I know of only one cure for the fear of death. It is not what people want to hear: experience death, and then live again. This is what happened to a mentor of mine.

She was whitewater rafting the Pastaza River in Ecuador. Her boat capsized, and she was swept away by a rip current. She fought at first. But the water swallowed her, slammed her like a ragdoll, and the inevitable became apparent.

While losing consciousness, her experience shifted: a lightness, an expansion, a still silence. A sudden freedom, unchained from societal conventions, expectation, identity.

Then, she woke up at the bottom of the boat. A guide had pulled her from the water and resuscitated her.

Her body survived. But a different part of her—the domineering corporate executive she thought she was—died that day. What remained: the stillness; the lightness; the freedom from all that was revealed to be trivial.

When trading greats talk about the moments that shaped them, I hear this same experience.

Paul Tudor Jones lost over 60% of his clients’ accounts on a single cotton trade. Stan Druckenmiller watched a bet on interest rates implode and was forced to sell a portion of his company. Louis Bacon saw a third of his initial funding evaporate, leaving him mortified.

I used to see stories like this as acts of perseverance. I would reduce their experiences to a motivational footnote: when the greats get knocked down, they get right back up. Doing so trivialized what had occurred.

Their raft capsized. They were thrown into a rip current. The inevitable became apparent: the trader they thought they were was losing consciousness.

Placing those investor letters in the mail. Signing away a portion of the company. Transferring all remaining capital out of the account.

Their bodies went unharmed. But the identities they once held died.

What remained: the trader who had experienced death, and then lived again.

Futures in Focus

Market hesitation persists following the weekly Doji on the Nasdaq that I pointed out last week. That candle appeared just above a multi-point weekly trendline, and as we finished this week inside of last week’s range, the state of uncertainty remains. I am still monitoring for a breakout beyond last week’s boundaries to confirm the direction of the next intermediate trend for equities.

Last week, I noted that Rough Rice reached its 1X measured move target with real momentum. That strength indicated that this could be the beginning of an extended advance. The 2X target is currently projected at approximately 13.945. We maintain our long in the Macro Ops Portfolio.

The established uptrend in Soybean Oil remains healthy, now appearing to be in a period of consolidation following several legs to the upside. On the December contract, a three-week pennant pattern has potentially developed.

Canola displays a similar look.

And Soybean Futures have taken on the form of a Symmetrical Triangle on the July contract.

Featured Forex

Euro / Pound continues to flirt with the neckline of its Head & Shoulders Top. The boundary could not be better defined, and the right shoulder has taken on the look of a Descending Triangle. My only qualm is just how large (in time) this pattern has grown. Applying daily-timeframe trade management to a pattern going on 46 weeks in length can result in being chopped out on volatility that, zooming out, never affects the integrity of the pattern itself.

The potential Double Bottom in Euro / Aussie highlighted last week continues to hold its form. A talented Macro Operator tells me positioning strongly supports this possibility.

And Mexican Peso Futures have formed a Head & Shoulders Continuation. The neckline looks well defined with multiple price pivots.

The Pauses That Refresh

The S&P 500 Equal Weight completed a Cup & Handle Continuation pattern this week.

This has led several individual equities to exhibit similar technical setups. If you decide to trade these names, remember to manage concurrent risk.

Here are the names that caught my attention in this week’s equity screen.

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George Coyle, co-author of the upcoming Market Wizards: The Next Generation, has been making the interview rounds.

Nearly every interviewer asks a version of the same question: what core trading principles do all wizards share?

Coyle’s answer won’t surprise anyone familiar with the iconic series: respect price action, hold winners, cut losses. Find a strategy that aligns with your temperament and lifestyle.

But one interviewer asked a different question: who were the human beings behind the tactics, and what traits did they share as people? Coyle identified six:

Self-awareness: A deep understanding of oneself and what works.

Clear goals: Precise objectives for what they’re trying to achieve.

Unjustified self-belief: Profound persistence, even after significant failures.

Independence: A preference for autonomy over traditional career paths.

Extreme passion: Devotion to trading as a primary reason for being.

Commitment and persistence: Willingness to press on despite the fear of failure.

These aren’t tactical choices. They are ways of being.

Across nearly all performance fields, aspiring players seek ‘how to’s’ of the elite performers, only to end up mimicking surface-level actions.

The doing is seductive because it’s observable. You can see the setups, the entries, the exits. You can backtest it, forward-test it, replicate it.

But the tactics bloom from the traits. The being births the doing.

The being requires you to look inward. To ask: Do I truly know myself? Do I have clear goals? Do I believe in this work even when the evidence says I shouldn’t? Am I willing to walk away from a traditional career path? Does this craft call me forward?

