This week’s edge: regime breadth deteriorated as Breakdowns rose to 10 and leadership thinned. This is the tape the rules are built for: trim or avoid the broken names until they reclaim, do not chase the falling leaders, and keep engagement to names still holding a defined level.
What this is. Every Sunday we sort the 60 stocks and ETFs we cover into trend regimes and publish the three numbers that decide each trade: entry, invalidation, target. You have them before Monday opens, so the decision is made in advance and in writing rather than in the moment. This is a risk discipline first and a stock-picking service second.
What to expect. When a beaten-down market snaps back hard we will lag the names that gapped off the bottom, because the rules wait for a reclaim. In a bad tape that wait is the whole point. You do not get to skip the drawdown and catch the first bounce with one rule, and anyone selling you a framework that does both is selling hindsight.
How to check us. Every level we publish is marked afterwards, win or lose, in the scorecard at the end of each issue, along with the running record against the S&P. Nothing gets quietly dropped.
If you already know the framework, skip to This Week’s Playbook. If a level does not sit right with you, leave a comment: we read every one, and they shape what gets covered.
Market Conditions
The indexes held their ground this week while the list underneath them thinned. The S&P 500 (SPY) closed at 769.38, Trend-Hold and roughly flat on the week, while the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) at 716.45 is Trend-Hold and roughly flat on the week.
Beneath the surface, regime breadth deteriorated: Breakdowns rose from 8 to 10, Repairs rose from 9 to 12, and Trend-Holds fell from 20 to 19. Regime downgrades outnumbered upgrades 15 to 9, a clear risk-off tilt. The selling concentrated in ASTS -15%, RDW -9%, RBRK -7%, LLY -6% on the downside, while MSFT +6%, ADBE +6%, PALL +5%, META +5% held up against the tape. Fresh damage showed up in ASTS, NVO and RDW, dropping to Breakdown.
Trend-Hold was reclaimed in AAPL, AMZN, BRK.B and NVDA, among others. The Nasdaq-100 reclaimed its trend this week, joining the S&P, which was already there, but the list underneath did not, and the Trend-Hold count still fell.
An index that goes up while its members go down is being carried by a narrowing group of the largest names, which is a weaker signal than it looks on the chart. Engage at defined levels and treat the index reclaim as permission to be patient, not as confirmation that the broad tape has turned.
What Changed From Last Week
Reclaimed Trend-Hold: AAPL, AMZN, BRK.B, NVDA, PALL, PANW, QQQ. In a week of net downgrades this short list is what is holding the index up, which is what narrowing leadership looks like from the inside rather than a bullish tell. The weekly chart still has to hold what the daily just reclaimed.
Up a step from Repair into Transitional: ORCL. Basing turned into an actual recovery attempt.
First repair off the lows: META. A damaged name showing the first sign of basing.
Cooled out of Trend-Hold into Transitional: DG, LLY, OSCR, RBRK, SLV, TSM, XOM. Leaders that lost their trend and now need to re-prove it.
Lost the trend, into Repair: AMAT, ITA, LRCX, SOFI, XRH0.L. Downgraded a full step, treat these as damaged until reclaimed.
Broke down: ASTS, NVO, RDW. Fresh damage, the framework moves these to the avoid list. RDW went from Trend-Hold to Breakdown in a single week, which is a three-regime fall and the sharpest kind of break the framework registers.
How Our Trade Plans Work
Each name is classified into a regime (Trend-Hold, Transitional, Repair or Breakdown) from the 1D EMA stack, cross-checked against the 1W chart, and every level traces back to a specific indicator. T1 is the first profit-take, T2 the structural objective, T3 the stretch target. Regime sets how much risk a name is allowed and when: Trend-Hold earns full risk but only on a pullback to support or a confirmed breakout; Transitional gets half or nothing; Repair gets a starter only after a reclaim; Breakdown gets none until a reclaim confirms.
Two stops, two jobs. The trade stop is the tactical level where a single trade is wrong and you cut it. The regime invalidation is the deeper level where the classification flips and the reason to own the name is gone. One manages risk, the other manages conviction.
