This week’s edge: regime breadth deteriorated as Breakdowns rose to 23 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 broad tape softened this week. The S&P 500 (SPY) closed at 764.29, Transitional and roughly flat on the week, while the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) at 714.88 is Trend-Hold and roughly flat on the week. Beneath the surface, regime breadth deteriorated: Breakdowns rose from 14 to 23, Repairs rose from 7 to 8, and Trend-Holds fell from 19 to 15. Regime downgrades outnumbered upgrades 23 to 7, a clear risk-off tilt. The selling concentrated in SHOP -11%, BIDU -8%, NVO -8%, RBRK -7% on the downside, while AMD +8%, INTC +7%, FFIV +5%, META +5% held up against the tape. Fresh damage showed up in ADBE, BIDU, CRWV and INTU, among others, dropping to Breakdown. Trend-Hold was reclaimed in AMD, FFIV, INTC and META, among others. That is broader than a rotation: 23 of 60 names now sit in Breakdown and the bucket grew by 9 in a week. It is not yet index-level capitulation, but it is no longer something happening only to the laggards. With trends rolling over, most pullback prices now sit too close to the level that says the idea is wrong, so the triggers that survive are mostly on strength rather than on weakness.
What Changed From Last Week
Reclaimed Trend-Hold: AMD, FFIV, INTC, META, XOM. These reclaimed while the benchmarks did not, so they are isolated pockets of strength rather than the leadership of an advancing tape. A reclaim into a falling market is the easiest kind to give back, and the weekly chart still has to hold what the daily just took.
Up a step from Repair into Transitional: IFX.DE. Basing turned into an actual recovery attempt.
First repair off the lows: AIXA.DE. A damaged name showing the first sign of basing.
Cooled out of Trend-Hold into Transitional: COPX, DG, FTI, NVDA, PLTR, RBRK, SPY, TGT. Leaders that lost their trend and now need to re-prove it.
Lost the trend, into Repair: GLD, LLY, LRCX, RTX, UNH. Treat these as damaged until reclaimed, and note GLD fell two regimes in one week rather than one.
Broke down: ADBE, BIDU, CRWV, INTU, NFLX, NVO, PALL, SHOP, SLV, SOFI. Fresh damage, the framework moves these to the avoid list.
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 0.9% to 39%, so the same dollar amount in two names can mean risking 43 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 0.9% stop carries 43 times the position of a 39% 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
No name in the universe reports during the plan week, so the levels carry without an earnings gap to work around.
This Week’s Playbook
Same four regimes as above, in the order they earn risk. Regime decides how much a name is allowed; the level beside it decides when. Detailed setups for the top names follow, and the watchlist carries every level.
Within each group the names are ordered by how far the entry sits from Friday close, nearest first. That ordering tells you where a decision is likely to be needed this week and nothing more. Across the 364 triggers we have published, those within half an average daily range were reached four times in five, while those more than one and a half ranges away were reached about one time in seven; roughly half of everything we print is never touched at all.
What proximity does not tell you is whether the trade pays, and we would rather say so than let the ordering imply it. Of the 140 near triggers that have filled, the average came back about one percent negative, with fewer than four in ten closing green. We do not yet have enough fills further out to draw any conclusion about them. So read the top of each list as the levels most likely to demand a decision, not as the ones most likely to reward it, and size every one of them off the stop underneath.
Trend-Hold, full risk, but only at a level. On a pullback to support: BRK.B. Only on strength, above the trigger in the table: AMD, AAPL, FFIV, INTC, XOM, META, OSCR, TSM, and 4 more carrying the same instruction in the table below. MSFT, XOVR are also Trend-Hold but do not appear above: their entry sits on top of their own stop, so they are in the skip list below.
Transitional, half size or nothing. The trend is not confirmed, so a position here is a probe rather than a holding. On a pullback, and then only at half size: ORCL, IFX.DE, DG. Only on strength, above the trigger in the table: SPY, AMZN, FTI, NVDA, ASML, PLTR, COPX, TGT, and 3 more carrying the same instruction in the table below.
Repair, a starter only after a reclaim. Basing, not yet trending; nothing until price takes back the trigger printed beside it: AIXA.DE, GLD, LRCX, GOOG, LLY, RTX, AMAT, UNH.
Breakdown, no exposure until a reclaim confirms. Not every dip is a setup, and cash is the position: CRWV, WMT, ADBE, NFLX, SHOP, SLV, INTU, RDW, and 14 more carrying the same instruction in the table below.
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.
- Tight and paying: BRK.B (2% stop for 5% to T1), SPY (1% stop for 2% to T1)
- Not paying for the risk, quarter size or skip: XRPI (35% stop for 3% to T1), TGT (8% stop for 1% to T1), COPX (6% stop for 1% to T1), NBIS (39% stop for 7% to T1)
- No usable room between entry and stop, skip entirely: PLTR (0.9 ATR to its 164.55 invalidation), XOVR (1.0 ATR to its 20.20 trade stop), MSFT (1.0 ATR to its 477.15 trade stop). 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.
Where that leaves your exposure. Of the 59 names we can trade, 4 offer a price you could act on at Friday close (BRK.B, DG, IFX.DE, ORCL). The other 55, 93 percent of the book, need a level that has not arrived: 23 need a trigger to fire, 30 need a reclaim first, and 2 have no usable room between entry and stop. That is not a forecast, it is what the rules produce when most of the universe sits below its own trend, and it means the default position this week is cash. Cash is an allocation here rather than the absence of one: it is the only holding that costs nothing while you wait, and it is what lets you take a level when it finally prints. The S&P regains its trend on a daily close above 765.02, +0.1% from Friday. The Nasdaq-100 still carries its Trend-Hold. Those are the numbers that would put risk back on the table. Until one of them prints, do not manufacture a trade out of a name you like at a price the plan never gave you.
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.
