I SOLD...

Coming up in today's video, we'll talk about the neverending rally in stocks with the NASDAQ hitting yet again another fresh all-time high. And this follows a pretty promising meetup between the US leadership as well as China's. And basically with a bunch of tech CEOs, Trump, President uh Xi Jinping all meeting and having constructive conversations, one of the big uncertainties of last year has pretty much all turned into what seems to be a promising outlook now. And just remember that China is a massive marketplace and so having all of these tech CEOs present at present as well as a physical meetup between Trump and she this is very promising for stocks and it does make sense that it is continuing to fuel the rally. If the Chinese market opens up more to US China trade that is just more fuel to the fire in regards to what kinds of earnings big corporations in the US can generate. And it's a win-win for China, too. As the AI race continues, uh it does seem like the US continues to be charging ahead on that front. And so, China doesn't want to get left behind. And so, we have this dynamic where US China, they know they need each other. They work best between each other. And there seems to have been an olive branch extension with this latest meetup. It is a big deal. And if we take a look at another promising statistic that came out, retail sales holding up just fine here in the latest month-over-month recording. We can see here a 0. 5% month-over-month retail sales growth versus forecast of 0. 5%. Nothing major here. But what we can see is that there is continued sort of US dominance in regards to a lot of uh global economic activity as well with the US and China relations improving that further supports in my opinion uh strength to the dollar. remember that when we saw this massive drop off in last year's uh you know kind of tariff tantrum a large part of that was the worry that US trade would no longer be center stage but with US and China quite literally shaking hands uh their leaders shaking hands that is we have a promising potential outlook for US trade as well as the massive you know growth we're seeing in the US economy relatively speaking to other economies due to the AI buildout, right? All of the tech trade, you know, all the excitement around um, you know, semiconductors specifically, where is this all happening? It's happening in the US. And this is why the US market is so, you know, treasured right now is you have this whole AI revolution, the tech centralism here happening mostly in the United States, the innovation techcentric spot. And so when you look at this and there are other places like for example South Korea's big on it, China's big on it like there are other tech hubs but in terms of capital markets the US definitely is A1 number one uh in regards to um you know drawing foreign and international uh money. Anyways, I'm pointing that out because that's just another reason why I think the stock market is just in this never-ending meltup. And while I don't think that chasing here is a good idea, you could also poke fun at me perfectly validly and say, "Well, Nick, you were saying that back over here. You were saying the riskreward was not great. " And that's true. But I still stand by that same logic. I don't think the riskreward now looking forward, we can't look backwards. We have to look ahead. I still think that going forward, the rally in stocks uh is very euphoric at this point. Like you've got a lot of excitement building in the tech rally. Um, and I think that for me the riskreward becomes much more attractive if you were to get a couple weeks of pullback. And I don't know what causes that. I'm not calling for that. I'm just thinking, you know, that would be more attractive in my opinion would be buying the pullback rather than chasing the highs. Um, we also have things like the it's not all equal though. I should say that it is really centered around technology because if you take a look at the in Invesco um S& P 500 equal weight, you can see this thing is kind of just hovering at prior all-time highs. Unlike the NASDAQ, which has flown through all-time highs, we have the equal weight, which takes a look at all S& P 500 and allocates, let's just say $1 to each one of them rather than like $9 to Nvidia, right? Or more, right? It puts a big chunk of the uh the value I should say. Actually, I think it's more like $50 if my math is correct. It's like somewhere around 10% of the S& P 500 is Nvidia itself. So, the weighted index of like the S& P 500 is heavily weighting towards the ginormous tech stocks that are doing really, really well. And so, underneath the surface, there's not so much participation. It's still a good rally in terms of we've still got a nice recovery from the April lows. Um, but it's interesting to see that there really is concentration in terms of the gains in your magnificent seven stocks as well as the semiconductor ETF, SMH, this is going to be Nvidia, um, AMD, Qualcomm, all these giant companies that are, you know, racing to the heavens right now given all the excitement around the data center buildout and AI boom. So again, I'm not a hater of the rally by any means, but I do think that uh being prudent, being patient is the