Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:20 Welcome Jeff McDowell (@synaptric) & the Road to the CMT
03:51 Nick's SPX "IPO Base" Post & Jeff's Four-Panel Clouds
05:55 Elliott Wave 101: Subjective by Design
08:28 The Ichimoku Cloud as a Wave Guide
10:36 Why Jeff Says Wave Three, Not Wave Five
15:12 Wave Three of a Wave Three of a Wave Three
23:56 Jeff's Daily Screen: $BROS Above the Cloud
34:06 GP: Mags Up, Memory Down & a Trash July
38:12 $NVDA, Chips & a Bifurcated Market
45:59 Nick: Manage Losers, the SPY Bear Trap & the QQQs
50:38 Trading in Thirds, Ego & Consistent Size
55:47 Mental Capital, Chess & Outsourced Watch Lists
1:03:04 Final Words
Market Hours #188 went out live on Wednesday, July 15, with Ben, Nick and GP and a guest, Jeff McDowell (@synaptric), a CMT charterholder and longtime member of the show's chat. It started with a weekend post of Nick's that treated the S&P 500 since inception as one giant IPO base. Nick read it as wave five, and Jeff replied that he thinks it's still wave three. So the first half hour was an Elliott Wave and Ichimoku Cloud walkthrough. After that it was OPEX-week chop: mega caps were catching a bid while memory got hit, Nvidia was stuck sideways, and the conversation turned to sizing, ego and mental capital.
Jeff's setups, levels and charts
Jeff came to markets through engineering and cost analysis, which he described as quantitative work about estimating and accommodating uncertainty. He later took the CMT program. He opened with a weekly Ichimoku four-panel of large caps (the QQQs and SPY) against small caps (the S&P 600 and Russell). All four confirm a long-term uptrend. But for eight or nine weeks the large caps had been clustering, while small caps made new highs and then had a "run-of-the-mill pullback," so he found the small caps more interesting.
His first point about Elliott Wave was that it's subjective. Show 10 people a chart and ask for a golden cross and you'll get one answer; ask them to label the waves and you might get 20 or 30. He looks for confluence with other tools, mainly the Ichimoku Cloud and oscillators. On a monthly chart from the Great Depression to 2000, he labeled a classic five-wave supercycle, with the ABC pullback as the lost decade. In his count, the cycle since 2010 is still in its first wave.
On the weekly, he labeled waves one through five from 2010 to the pandemic low, ending in an expanding triangle. The pandemic stimulus run became a new wave one and the tightening selloff below the cloud became wave two. The tariff low is where he parts ways with a wave-five count. A wave four can't penetrate the end of wave one, and while the Liberation Day low touched that level, it didn't stay below it and never meaningfully broke the cloud. So he's "just not ready to say" that was wave four. On the daily, he called this year's action an ABC that completed wave two, and the 30-minute chart showed five subwaves into June followed by a pullback. His conclusion: "We're sort of in a wave three of a wave three of a wave three," which is bullish. Wave three is usually described as the steepest, and wave five is often a blow-off. He didn't put a terminal value on it.
His daily screen, shown on Dutch Bros, has a 5-minute chart with VWAP, a 30-minute chart with a 5-day (65-bar) average, a daily chart with oscillators, an envelope channel and stop-and-reverse, and a weekly chart with the cloud. "Good things happen above the cloud and bad things happen below the cloud." BROS was riding the top of its weekly cloud, but the PPO had crossed down, it was struggling with the 5-day on the 30-minute and couldn't hold VWAP on the day, so it wasn't interesting yet. He likes it as a story: a regional brand with national aspirations. He avoids shorts and options because he "can't stomach the time decay," and usually holds for weeks or months. Entries come from the daily and 30-minute charts, sometimes timed with intraday VWAP, never from the weekly alone.
For finding names, he runs StockCharts.com screens: a multi-scan bullish list, a pullback scan of what's been on that list for a week, and a turnaround scan for names coming off the bottom or printing hammer candles. Fundamentals come in as part of the "compelling story" rather than as scan criteria, since for a pre-revenue company like Joby Aviation "most of the usual metrics aren't going to make any sense." On the market, he said the chop between the different parts of the AI trade gives no directional confidence. Heavy money moving into the largest caps while others fall looks like a flight to safety. If rates have a tail, small caps with big borrowing needs could benefit, and they'd been green almost all day. On sizing, he likes thirds: have an "aspirational position size," take a third at a time, and sell a third of a big winner if it helps you sleep. On mental capital, he borrowed from chess: when you see a good move, sit on your hands, think through the threats to your position, and let your mind run unconstrained until a plan forms. His closing thought: "Keep a clear mind and a clear heart."
