7/30 Recap.

Alright people sending this out a little early. I have a few things to say I’m not writing a full recap today. I hate the timing of it as this is the biggest earnings week of the year but I need to take a few days off. As you know I’ve been dealing with my dad in the hospital since May 30th, we had a small 4 day break where he got to go home in early July when his cancer was in remission but unfortunately we went back a few days later because of complications from the chemo. We’ve been there ever since, something like 56/60 days we’ve been in the hospital. Anyhow, yesterday things took a bad turn when he had an event where he stopped breathing after his dialysis and he has been in the ICU since. This morning they have him sedated and they told us they may need to intubate him soon to help with his breathing. I don’t know how I feel about that because I’ve heard the horror stories but I trust the doctors. I don’t even know what is going on anymore, everyday it seems like there is a new issue and to this point I haven’t missed any time here because of it. The days I’d stay with him overnight, my mother would come switch with me in the morning and I’d go home and get this done. Right now she’s there and she’s pretty broken.I just need to be there full time for a few days with her. She’s old, she’s sad, and I am the only child. I don’t know how this ends but as bad as it looks, I’m always hopeful.

Again I really apologize, I never miss time unless I lose power like the hurricane recently. I really do take my work seriously, I know alot of you depend on this everyday to help in your trading. I couldn’t even be more thankful for you all being here. It’s still crazy to me that thousands of people read this everyday and this is the 11th biggest financial substack, I’m sitting higher up on the rankings than some well known financial publications. Even when I travel I make sure to get my work done before doing anything, you all don’t even know when I’m on vacation because I do not miss a recap for it. So trust me I do not like taking 3 days off, it is a very big deal to me and I hate letting you down. I do promise if I come home at night, I will upload whatever data to the database and I will include a link today that will be open until next monday, but there will be no recaps for a few days.

What I will say regarding earnings this week is you know my positioning, I used June 2026 calls because I wanted to give myself as much time as possible. I also said I wasn’t selling anything until January at least for the hopes of a long term gain, so whatever was going to happen this week, regarding Amazon and Apple, whether good or bad, I wasn’t in any short term positions so while I’d ideally love them to go higher, if they moved lower, unless something materially changed, my thesis wasn’t changing. Tech in general is quite weak now as this rotation countless to unfold and the charts aren’t exactly inspiring confidence. Unless you’re gambling, do not play short term calls, ever. Give yourself time for trades to work. You have names like NVDA that went from 140 to 106 in a month or so. It doesn’t mean NVDA is a bad company, it isn’t even expensive now, but it did get ahead of itself. If you’re holding common, I don’t think any of these 6 big tech names will be lower in 24 months than they are today.

As for the market, look at the SPY below, we’ve discussed this weakness for a long time in here, you can see below that if you just closed up everything when we broke the 21 ema, you would have mostly avoided this mess. Today we’re breaking the 50 day again after rejecting the 8 ema above and this just looks terrible right now. That is all we can, the charts are telling you this is not time to add new longs, and if you’re unwilling to sell your existing longs, you should be selling covered calls or buying puts to protect.

Tech remains the big laggard down big today and it is forming a bear flag right over the 100 day. This is a not great, while I do think the names reporting this week will be fine, the market moves in waves and right nobody wants big tech, the IWM is green again as the NQ is -200. We’ve discussed that coming rotation ad nauseam the last couple weeks so I won’t do it again. The narrative can change with some big guides from the leaders.

Let’s talk about the importance of the 21 ema rule I always discuss one last time, here is CRWD, look back to when the 21 ema first broke. I circled it for you, we didn’t even know about the crisis looming, just pretend you closed at 370 or so just because it was below the 21 ema, 3 sessions later it barely recovered lets say you bought back in there, but the next session it closed below it again so you would have sold again. It has been a disaster since. In any ticker, once you’re below the 21 ema, expect nothing good, it doesn’t matter if its an index, large cap, small cap, it does not matter. The green line below is the 200 day, when CRWD broke that 7 days ago it was a truly never touch this name again until it reclaims the 200. This is where markets are made so much harder than they are by people who don’t get how stocks work. I think I’ve done a great job this year of pointing out every time the SPY moves below the 21 ema and those who listened in April and a few weeks back really avoided the bulk of the pain. Unless its a long term holding you want, you never want to be long anything below the 21 ema, it sounds simple, but it will save you alot of agony.

As for my Amazon position, this chart below looks terrible, I can’t say much, it is below all the short term moving averages but it does still sit well above the 200 day, the green line below. This isn’t the best setup into earnings, but as you know earnings can change everything and the selling now could be overall market weakness than Amazon specific. As you all know I bought those June 2026 170 calls when the stock was 145 or something, they were 28.xx each. So I have all the way until June 2026 for Amazon to be over 198 and that trade is profitable, I’m really not too concerned with what it does on this call assuming it isn’t catastrophic which I don’t see. Alot of you email me asking why I’m so calm and unconcerned and the answer is because I have almost 2 years left on the trade, that’s why I specifically used those leaps, what do you want me to be concerned about? I’m still outperforming the market by alot this year. After earnings I will reassess where they are and go from there.

Here is the link to the database it will be up until next monday.