Size by risk, not by dollars. Stop distances in this issue run from 1.8% to 36%, so the same dollar amount in two names can mean risking 20 times as much on one as the other. Decide what a single losing trade may cost you, say half a percent of the account, and divide it by the distance from entry to stop. A 1.8% stop carries 20 times the position of a 36% stop for identical risk. The wide-stop names are not off limits; they are simply small.
This update ranks 60 names. You are not meant to trade all of them, or even most of them. Most weeks a handful sit at a level worth acting on and the rest are there so you can check our work.
The Week Ahead
These names in the universe report during the plan week:
Tuesday: PANW
Wednesday: AVGO
Thursday: LULU
Only one of our two calendars had coverage this far out, so these dates are unconfirmed. Check the company before you size into any of them.
Earnings are binary and the framework does not trade into them. If one of these sits at a defined entry, either take it at reduced size or wait for the print and re-read the structure afterwards. A level that was valid on Friday is not wrong after a gap, it is simply no longer the level.
Those matter more than the rest of the list, because you have a live instruction on them this week: AVGO is tagged “Starter on reclaim”, LULU is tagged “Starter on reclaim” and PANW is tagged “Breakout only”. Take the print as the risk event it is, size for it, or stand aside until it is out.
And one that just reported. Last week’s issue flagged NVDA as the plan week’s earnings risk and published it as a breakout above 215.53. That trigger fired on Monday’s opening print, two days before the report, so anyone taking the level as published was long into the binary rather than standing aside from it. The print landed well: NVDA gapped 6.3% on Thursday and ran to 230.47. It then gave most of it back on Friday and closed the week at 217.54, up 0.9% from the trigger. Taking a binary and being right about it paid nine tenths of a percent, which is the honest advertisement for sizing these small.
That matters this week because NVDA is one of the five detailed setups below, and its breakout trigger of 230.47 is exactly Thursday’s post-earnings high, 5.9% above Friday’s close. The level is real, but you are being asked to buy above the top tick of the gap day, and the catalyst that made it is already spent. Note too that NVDA reclaimed its Trend-Hold on that print while the rest of the complex went the other way: AMAT and LRCX both fell into Repair and TSM cooled to Transitional in the same week. The AI trade did not broaden, it narrowed to the one name that reported.
This Week’s Playbook
Start here. Detailed setups for the top names follow; the watchlist covers the rest.
Closest to a defined entry: BRK.B, QQQ, GLD, FTI, NVDA, AMZN and AAPL. QQQ and GLD can be taken on a dip. The rest have no pullback that clears their stop, so their only trigger is on strength above Friday’s close.
Clean leaders, but extended: TGT, PLTR, COPX. Strong trends, but each sits far enough above its 1D EMA20 that the support it would pull back to is also its trade stop, so a dip there is not an entry. That is why these read Breakout only in the table: the only defined trade is on strength, or you wait for the trend to reset and the name to re-qualify.
Most dangerous chase setups: ETHA, MSFT. Overbought leaders; the trend is real but the entry is not, wait for a reset.
Avoid until a reclaim confirms: ASTS, BABA, BIDU, COST, CRWV, NKE, NOC, NVO, RDW, WMT. No long exposure; not every dip is a setup, and cash is the position.
Where the payoff justifies the stop. A wide stop is not a bad setup, it is a small one, but some names are not paying enough to be worth any size at all.
- Not paying for the risk, quarter size or skip: SLV (20% stop for 2% to T1), XRPI (35% stop for 4% to T1), COPX (20% stop for 2% to T1), NFLX (12% stop for 2% to T1)
- No usable room between entry and stop, skip entirely: OSCR (0.6 ATR to its 29.46 trade stop), PINS (0.9 ATR to its 22.65 invalidation), XOVR (1.0 ATR to its 19.94 trade stop), SPY (1.0 ATR to its 748.80 trade stop), XOM (1.0 ATR to its 149.09 invalidation). Measured to whichever stop is nearer, which for some of these is the trade stop rather than the invalidation printed in the table. Entering there puts you at the exit before the trade has moved.
Top 5 Actionable Setups
The highest-conviction names sitting closest to a defined entry, with full detail, levels, and both stops for each. The next tier follows in the Also Actionable table, and the rest of the universe in the full watchlist below it.
