Below is my weekly video for members of Macke's Retail Roundup.
We're into earnings season. Thank the lord...
For the next few weeks, we'll hopefully learn how these retailers are preparing for a world with(or without) tariffs. Maybe it will give us something to focus on other than the soap opera out of the White House.
These tariff shenanigans really couldn't come at a worse time for retailers—they're doing their holiday season ordering now. And without clarity on tariffs, it's awfully hard to plan ahead.
So I'm looking forward to hearing what these execs have to say. This week we've heard from HAS, CMG, and SKX. I discussed these reports, as well as my Macke Retail Portfolio, in this week's video.
One of the most powerful and reliable signals in market history just triggered today: the Zweig Breadth Thrust.
This indicator is known for its unique ability to spot the start of major bull moves by combining breadth and momentum — showing not just how many stocks are participating, but also how quickly the shift happens.
Here’s how it works:
🔹The setup begins with the 10-day exponential moving average of advancing issues divided by advancing + declining issues on the NYSE falling below 0.40.
🔹Then, within 10 trading days, that same reading must surge above 0.615.
When you see this kind of rapid transition — from washed-out breadth to upside participation — it signals a violent shift in market internals.
Welcome to TheJunior International Hall of Famers.
With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.
This scan is composed of the next 100 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 100 and are thus covered by the International Hall of Famers universe.
Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original International Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.
Let’s dive right in and check out what these future big boys are up to.
This is our Junior International Hall of Famers list:
Click table to enlarge view
And here’s how we arrived at it…
We removed laggards which are down 5% or more relative to the ACWI Ex. U.S. Index $ACWX over the trailing...
There is a real power to always staying open-minded.
We can’t be dogmatic with our approach or our positions on the market. It’s dangerous.
The data is always changing, and we need to be nimble and ready to change with it.
That brings me to the point I’ve been thinking about more than anything lately.
I think it is absolutely imperative that we remain open to the possibility of a v-bottom.
While there is plenty of data that suggests this is more likely to be a prolonged bottoming process… there is also a growing amount of evidence indicating we could rip right back to where we were.
I mean, it’s already happening overseas.
MSCI country indexes like Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan,...
If you missed it live, I reviewed the broad market setup and what the recent "follow-through day" is signaling, if anything.
There is now an increasing chance that the recent lows are going to hold for a meaningful amount of time. This does not mean that volatility is going to rapidly cool any time soon -- so we'll have to continue being tactical.
Additionally, we review three profitable exits and one trade that is really starting to shape up for us at the perfect time.
Check it out here:
Sean McLaughlin | Chief Options Strategist, All Star Charts
Getting our first look at consumer-facing outlooks now that we've gotten through the tedious Banks portion of earnings season.
Notable takeaways:
Hasbro was surprisingly good but it's not really "game on" until Q3 and Q4. Gets 50% of Toys and Games from China but has a reasonably flexible supply chain. Says earnings hit from tariffs will be $60 - $180 million hit to net earnings (LY net was only $385mm). Helped by digital focus.
Pepsi seemed pretty resigned to consumers being too price-conscious to buy snacks.
Chipotle has first negative comps since COVID. Said business fell off in late February and has continued worsening since. More people eating at home (but not buying Pepsi(?)). Fired shots at the entire outlook for QSR by insisting execution is great and the company is taking share.
I’m thrilled to announce that earlier this year I was named Chief Market Strategist of All Star Charts Research.
As many of you know, I have been the full-time Director of Research at All Star Charts for the past 5 years, and have run the entire analyst team during this period.
JC Parets and I together assembled what has turned into one of the greatest teams of traders and analysts on Wall Street.
This team has helped me deliver the daily research and put out all the great analysis and trade ideas that you see here today.
Training our research analysts and watching them grow and develop over the years is one of the things I’m most proud of at ASC. These guys are absolute killers.
We have one of the most talented and deepest teams in the business, and with the support of guys like Alfonso, Sean, and Louis, I am confident that we’re...
Tesla's latest earnings report delivered a double disappointment, with revenue and profits falling short of expectations.
Revenue declined by 9% year-over-year to $19.3B, and operating income plummeted 66% to $400M.
Automotive revenue dropped 21%, which caused the company to pull back on its 2025 growth forecast.
Despite these setbacks, Tesla's stock surged nearly 9% to an intraday high of $259.45.
This rally was fueled by CEO Elon Musk's announcement to reduce his involvement with the White House's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and refocus on Tesla.
Investors were also encouraged by updates on the company's progress in autonomous driving and robotics, including the upcoming launch of a robotaxi service and affordable vehicle models.
While the market remains cautious due to ongoing challenges like tariffs and brand perception issues, Musk's renewed commitment to Tesla and its innovation pipeline has boosted the stock price.