better play for my personal approach. As always, these videos are not financial advice. Trading is high risk. I'm just sharing my thoughts and opinions. I do still think that the dollar index looks healthy here. We had a good round of data here recently. Um with the jobs report beating expectations. In fact, we've got a chart for this. Let's pull up our asset scorecard. We can take a closer look at what is going on with the US dollar. And then I want to talk about bonds because I am actually bearish bonds right now. Um so let me take a look at US dollar first which I think fundamentally is painting a decent picture and an improving one recently. So let's take a closer look. Um in terms of retail sales, we did lose a little bit of our bullishness here because this went from a positively impacting score to a neutral one in regards to EdgeFinder scoring matrix because we met expectations. We did not beat expectations in the previous report. um we had beaten expectations which was a bullish factor here. So we are getting a bearish read on economic growth and that's because PMIs both missed their expectations and GDP growth missed its expectation. So this is what's holding back some of the bullishness on edgeinder for the US dollar. But we do have high inflation prints and this is part of the reason why I think dollar um could be stubbornly higher for a little while and that is look at PPI came in at 6% versus 4. 9% expected. So too did the consumer price index and yields are confirming the move. So all of that to say right this category inflation very bullish this category very bearish. So we have some low growth uh or lower than anticipated growth metrics tied with high inflation metrics. And you might hear where I'm going with this. That sounds a little stagflationary. And I think that is worth keeping an eye on. And while the market doesn't seem to care too much right now, uh there's nothing to say that at some point that could start to become the narrative and you do start to get a rollover in stocks as worries about high inflation and slowing growth could come back into the picture. Uh and again, is that a sort of catalyst that could get us a four to 5% pullback? I think so if the market's narrative actually starts paying attention to it. But again, lately the market has just been in euphoria mode around specifically semiconductors. Not everywhere, but really just focused in on the excitement around semiconductor stocks. Um, so turning to gold here as well. Oh, and by the way, if you want to try out the software that I'm showing here, the scorecard is especially useful if you're somebody who tracks fundamentals as well as trying to keep an eye on institutional activity and retail crowd sentiment. The EdgeFinder is exceptional for this. So, if you don't have a copy and you would like to try it out and get access to our free fundamental analysis course that goes with the EdgeFinder, then use the first link in the description down below to sign up for a trial and we'll email you all the information in regards to setting that up. And if you're looking to get funded, then consider checking out our video sponsor today, DNA Funded. DNA Funded is a very well-known uh and brokerbacked uh prop firm in the space. They offer high profit splits. They have up to 600k in simulated capital and basically you can potentially if you meet the criteria and all their terms etc. Uh you can get paid out on what is effectively a simulated or demo account. They're very transparent about this and have been since the beginning. Uh they allow you to trade over 800 different instruments all in the same uh overall uh platform which is really nice. You can trade stocks CFDs and cryptos and currencies and all sorts of different things. And they offer some really competitive pricing. Get 20% off with code A1T20 down below. Do your due diligence to see if this prop firm is correct for your style of trading. So, turning now to gold for a second. Gold, if we go back to our scorecard for just a moment to get a general bias on this

one, it has a mixed bag here because in some ways the fundamentals actually kind of improved recently with the retail sales number coming in line with expectations. Um, and then some of our growth metrics coming in weak. This serves as more of a bullish catalyst for gold. Remember that gold likes chaos slowing economies and money printing going crazy. And where we don't get that is the inflation story, right? The inflation story is the brakes getting pumped hardcore by the Fed. Because if you have this inflation story, it's going to be very difficult for the Fed to cut interest rates meaningfully here. And so if inflation is running hot and the Fed can't cut rates, that really eliminates a part of the bull thesis for gold in my opinion. Meanwhile, however, the technicals still seem to be holding up seasonally. It's a strong period of year for gold. And we also have institutions that are still piling gold longs. So am I willing to bet against gold? M not really. But fundamentally, I lean just slightly more bearish if we were to start to see the technicals break down. So let me explain that further. Let's say that gold starts to actually materially see selling pressure come into it and the