Nick's setups, levels and trades
Nick's take on Elliott Wave was the big-picture view. He wouldn't use it intraday because it's subjective, but he likes that it captures human behavior over a 100-year chart, from the Great Depression on. Asked how he handles a market that swings 2% one way and then the other, he said he manages his losers. If a starter moves against him he sells and looks for a better entry, and he leaves his winners alone. That day he dumped MRNA on the spike low, and then the market bounced everything back.
He felt memory and space were at an inflection point, and that shorting extended names like SanDisk was hard given how popular the undercut-and-rally (U&R) entries and bear traps had been. Space was "acting like trash," and he wondered whether he just needed to step back and let the digestion work. SPY had already put in a head and shoulders, tried to snap the neckline and ripped back, which he read as a bear trap and squeeze. SPY was holding up while the QQQs were still mid-range. If they "drop the floor," his plan is to knife-catch the 200-day or buy a U&R on the way back up. His general advice for chop was to match it to your personality: zoom in and day trade with a daily stop, or zoom out with very small size in names showing relative strength. Either way, don't trade your P&L.
He also screens with sales or EPS growth minimums of roughly 5–20% quarter over quarter, and treats social media "like an R&D department." Someone else's fundamental conviction adds a layer to his own technical read. For narrative names like Joby, drones and space, he lets the story grow and waits for the technicals to confirm a breakout from a stage-one base. Jeff summed it up as waiting for the market to agree with you. Nick's final word was about Trading in the Zone. His OG mentor, Larry Pesavento, had him read a chapter every morning before the open to drill in that trading is an odds and probability game.
Ben's setups, levels and trades
Ben hosted and asked most of the questions. He said he's never been an Elliott Waver, though he sees the patterns play out, and that charting is subjective: where he puts a pivot might differ from yours, and your state of mind, optimistic or pessimistic, can shape what you draw. He liked that Jeff uses longer time frames to set a bias and then treats the daily as a fractal of the bigger wave. He noted the weekly BROS chart looks like one giant cup and handle.
On the market, he said Amazon, a name he's talked about for a while, was showing real strength, and Microsoft was "still a dog" but up 3%. His worry was Nvidia. When semis help lead, the trend keeps going higher. If semis stay weak while money rotates into mega caps, he expects more chop. He thought Nvidia was close to a breakout, but it popped its head up the day before and fell right back. With half the month left, he wasn't throwing out July yet, though he expected Nvidia to show more relative strength than being down about 1.5%.
His red flag is ego: once he starts falling in love with a position, he knows he's in the wrong state of mind. His line was "never get high on your own supply." He likes to dumpster dive in hated stocks, but ServiceNow hadn't played out as he'd hoped this year, though he'd been able to repair the position. If a line he draws gets hit on something he wants to own, it's almost an instant buy. He's been wrong plenty of times, but like a poker player he only needs to win more than he loses, and "shooters shoot." The key is admitting when you're wrong and either repairing the position or cutting it. His final word: be grateful and present, because "you miss every shot you don't take."
GP's setups, levels and trades
GP called the market "trash." Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon were all running, but instead of the mags lifting everything, the market was getting hit by cyclical names like Micron and SanDisk, plus Intel. To him, that was a clear change of character. The mags are heavily weighted in the QQQs, but over the last month and a half the rotation into them hadn't produced leadership. The NQ had spent nine days in the same range. Each time it reached the top, around 30,000, a seller knocked it down 500–700 points to the 29,280–29,330 area. He called it probably the weakest July in a long time. Even in 2022 they rallied hard into July, so "all the seasonality bros are dead." It was OPEX week, and the market was saying it's a "show me" story for the mags. He expected that to kick off with Netflix earnings: "trash until earnings."
On Nvidia, he said it had been sideways since around October and this looked like a shake-and-bake before leadership came back. He thought it could clear by the end of the week. Within chips it was already leading, compared with Intel, which was down about 42% from its highs at the day's low, and SanDisk, down about 40%. On Dell, he said it had been leadership and was the last to crack, which he called "as bullish as it comes." What he wants is a market where everything goes up together instead of the dispersion pair trade, which he said started in 2022 and is worse in the summer. He worries about the Q2 leaders if Microsoft, Meta or Google cut spending, since those cyclical names don't get the same multiple. During the Elliott Wave segment, he put the 161.8% extension "about 10,400, 10,300," with the caveat that he knows nothing and Jeff is the boss.
His pro tip on sizing: when you load the boat, expect it to die. When you buy three to seven contracts, expect it to go to the moon. The more conviction he has, the less a trade seems to work, so consistent size is everything. His analogy was the WSOP: with a $10,000 buy-in every year, you have to win about 2% of tournaments to break even, and that math only works if the buy-in never changes. After a hot streak in mid-May, he sized down because he assumed he'd get smoked. His final word: he's gauging interest in a book called "trash trading," and since it was hump day, "go out and do something hump-worthy."
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