So what else did we learn from yesterday's earnings reactions? Let’s dive into the details.
Here are the latest earnings reports from the S&P 500 👇 ...
The percentage of stocks in the S&P 500, S&P 400, and S&P 600 with their 50-day moving average above their 200-day moving average have declined to levels not seen since the 2022 market downturn.
Here’s the chart:
Let's break down what the chart shows:
The black line in the top panel shows the price of the S&P 500 index.
The blue line in the bottom panel represents the percentage of S&P 500 stocks with a 50-day moving average greater than their 200-day moving average.
The gray line in the bottom panel represents the percentage of S&P 400 stocks with a 50-day moving average greater than their 200-day moving average.
The red line in the bottom panel represents the percentage of S&P 600 stocks with a 50-day moving average greater than their 200-day moving average.
The Takeaway: When we look beneath the surface, it's evident that most stocks are in downtrends.
Only 38% of S&P 500 stocks are experiencing uptrends, while just 29%...
The market feels like a rollercoaster these days — volatile, messy, just trying to find its footing.
Headline-driven rallies and big swings in both directions is now the norm, and there’s no sign this will stop any time soon.
But things are getting interesting as major levels in the S&P 500 $SPY are coming back into play.
The bulls came out this week. Let’s zoom in.
We’ve got the VWAP from the all-time highs and the VWAP from the April lows converging into a tight range. This is what our friend Brian Shannon calls a “VWAP pinch.”
This kind of compression often signals a buildup of...
Dividend Aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to long-term-minded shareholders.
As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.
Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That's why we're turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we're curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for five to nine years.
We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are "stocks that pay you to make money." Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.
We talk to a lot of traders. Not just on this podcast, but across everything we do. And one thing that is common to most of them is some level of stress which must be routinely navigated. And it’s often a real struggle. Many of them are emotionally damaged and scarred by it.
In fact, many of our conversations get into discussions about how to best navigate ourselves out of these negative spirals.
“I don’t need to kill it right now. I need to make sure I’m around for the next cycle that is favorable to my trading style.”
According to Anthony Crudele, most traders struggle because they are too short-sighted. He believes most successful traders think longer term—not about time frames but about how each trade, day, or week fits into the bigger picture of what the trader is looking to accomplish.
From an early age, David Hale had hustle in his DNA. At just 10 years old, he was sneaking into casinos to play slot machines. By 11, he was betting on horse races. And before long, he was hunting for arbitrage opportunities in baseball card values. Inspired by his bargain-hunting mother, David developed a “value-player” mindset that would eventually spark a deep fascination with trading the markets.
It’s hard to believe Denise Shull is a product of parents and grandparents who believed in “buy and hold” and wouldn’t even know how to sell a share of stock if asked to.
Today, Denise is well known as a Performance Coach to big Wall Street traders, specializing in modern psychoanalysis.
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
There’s a profound simplicity that can only be reached by working through complexity. It means that deep understanding is often simple, but achieving it requires grappling with and overcoming complexity.
Jason Leavitt believes this wholeheartedly. And this was his path.
When he first got involved in trading, everything seemed simple: buy low, sell high, make money.
Reinventing your career after 20 years is no small feat. Now, imagine trying to do that by becoming an active trader. That’s exactly what Andrew Moss is doing—but he isn’t going in blind.
Andrew’s fascination with the markets began as a teenager when his father introduced him to point-and-figure charts. From there, he pursued a career in brokerage and wealth management at a major Wall Street firm, gaining deep insight into the industry.
“We all have to follow our own path,” Andrew reflects.
Matt Kenah is Building Positive Momentum Every Day.
If we only learn one thing from Matt Kenah, I hope it would be this: “The only goal we should have every day is to live to fight another one.”
Matt has lived this ethos and he has been repeatedly put to the test. And passed.
Starting out on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading floor as a runner just out of high school, Matt quickly rose the ranks to Arb Clerk and was earning great money as a young man in his early twenties.
To say Andrew Menaker took an unusual path to Wall Street would be a severe understatement.
While negotiating with an armed bank robber to de-escalate the situation and ensure the safety of customers and bank employees, he had to let Wells Fargo know he wouldn’t be making it to his first interview that day and, therefore, would have to pass on an opportunity to work with the firm.
Among the many things that stood out during our conversation with David Lundgren, it was this quote: “I want to find a way to listen, and learn, and get a little bit better every day.”
This is a mindset that every trader, every human, can benefit from.
In his early days, David described himself as a “systematic researcher.” This process of discovery held sway for him, and when striking out on his own, he employed the same systematic philosophy to portfolio management and trend-following trading.
For Wall Street veteran Jared Dillian, getting away from Wall Street might have been the best thing he ever did for himself.