technicals start to confirm that little bit of fundamental doubt that I have going on. That's where I might actually start to look for uh possible short side action in the uh short to medium term in regards to gold setups. Now again, I'm not short gold right now. I'm pointing out that if technicals were to break, right, our technical bias is still very bullish. that's contributing a lot of positive score to our overall finding here. If this were to start to work against gold, if institutions were to start sequentially selling gold, right? If you don't have edge edgeinder, then this might be a cool little tutorial here. We can actually go look at our coot data history. And I'm going to select specifically for gold for a second and pull this up for you. And what you can see is the yellow line represents long percentage over time. Institutions have just been piled in gold for quite a long time. However, just notice how generally speaking, this bar chart is declining from left to right, showing open interest is actually on the decline over the last year in gold, which is interesting to me as well. Now, if this line starts to trend lower, then we have a scenario in which I get much more interested in shorting gold. institutions who are currently very long gold start to unwind some of that long positioning and again I'm not predicting that they will do so but if they started to do so I would actually probably look to sell rallies on gold simply because that in combination with my bleak sort of inflation outlook right now as well as um if the technicals were to start to roll over it presents an interesting shortside opportunity in gold. Now I also want to issue that if this stays strong that is a reason to stay bullish gold. Right now the default should be institutions are still sitting in heavy long positions. They still feel confident holding on to gold despite the recent kind of cool off in gold's price. But you have to remember we've covered on this channel if you've been here for a while then um you know comment down below if you know what I'm talking about here. But we have talked about for years institutions have been long in the commitment of traders data for gold and so they're sitting on massive gains. There's tax implications too if you close out of long-term positions that they might hold in the form of ETFs etc. But if we're looking at this right um they might just be sitting happy with their profits and not willing to take stuff off the table at this time. Maybe they think there is more room to run. So, I don't necessarily want to get caught on the short side of what has been a phenomenal rally that could very well continue. But I think that if you want this thing to continue, if you want to see gold materially improve in score, what would we need to see? Well, this fundamental score is what's really holding us back. It's that inflation bias. If, for example, we saw the 2-year yield really start to trend lower, EdgeFinder would mark that as more of a uh positive thing for gold. Remember, rising yields means the Fed's likely to keep interest rates elevated and higher for longer. That is a bearish catalyst for gold. So, we're going to keep a close eye on that as we go into the weeks and months to come. So, again, I think right now I'm still on the sidelines with gold, but I am watching closely because either direction could be feasible. You could see the breakout in gold. uh institutions stay long and let's say inflation data starts to materially improve or that two-year

yield that we just referenced starts to really trend lower which brings me to my next category of conversation today which is going to be of course bonds. I actually have a short position on bonds. Um so far it's off to a not so great start. Uh but we'll see how this plays out. Basically the 10-year yield I think has room to continue to move higher. So if we take a look at this just from a technical perspective, I think that we may be seeing a brief kind of break and retest and a continuation in bond yield uh or bond yields moving higher, especially on the long end, the 10ear, the 20-y year, the 30-year. So why am I thinking that? Well, let me break that side of things down here a little bit and we'll go to our US 10-year Treasury. Of course, we have a scorecard for this one as well. So you can see yesterday it got a bearish reading. Um this is going to be 10-year treasuries. Now remember, bond prices move inversely to bond yields. So bond yields moving higher is thinking bond prices move lower. So I'm I have a short position or a bearish put position uh on TLT. Now of course the jump up here in price not so great right off the bat. I think a good chunk of that is due to a little bit of um you know concern coming out of the bond market due to the uh President Xi and President Trump meetup. Um, but I think that bigger picture, inflation looks sticky and I think that we are likely to see bond prices continue to roll over. But I'm not willing to die on this hill. So, I'm going to keep an eye on it closely. So, if we see the 10-year yield uh really break back down, then I'll need to get out of this these puts that I have on TLT. But what I am looking for is a brief pullback and then a follow-through move as I do think