Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:25 QQQs Rip Off the Fed Low
06:07 Predatory Dailies, Bullish Weeklies
08:07 The Wall of Worry
11:41 SPX 7741 and the 10,400 Scenario
15:16 Why Breakouts Fail: $TSLA & Options Flow
20:57 Trading the Open & the Iran Catalyst
25:37 Ben's New Longs: $SNDK & $BE
27:09 Software: $FTNT, $IGV & $ORCL
33:24 $RKLB's FOMC Tell & $NVDA
36:29 $AMD, $INTC, $ARM & Cup-and-Handles
44:18 $SMCI: "The Chosen One"
49:58 Jensen vs. Elon
52:34 Picks for Next Week & Wrap-Up
Ben, Nick and GP were back on Thursday, September 24, for Market Hours #208, the day after the QQQs ripped off their post-Fed low. They're on week 21 of the range, so the big question was why breakouts keep failing. GP called the daily charts "predatory" while the weeklies look great. They also covered the wall of worry, the SPX at 7741 and the 10,400 scenario, options flow running intraday price, software setups, Rocket Lab's FOMC tell, and Super Micro as "the chosen one."
Nick's setups, levels and trades
Nick's read on the QQQs was that they ripped off the Fed low with price action very similar to the July capitulation low: they gapped it up and ran it into highs. He'd expected Tuesday to look more like Wednesday. When Wednesday took out the prior candle low, Cookie's rule came to mind — once that low goes, the 10-day is in play — and it played out perfectly. The ES looks a little uglier than the NQ, he said, but both held where they needed to save the look of the chart. FinTwit is busy with breadth and the number of stocks under their 200-day, but what's acting well is acting well. The market feels suppressed to him, like it wants to explode but can't. With the Fed, the midterms and a lot of uncertainty, a little consolidation before ripping highs wouldn't be a bad look. "We're on week 21 of the freaking range," and still technically range-bound.
He pushed back a little on GP's "predatory." If you take a top-down approach and stay aligned with your monthly and weekly charts, he'd call the market very choppy and tactical instead. (He reminded newer traders that a weekly chart means each bar is one week, not a squeezed-in view of daily bars.) Intraday, he said the action reminds him of 2006–09. If you're good at identifying levels, trading the open can be close to easy money: fade gap-ups and buy gap-downs against specific levels. His example was a Tesla level around 376, drawn from the high-volume candles on Monday's gap-up. He also called the first hour "amateur hour" for newer day traders. On the morning's rip, he'd put money on Iran headlines being the catalyst. If the Iran situation, and oil and energy with it, is what's driving the market, he doesn't think it has reached its apex moment yet.
Software is where he sees setups that look really good. The HACK trade keeps working, with CrowdStrike blowing him away. Palo Alto and FTNT look nearly identical and ready to go on the daily, and RBRK is hanging out at highs with a new all-time high. The IGV is wedging and riding the 20-day while the 50-day catches up, though the 200-day still needs to curl up. Okta has run, Veeva looks good, and CRM is sitting at the low end of its gap-and-go candle. The entry against the low of that candle was spot-on, but he isn't sure he'd hop in now. JFrog looks good too. Intel looks good as well, and he posted it in the chat.
On Nvidia, he isn't worried: it looks great to him. He thinks of it more as a stock you ride than one you trade, because it's so thick. On the weekly it stair-steps up through huge bases, so if you want percentage gains, trade the other semis. On SMCI, he and John talked it up on the Friday show. A typical bear would call it a descending triangle, but it went three weeks tight, and the long-term moving averages have converged and are curling up. It held the 0.382 of the bounce from 24 to 42, and he thinks it could run alongside HPE. You could also just call it a massive stage-one base between about 25 and 50.
His picks for the next week: he likes the setup in INFQ in quantum, and IREN, though it needs to crank above about 49.50 to really catch his interest. Palo Alto still looks phenomenal after its breakout candle, even without follow-through yet. Crypto continues to look phenomenal to him too, Zcash especially. His last words echoed GP: less is more, take the singles when you get them, and focus on risk.
Ben's setups, levels and trades
Ben came in liking what he saw. On the weekly QQQs, if the week closed where it was trading, it would be a weekly all-time high that had just pushed off the 9-week EMA — "convince me that's not bullish." Before the break, he'd said late September and early October would be messy, and that's still his base case. But after 21 weeks of chop and a market right back near all-time highs, he's asking himself, "what if I've got it wrong? What if it's upside down?" — strong into the election, then a turn lower after. He's open to that, and he thinks all of this ultimately resolves higher: "nothing right now has me clutching my pearls."
On trades, he cut Tempus AI that morning after a nice run from around the 75 level. He then got "gifted" entries in SanDisk and Bloom Energy, which top the multiple-expansion screener he's been posting, and he says both still look ripe. He likes Oracle in the ugly-duckling way. He added a bit more the day before near the low. On the weekly, it failed the 50-week three weeks ago, and he could still see it coming into a box around 129–130, where he'd expect it to get bought for at least another run back toward 170.
He wondered whether Nvidia backing Intel at that size was the bigger surprise than the federal money — Jensen as the "chief allocator." He also asked whether Jensen could eventually catch Elon in wealth through all of Nvidia's investments. He was "all in" on Super Micro by the end of that segment, half joking, and said he's also expecting a 5% down day at some point to make them all eat crow. He gave a playful "little bird" nod to VICR and the call made on it at last year's Stocktoberfest. His closing adds were Credo, which he bought recently, and Broadcom, which is on his buy list. Most crypto names look great, but his positions are already there, and he likes to anticipate where the puck is going. He can't make Stocktoberfest this year because of family plans.
