Wow. This conversation with Trading Psychologist Andrew Menaker covered so much meaningful ground — if you’re a trader who’s serious about leveling up, emotionally and mentally, this one is a must-listen.
Here are just a few of the highlights we explored:
🔹 Intention vs. Expectations – We talked about the subtle but critical difference between trading with intention versus trading with expectation. Intention keeps you grounded in process and presence, while expectations often drag you into attachment, disappointment, and emotional volatility. They may look similar, but they feel very different — and the difference matters.
🔹 Intuition as a Signal – One of the most powerful themes was learning to identify and trust your own intuition. Not as a mystical force, but as a reflection of your accumulated pattern...
Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.
These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.
It has all the big names and more.
It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Click here to check it out.
The Hall of Famers is simple.
We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.
Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.
Here’s this week’s list:
*Click table to enlarge view
We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month.
So, we’re well off the highs in the VIX—but a 30-handle is still considered elevated by historical standards.
Why does that matter?
VIX above 30 typically signals that there’s still plenty of undigested stress and uncertainty swirling around in the markets. It tells us that fear hasn’t fully cleared, and the waters are still too choppy for comfort. Historically, when VIX is at these levels, it’s often during periods of heightened news-driven volatility, unclear macro narratives, or disorderly price action.
And more importantly—for me, at least—it signals that taking anything other than shorter-term trades can be problematic. Swing trades that might normally take weeks to play out can get chopped up or invalidated in hours. Markets at these volatility levels are unforgiving to those who overstay their welcome.
This is the market we have, and we have to trade it as it is, not as we wish it would be.
In today’s Options Jam Session, I cover this in more depth—along with a great teaching moment from two recent trades that moved in opposite directions. Both trades used variations of a calendar/diagonal spread strategy, and the contrasting...
We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.
However, when it comes to this one, it couldn't be any simpler!
With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US stocks.
Welcome to TheJunior Hall of Famers.
This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.
There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That's good enough for us.
In this scan, we look to identify the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn't just end there.
We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.
When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on Technology and Growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online...
Well, now that the bounce feels like it's running out of a little steam, it's time to scan the universe of stocks that have been underperforming and had tepid bounces (at best) during this week's counter-trend rally.
Today's stock is one of the laggards in the semiconductors space.
Last week, I floated a thought: I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon saw an executive order banning short selling coming out of the White House:
Well, it hasn’t happened—at least not in the official, legislative sense. But today my friend Howard Lindzon tweeted something that really hit the nerve I was feeling:
This begs the question: Has Trump essentially implemented a “shadow ban” on short selling, just by threatening to tweet?
Think about it.
We’ve seen this movie before. In 2008, during the depths of the Great Financial Crisis, regulators issued a temporary ban on short selling for 799 financial stocks. It was a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding and restore confidence in the system. But the results were questionable at best. Liquidity dried up. Volatility spiked. And many argued that the move did more harm than good by signaling panic.
Other countries have tried similar moves over the years—especially during periods of extreme stress. France, Italy, Spain, and South Korea all...