My initial idea was to make my first post of the year a longer piece covering the current market environment, the overall outlook for 2026, the leading investment theme for the year, and a few other related topics. As I started writing, however, I realized I had much more to say about the market itself, and that section naturally evolved into a post of its own. Now that we’ve clarified my views on the current market environment and the broader picture for the year, let’s m

Late happy new year, everyone. Sorry for the slight delay on this usual New Year post. I caught that stupid flu over Christmas—like probably half of you—which pushed my New Year post into the first week of January. The first week of the year is always particularly hectic for me work-wise, but more on that later. That being said, I didn’t really feel the rush, as the market is currently doing its thing: a low-volatility grind higher, with some good days and some bad ones, but

This week, we have seen a streak of red candles forming under relatively low volatility. Today, after opening in the green, the session turned into the worst day of the series. This naturally raises the question: are we heading back into a full-blown correction, or will Santa soon make us forget these few bad days?

We may be about to re-enter the market. Our Hedge signal has moved back into the safe zone on TradingView, but not yet on our DataHub. Unlike the discrepancies that sometimes occur with our Option Model, this difference is expected because the underlying data is not exactly the same. For those who were with us in May 2024, you may remember that when we first started working on our DataHub, we ran into an issue: the underlying data for our breadth-related signal was simply far

The market didn’t have a good day today. After last week’s strong gap-up driven by impressive earnings from the major AI players, it was inevitable that earnings-related volatility would eventually swing in the opposite direction. Today’s weakness seems to be the result of several overlapping factors: a wave of AI-related layoffs over the past few days, disappointing employment data from Indeed (since we still have no official data due to the government shutdown), concerns

I regret to inform you that this bull market should continue for a little while longer. Yes, I know — valuations across the index (and many of its components) are filthy. If you read my post “Are We in an AI Bubble?” from last year, you’ll remember that one of my arguments back then was that we were not in a bubble — yet. My reasoning was that the “AI reward” was still mostly concentrated among the companies providing the backbone of the revolution. I compared it to Cisco

In our last analysis, we noted that after our Color Signal from the Margin Signal reached a very heated reading of 14 (out of 15), the chances of seeing much upside before at least a consolidation were slim. That is exactly what happened. Since then, we’ve had several consecutive down days, but realized volatility remained extremely well contained throughout this series of red candles, and the result has been modest: only –2.27% from daily close high to intraday low on QQQ, a

Following the minor 3% pullback at the start of August, the stock market timidly climbed back, with a few small hiccups driven by anticipation of upcoming economic news. Most of those reports turned out to be less than encouraging — a weaker jobs report and higher-than-expected inflation — yet the market displayed notable resilience. This aligns with the view we shared in our last update: most of our metrics leaned on the bullish side, which did not support a sharp downside m

The market went through a moderate series of red candles last week. Although price action looked bearish, the options market didn’t confirm the move. Some of our option metrics weakened slightly, but none came close to flipping back to red. The biggest positive surprise came Thursday night, on the eve of Jerome Powell’s speech at Jackson Hole, when the SKEW—which had been holding up stubbornly—finally cooled off by 10 points. That didn’t surprise me. It reflected the lack of

As our Margin Signal’s color indicator surged to a striking 14, we viewed it as a clear opportunity to take profits. While not every market pullback is preceded by a peak in this signal, a peak is almost always followed by some degree of retracement. And indeed, just a few days later, the market dipped in response to weaker-than-expected job creation numbers. The decline was relatively mild: QQQ retraced 3.92% intraday and SPY about 3%. Despite this modest drop, fear retur

In our previous post, we mentioned that the market appeared to be nearing a point of exhaustion. As of today, that call is playing out across several key indicators. This blog post will be brief today as the situation is relatively straight forward and aligned with what we expected. We will then update this post as the story unfolds.

If I had to summarize our previous S&P500 related post in two sentences, I’d say this: the market had climbed rapidly and was due for a brief pause or consolidation—but there were no signs of major overbought conditions. Most of our signals were right in the middle: SKEW had cooled down, market breadth was solid, riskier assets were still leading, and the margin signal sat at a very average level of 7. Following that post, the market indeed moved sideways for about a week

Yesterday, with the 30-day extension to the previous 90-day delay on the “reciprocal tariff” nearing its end, the White House ramped up pressure on a few trading partners by announcing new tariff threats. In this déjà vu moment, the market responded with a moderate sell-off, with SPY closing down -0.75%.

Yesterday our Risk Index officially reached its threshold of 4 — the level where backtesting suggests it’s better to be out of the market. It’s important to distinguish between our Risk Index and our Hedge strategy. The Hedge is specifically built to shield against drawdowns that have a high probability of becoming significant. It may sometimes trigger before a small dip, but more often it activates ahead of larger corrections — like the one we saw earlier this year. This ma

Today, the Hedge strategy finally returned to its green state after one of the longest out-of-market periods in its history. While it deliberately stayed on the sidelines during the initial, highly volatile bounce, it came close to re-entering several times in recent weeks. In this post, I’ll walk through why it remained cautious until now, what triggered today’s buy signal, and what the current landscape suggests going forward.

Some of you have been wondering what we did with our position in MARA during the recent market turmoil. The answer: nothing. As we mentioned when we initially bought MARA around $16, it was a small allocation—but we were in it for the endgame. Our thesis was simple: when it’s time for miners to shine, MARA has a high probability of leading the move, or at least ending up in pole position. From our point of view—and for several reasons discussed here—we believe MARA is best-in

On Friday, the Nasdaq closed in bear territory, and the S&P 500 is now just about 2.5% away from confirming a daily close at that same mark.

After a very short rally following March 13 local Bottom, the market pulled back slightly before rising again in anticipation of Liberation

After a month of delay, today finally marked the beginning of a trade war between the U.S. and its closest economic allies. The stock and...

Today marked the fourth consecutive red candle since the S&P 500 hit a new all-time high last Wednesday.