When you study a Market Wizard, be curious about their tactics. Learn their setups.

But do not seek to copy their trades. Seek first to cultivate their traits.

Futures in Focus

The Nasdaq printed a Doji this week, signaling market indecision right above its multi-point weekly trendline. With open skies overhead and a lack of structure below, I expect the direction for the next two-to-three week move depends on which side of this weekly range breaks first. In this scenario, this next phase will either trigger a significant reversal of the recent v-shaped rally or spark an accelerated blow-off move.

Rough Rice met its 1X measured move target this week. Thrusts out of patterns don’t get much stronger than this, suggesting it could be the start of a larger move. We’re long a risk-defined position in the Macro Ops portfolio.

Cocoa Futures hit their 1X target and are retracing to the breakout level. Note Cocoa’s strength relative to Rough Rice. Tony D-L, our resident Vol expert and futures trader, caught much of this move for the MO Portfolio via an early entry last month.

A theme we’ve seen—and played (see: A Real Gusher)—since the turn of the year has been the major trend changes across the commodity complex. Soybean Meal is attempting such a trend change right now.

The December contract had the cleanest boundary, in my view. Price is experiencing volatility as it attempts to breakout from the ~323 level.

Soybean Oil already established its uptrend and is pausing after multiple legs higher.

Canola has a similar look.

Bucking the uptrend is Coffee, which I’ve been highlighting in recent issues. Price closed Friday definitively below prior support on the weekly continuation chart.

Individual contracts show support from last July still in play. For the September contract below, that level sits at 251.50, where I expect more volatility before direction is ultimately decided. Our MO Portfolio is short a risk-defined position in the July contract.

I’m sneaking one currency cross into the futures roundup as it displays price structure very similar to the commodity reversals we’ve seen. Perhaps one of our traditional Macro Operators can provide the economic rationale for going long Euro short Aussie …

The Pauses That Refresh

There’s a mix of equity consolidations ready to break out and others ready to break down in this week’s screen.

Here are the names that caught my attention:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

What does money represent to you?

Complete this sentence with the first three words that appear: “Money is ______ .”

When I ask traders this question, the same qualities surface time and again. They surfaced for me, too.

Money is freedom. Money is choice. Money is security.

Now, name the opposite of each quality you just wrote. Use those words to complete this sentence: “Without money, I am ______ .”

Without money, I am imprisoned. Without money, I am coerced. Without money, I am unsafe.

See what money has stolen from you.

See what you believe must be protected when your account reaches new highs. What you believe is being taken from you when your account draws down.

This perceived theft is what disconnects traders from their process as their account scales.

They are not protecting capital. They are protecting their sense of freedom, their sense of choice, their sense of security—all of which have been projected onto an account balance.

What if you could reclaim these qualities? Not by pretending the money doesn’t matter. But by recognizing the qualities exist independent of the numbers on the screen.

The work is seeing it: you have freedom, you have choice, you are secure—at new highs and in drawdown.

Limit your drawdowns. Compound your returns. Care deeply about the process. But do not trade in pursuit of life’s most precious qualities.

Trade because the craft itself calls you forward.

A Trader’s Journey

Last weekend, a member of the Collective reached out to Alex, our Macro Ops Team Lead, seeking advice on how to cultivate his ability to act more independently as a trader. Alex subsequently shared this inquiry with the broader community:

“Just renewed my subscription … been loving the community and learning from you guys. I’ve been enthusiastically reading and applying what I read as it relates to trading/macro (eg, just today backtested what happens to JPYUSD post MOF/BOJ intervention given the news and whether it makes sense to follow that trade through) but the volume of info and content to consume far outpaces what I can realistically get through and don’t feel like I’ve grown too much as an independent-thinking trader (where I can generate ideas myself without leaning on what you, Brandon, Mike write about) so wanted to ask what you recommend as the best path forward -- do you think it’s a function of time spent reading books and eventually things clicking into place, reading research papers, etc.? what would you attribute to driving better idea generation and trading, and what do you think is the most optimal path forward for someone in my shoes (~6Y working in finance in banking, PE, and now credit with ~1-2Y of trading experience but honestly mostly riding the coattails of you guys and 1-2 others whose work I trust)? appreciate any help. thanks!”

Several members of the Collective stepped up to provide mentorship based on their personal experiences. This exchange highlights the strength of our community and brings to life one of our foundational principles: iron sharpens iron.

In my contribution to the discussion, I aimed to synthesize the initial inquiry and provide a structured framework for the various recommendations offered by the group.

I am including that response below as a real-world application of the concepts explored in the introductory essays of This Infinite Game.

