifth touch at the lows, which showed relative strength. He'd set alerts at 58 and 63 for a long. On the weekly, it was mid-range in a big IPO base, with entries through 55 and then about 77. He took a starter in Gilead that day, admitting he was chasing. He likes the drug names, with IBB and XBI both looking good, and Gilead had drifted into the 200-day and then broken out above it, through the 127.50 pivot and out of a descending channel. He'd be sized to add near 131, wouldn't add under the 200-day and would stop out around 126–127. Moving averages, he said, are guides and references, not hard support. NTNX had an inverse head and shoulders on the weekly, with a right shoulder forming after a three-week tight on the pivot low. He wanted a weekly close above 56 on volume, which gives a roughly 10-point ABCD trade. Snipe a backfill in the low 50s and it stretches to 15–20 points, then keep legging in on wide-range bars and loose pocket pivots.
He agreed IBM looked great, measuring about 100 points off the range width to around 420 conservatively and closer to 500 on a longer view. Whether a name breaks out depends on where the indexes are, though. If the QQQs fail at the top of the range, he doesn't expect IBM to go. He chopped himself out of HNGE, which John had been all over. He doesn't like space right now, but saw a possible trade in ASTS. A wedge drop and pop and a wide-range bar that sliced through the major moving averages could be an igniting candle if the market holds space up. The entries were the reclaim of that candle's low or a breakout through 87. Rocket Lab had taken out its high-volume candle's low and filled the gap, so you'd trade against that low or the 200-day. He wants the 50% of the downtrend reclaimed before he gets bold, and FLY could still offer 18–20. On DocuSign, he showed the high-volume gap candle's range and an intraday entry against the prior day's high or a swing entry through Thursday's high. He'd set an alert at 38 on Figma, wanted Microsoft over 400 so it "just takes this out and keeps soaring," and floated 110–115 as a first target on monday.com. His closing thought: this isn't an environment that rewards aggression, but if you trade tactically, there are trades in both directions.
GP's setups, levels and trades
GP said the market had been in "a massive balance since June 2." The June 5 candle was the one to reclaim. Price gapped above it and sold off, closed above it the day before and sold off again. He wants back-to-back closes above it. The momo leaders of April and May, like ARM and Micron, had been hammered for weeks, as their charts suggested. Dell was the standout, with a major move against those names. It can keep building in a tight range until next earnings, maybe fake a breakdown below the gap, and do what AMD did before its run. That's why he cut ARM a couple of weeks ago. If Dell confirms its $53 billion backlog, he thinks it gets "its SanDisk moment, its Micron moment." It's only doubled in three months, while those names went 4x–9x. His analogy was Nvidia after May 2023: revenue doubled, it popped 30%, then did nothing until December before running another five or six times.
The mega caps had stopped selling but weren't leading. Microsoft wasn't doing much, Tesla "will bring you in and then spit you out," Meta has been in its range forever, Apple was contrarian, Amazon had a "messy, terrible chart," and Nvidia had done nothing for months, though it was the first to reverse higher that day. The other leader he pointed to was IBM. He took the back-to-back hammers, not a setup he usually takes, by buying July 300 calls at $1.80, then sold most of them that day around 15–16 and rolled. A year and a half after January 2025, the second attempt looked ready to go. Measuring from the 219 January breakout low to the 332 high, about 113 points, he gets to roughly 455–460. He argued leaders hit all-time highs before the market breaks out, as Dell did into March 30.
He said XBI was the hottest thing in the market, and HNGE an "animal." He took HNGE on a three-week tight expecting the usual 20–30% shakeout, but it did a fourth week tight and took off without him. He compared the market to the spinning-head scene in Beetlejuice. Tesla crushed deliveries by 20–25% and fell 8.5% before the Fourth. "Relative strength has only mattered in a handful of names." Even if you had relative strength in Meta, you ate 80–90 points. He thought the sellers were getting sloppy and that a lot of this resolves much higher. On Rocket Lab, he said it was way oversold, mean-reverted to the 50 SMA and filled the gap on diminishing volume, so it had actionable pivots against the gap and not much distribution. He didn't like how deep ASTS corrected: a nearly 100% retrace of a breakout means it isn't a breakout anymore, and his red flags go up past the 61.8%. He couldn't understand why the NQ had traded tick-for-tick with the KOSPI, which is about half SK Hynix and Samsung (EWY is the ETF, KORU the 2x), after three months of trading off oil. He blamed the growing pile of derivatives and 2x ETFs, with single-stock futures coming, for "the muddied middle."
His other strong names were DocuSign, which he still thinks ends up looking like AppLovin, crypto's relative strength including Zcash's whipsaw, Wayfair's quarterly supply build and perfect 61% monthly retrace, the banks (Wells Fargo pushing toward all-time highs), Figma turning from relentless selling to leading software, Twilio, and monday.com, whose weekly Bollinger Bands were squeezing for a big move with an island. On Rivian's offering just after a close barely above 20, he said management should have let it reach at least 25. Raising right then signals a company burning cash to survive. His closing thought: it was his mom's birthday. Go get ice cream and tag him with a picture, stay strong, and don't let the outside noise get to you.
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