yields can continue to move higher with the stubborn rise in inflation. Remember, rising inflation typically causes yields to move higher as it puts the Fed further into a rate hold or even possibly a rate hike scenario. If we take a look at our economic uh let's go economic data. I'm going to look at inflation. This PPI number was really part of the reason I jumped into this trade. Basically, the idea is the inflation metrics that we have within Edgeinder seem to be just on a nice solid upward trend. that makes me a little bit more partial to stay bullish dollar as well as bullish TLT I'm sorry uh u bearish on things like TLT which is uh a bond ETF. So if I take a look at TLT what is that if you're not familiar it's an iShares 20 plus year treasury bond ETF. So I think that this thing can continue to roll over. I would not be surprised if we do in coming months see a move down to something like 8350 or 81 uh let's call it somewhere in this region. Now again, uh I bought one month out puts on these uh on this uh chart. So if the thing rallies higher, then I'll probably just get called out of the or taken out of the position for a uh a controlled loss. It's nothing drastic, but if we do see a melt lower in bond prices due to the 10-year yield continuing to rise, uh, which I think it can, and I also think that could be a coincidental uh, reasoning for the stock market itself to potentially have a bit of a corrective pullback. Now, I'm telling you this, this is my opinion, not financial advice. I could be dead wrong on all of this, but I am defining my risk because it is a put contract, right? or I bought about 34 put contracts on TLT. I think 31 or 34, I'm blanking on it, but I shared, of course, the trade idea inside of our Discord.

So, here was the trade in full detail. So, you can see it was 34 contracts. I bought them for $1. 22 each. And uh this was, as I mentioned, it was a poolside trade. Now, I had no drinks at this time. I was watching the market open, but I am on vacation right now. So, um maybe if this trade doesn't work out, what I can conveniently do is just call it uh a blunder due to being poolside and not at the desk. Uh but in all seriousness, no. This was actually a plausible trade for me. It might not work out as all trades I take. I'm not expecting I'm not, you know, fully 100% confident of any trade when I take it. It's always a riskreward type thing. And I think that with inflation rising dramatically and I also believe that Kevin Bors could be more hawkish that price action I think could continue to be bearish for things like TLT. So I bought the $85 strike price 18th of June puts. I bought 34 contracts. Uh my max risk on this is somewhere around $4,200 which I know is a lot of money. Uh but relative to my account size is pretty small. So, I am taking a calculated bet that I think bond prices could continue to move lower and we'll see how it plays out. So far, not starting out on the right foot, but we'll see. By the way, if you do want to see every trade that I'm taking, I share all of my forex trades, commodities trades, index trades, and even my journal on what I'm thinking and walking through everything about what I'm doing in my own trading account. If this is something you'd be interested in joining, uh we'll leave information down below in the description to where you can sign up and get a subscriber discount. uh setting up a membership with us inside of the Discord. We also have a free tra trading chat room and if you made it to the very end of today's video, I've got something special for you. Head over to the giveaways section if you join our free Discord and you can enter for a chance to get a free copy of Edgefinder. Be announcing the winner next week. We're giving away two free copies. It is free to join and there's not that many entrance. So, there's a pretty good chance if you enter this that you have a solid potential running to win a free copy of Edgefinder. And even if you don't win, we still have a wonderful free trading chat room now available within our free Discord. All the information can be found in the description down below. And if you made it to the very end of today's video, then I greatly appreciate you watching my stuff. I do these things because number one, it's a business for me, but number two, I genuinely love markets and creating content around them. And I genuinely uh appreciate every single person that watches my videos and I do hope that they are in some way helpful to your own trading career and journey. I know how hard it is. I've done this for the last 10 years. And so if you could do me a big favor, if you have not already, make sure to hit the thumbs up button, comment the word end if you made it, and I'll try and heart your comment and subscribe to the channel if you're new. Thanks so much for watching. Hope that video was helpful to you, and I also wanted to make sure to share our Telegram channel with you. Every day we are posting up chart markups and analysis and in-depth breakdowns of what's going on both fundamentally and technically in the markets. We also drop bonus videos in the telegram channel. So don't miss out. Come join our telegram channel. The link is in the description down below. Have a great rest of your