GP's setups, levels and trades
GP stays bullish on the larger timeframe, but says the dailies are as predatory as you can imagine. His example was Meta: a push higher on Friday's OPEX for no reason, a bearish engulfing candle, then a 12% up day on Monday — "they're in the process of making sure you do not participate at all." The weekly, by contrast, is amazing. Counterintuitively, he thinks the fact that the market didn't go to all-time highs and then reject is the most bullish thing imaginable. In 2026 it has done exactly that before: the S&P took out all-time highs on August 4, then got destroyed for a month and a half until FOMC.
He ran through the wall of worry. Rates are running, oil is going nuts, the Russia–Ukraine war is heating up, there's the CapEx and circular-financing debate and Oracle's data-center news, Burry keeps adding to his shorts, TLT is at all-time-low prices with no bid, breadth is "the worst in history," and the McClellan is still in the negative 120s. Yet the market sits at or near all-time highs, and outside of AMD and Dell, he challenged anyone to name another all-time high. He thinks the market is ready for a rip at some point, whether the trigger is the wars ending, the elections or the calendar flip.
On the SPX, he's sitting right at the 161.8% extension, the 7741 level he talked about in February 2023, and it has been rejecting there for six to seven weeks. He'd expected a tag and a breakdown; instead it's building there, much as gold and silver did before their moves. Silver went from its 161.8% to its 261.8% extension in about five weeks off a 47-year base. If the S&P does something similar, he sees it going to the 261.8% extension — around 10,400 — into or around the elections. In that case, "not financial advice," he'd be trimming hard, moving into cash and waiting out the storm, with a "sell, do not buy" note on his TV. That isn't the scenario he wants; he'd rather the market go up to the right in a healthy way, but he doesn't think that's in the cards in this window.
Why breakouts fail: he pulled up Tesla's 5-minute chart from the day before. It was on the verge of breaking out on decent volume near 386, then dropped 7 points in a single candle. His explanation was options flow and heavy naked option selling, with not enough organic buying. Meta's intraday chart, he said, lines up with the options flow; every breakout attempt met size selling calls or buying puts until the day they stopped. "The market is becoming a derivatives market, not an equities market." He circled the same tightening on Meta that he sees in several other charts. With the VIX at 15, he said, two- and three-percent moves on a single 5-minute candle aren't normal. Less is more, and if you're on the daily you have to be fast. "Assume the range" until there's sustainable action, because right now it's shorts covering.
On Oracle's force-majeure headline, he said he loves the narrative. Larry Ellison has survived everything from the savings-and-loan crisis to 9/11 and the GFC, and the idea that a data-center clause will be his downfall doesn't make sense to him. "Breakouts aren't working, so you might as well take the false breakdowns." His tell for the FOMC run, which he said he capitalized on, was Rocket Lab. It was green back-to-back days into FOMC while oil, rates and the dollar were all pushing higher — everything that would hurt its business — and it was green again that day. In a true risk-off environment, he said, not many things would show that kind of strength consistently. Nvidia, meanwhile, "can't find a buyer": one of the greatest moves of the last decade, and the worst trader of the bunch — "Apple 2.0." Still, he can't worry about it, because Jensen sees the market in a way none of them can. He added that Nvidia trades well if you know the pattern, since its spreads are tight and the volume is deep.
He reminded the chat that they outlined AMD's 76.48 low and the long thesis while people asked why he was buying, and that he was pounding the table on Intel at 24 because of the volume coming in. Of the two stocks he bought back in March, he's only holding Dell. He sold ARM at 370, and while he doesn't think the valuation justifies a lot of the price, he likes the setup. On patterns, he said a true cup and handle is a short-term consolidation inside a long uptrend, ideally with a handle that holds the top third or 0.382 of the cup. Once it retraces 61–78%, that thesis is broken and you're talking about a new uptrend.
On SMCI, he said the earlier cup and handle broke out, topped around the S&P inclusion and fraud headlines, came back to the breakout, and is now building the volume profile it never built — the way Wayfair did over about three years. If that supply zone breaks, it's a massive failure. If it holds, the move higher has institutional support. A random news candle down toward 36 that holds would be a zone to add. Otherwise he'd rather take the breakout above roughly 42.30–42.50, if it holds. He thinks SMCI could be past all-time highs by next year. To him the fraud story is past tense, like Bitcoin at 15K during the FTX bankruptcy, when the bad actors had been removed. He also noted it's another name Jensen has money in. On Jensen versus Elon, he said no: diversification isn't how you build wealth, and Nvidia's own share price would have to get past 228.
His picks: he can't bring himself to buy Affirm even though he likes the look. He is building DoorDash ($DASH) on the monthly, not expecting a move soon, but hoping it looks like Dell next year. It's non-AI, so it spreads his risk. He's still banging the Wayfair drum, which he called itching for a catalyst. Like Carvana, Wayfair's management "understood the task" when the Fed walked away from free money in 2022, and it was one of the first in its group to go profitable. He finished by plugging Stocktoberfest, October 5–7, where he and Nick will be and where he'll be speaking on a panel. "The market is building, and in the process we must build as well."
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