Now living in South Carolina, he can’t be further removed from the lifestyle of your typical Wall Streeter. And he’d have it no other way, as he’s convinced Wall Street took at least 10 years off of his life expectancy.
As Jared says, his stress levels are now “basically zero.”
Milton Marmanides does the hard work that traders don’t have the time to do. He sifts through the firehose of headlines, news releases, data points, and social media to cut through the noise and deliver only the market-moving information active traders need to make smarter decisions.
And in his nearly 25 years in the business, first as a trader, and now as a market data provider, he’s seen a lot.
They are only losses if we don’t learn something from the experience.
When traders woke up on Monday, August 5th to the VIX at 65 and the Nasdaq index down 5% overnight, they didn’t need a cup of coffee to snap into high alert.
The easy first question to ask was: “What happened?”
If there’s one thing Anne-Marie Baiynd learned after making the transition from a business owner to a trader, it’s that she’s no longer in charge.
The market, unlike her employees, doesn’t do what she asks it to do.
She needed to learn to give up control. And it wasn’t easy.
In fact, it was so hard that she almost lost all of the hard-earned money she had salted away from years of successfully running her business. To say this would be stressful for a family and a marriage would be an understatement.
It wasn’t until Nik’s father suggested he get involved in High School Wrestling that he began to learn what drives him: Discipline, Regimen, and Humility.
For the first time in his life, wrestling gave Nik recognition. He liked it and knew the only way to maintain it was to go all-in.
From high school and into college at the University of Minnesota, wrestling taught Nik how to become the man who would soon enter the ring of Mixed Martial Arts and the UFC tour circuit.
When Michael Nauss first sat down at a trading desk, his computer had a keyboard and a screen. But no mouse.
And his screen displayed an order book. But no charts.
Thus began his career as a scalper working the order book, who paid no attention at all to trends or technical analysis. He was simply trying to find spots to buy ahead of large buyers and flip the position out for a quick couple of ticks. Do this a couple hundred times per trading session and perhaps he’d have a successful day.
When you are chasing a wave, you can’t be anywhere else. You have to be present.
Similarly, you can’t be anywhere else when you are chasing trends. You have to be present.
Ian has worked hard to create the right mental and physical environments to increase his odds of presence. The places he’s lived would surely inspire envy in anyone who cherishes beautiful natural surroundings and ocean breezes: San Francisco, Hawaii, and the underrated Gulf Coast of Florida.
Ian said it best when we said: “Find what brings you joy, then do it!”
Born with an entrepreneurial spirit and temperament, Michael grew up in a working-class community full of blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth people who worked honest days for an honest wage. And it rubbed off on him. How could it not?
In order not to be a financial burden on his family, he knew he needed to get out there and hustle. He shoveled snow, mowed lawns, caddied, and worked as a server and waiter. He worked 15 hours a week while in college so that he could earn a degree from Columbia University.
Flying down a mountainside on two skis while negotiating tight turns and ever-changing microclimates would be a terrible time to lose focus.
Todd Gordon knows this. If he hadn’t quickly learned this skill in his journey to competitive ski racing, he would’ve likely landed himself onto a stretcher and an air-lift back to base.
There was no other choice.
But for Todd, he’d have it no other way. From a young age, when he found an interest in something – whether skiing or finance – he’d go all in. Nothing else mattered.
Heading into the COVID-19 pandemic, Caleb Franzen was working a corporate banking job that felt like a dead end. “It felt like I was just being moved around from one boiling pot of water to the next.”
Additionally, he had traded during college and what worked in the market didn’t jive with what he had learned in college. “Never once did I use anything in my banking job that I learned in college.”
As a Trader with zero to negative correlation to traditional assets, managing money on behalf of institutional investors is exactly where Jason Shapiro is supposed to be.
But if you were to ask him, he’d tell you he probably should’ve been a lawyer. And anyone else who comes to him asking about how to break into the world of full-time trading will likely get admonished with: “Go to Law School instead. Become a lawyer, then trade on the side with the money you make.”
We've all been there. Think about the time you first got interested in trading. It was exciting thinking about all the potential money we could make. But then we were quickly overwhelmed with the reality of all the things we didn't know. Former aspiring traders never made it past this moment. The mountain they had to climb just looked too daunting. When Jason Krutzky left the road after spending years touring with a rock band through North America and Europe, he decided he wanted to try his hand at full-time trading.
If there’s one thing Brian Lund learned about himself over the past 30 years in the markets, he must write. Without a doubt, without even thinking about it, he knows that to express himself and to complete his thoughts into productive trading, he needs to sit down and start writing. And this makes sense. We hear this a lot from our smart friends. Barry Ritholtz once wrote: “I write to find out what I’m thinking.”