You’re consuming ideas faster than you’re developing your own judgment. That’s normal at this stage (”~1-2Y of trading experience”) and fine as a starting point. But now you need to shift from observer to operator. The path forward isn’t more books or reading (external input). It’s narrowing your focus and building reps in one specific area until you develop proprietary pattern recognition.

Here’s what I’d suggest:

Pick one domain. Not ten. One. Maybe FX interventions. Maybe credit dislocations in a sector you know from PE. Pick one thing where you’re genuinely curious and have some edge from your background. (See: Enabling Constraints)

Let your curiosity lead. Audit your last few months of trading-related work. What work has dropped you into flow state—where you followed a thread for hours with no regard for time? By contrast, what felt like a homework assignment with a looming deadline? Double down on flow state. (See: Trade Where Time Falls Away).

Study it obsessively for 3-6 months. Build a database. Track every instance. Backtest different approaches. Develop your own framework for when it works and when it doesn’t. If you’re more of a price-action trader, you can use my trade log template. If you’re more of a thesis-driven trader you can use a journaling software like Notion.

Trade it in small size. Real money, but small enough to learn without bleeding. The goal isn’t profit yet, it’s judgment. The best you can, tune out all other market commentary. Tune in to the budding intuition that is taking root as you apply your “classroom” study to real-world live markets. You’ll learn more about your own market sense from taking 20 small trades in your domain than from 100 hours of reading what others have to say on those same markets. (See webinar: Your Ears Are Your Enemy)

Share what you’ve learned and ask about topics where you feel blocked. By this point you will have original thoughts on your individual domain, and specific questions as to what you believe is blocking your next stage of growth (much like you shared with Alex, as it happens). Ask questions specific to your study and your experience trading your strategy in small size. This community will route you to excellent, curated resources on those specific topics.

You don’t have to remain in this single domain forever. But for right now, deep expertise in one thing will cultivate your ability to think independently.

Commodity Whiplash

A slew of commodity breakouts saw their advances undone this week when reports hit that the U.S. and Iran were close to a peace agreement. My current commodities ruleset stopped me out of positions in Brent Crude, Soybeans, KC Wheat and Corn for a smattering of tiny wins and tiny losses.

What’s survived? Rough Rice, holding its Ascending Triangle breakout …

… and Cocoa Futures, holding its Ascending Channel breakout.

Fresh breakdowns appeared in Lean Hogs—possibly a Secondary Completion of April’s Head & Shoulders Top …

… and a real surprise based on what I was anticipating in Coffee: a Head & Shoulders Continuation to the downside.

If you recall from earlier issues, I was monitoring the lower boundary of a massive range between ~280 and ~420, scanning for either a reversal pattern at the lows or a continuation pattern after an initial move higher.

Yet the market now appears on the verge of breaking down.

Other markets I’m watching right now include Australian Dollar / New Zealand Dollar, which broke down the Rising Wedge featured in recent issues.

This wedge is small and price is above a rising moving average, so expectations are low.

Euro / British Pound’s Head & Shoulders Top.

Feeder Cattle’s Cup & Handle Continuation.

A multi-point trendline in Robusta Coffee Futures.

The Dollar looking increasingly weak at the mid-point of its range.

And the runaway train that is the Nasdaq …

The above chart is weekly and displays the almost unfathomable potential for further acceleration of the trend with this week’s closing breakout. Grab your popcorn.

The Pauses That Refresh

There are a number of consolidations in equities hovering right at All-Time Highs.

Here are the names that caught my attention:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

To trade is, in part, to navigate discomfort. The ambiguity of selecting trades, the vulnerability of putting on risk, the tension of extended drawdowns.

To grow in trading is to develop one’s capacity for doing so.

So when someone promises to eliminate these for you—completely remove them from your trading experience, for one low fee—you’ve found my favorite screen in finance.

Such engagements are not mentorship. They are marketing. Even at their best, the enrichment flows one way, and the result is dependency.

What, then, distinguishes a true mentor? Start with your own lived experience.

Whether you have traded for a few years or a few decades, you have made contact with many truths of trading: the ambiguity, the vulnerability, the tension; the euphoria, the invincibility, the ephemeral sense of arrival.

Even in the faintest of ways, you already know these textures.

A mentor is someone steadier in the places that have left you off balance. Their contact with the realities of trading is more persistent, more tapped in.

And when you observe them closely, you can see it—not because they claim it, but because you’ve touched that same truth yourself and recognize its depth in another.

Each aspect of trading carries its own truth: market sense, sizing up, adding asset classes, trading under the eyes of risk managers or LPs.

You don’t need someone who has mastered it all. You need someone closer to whichever aspect is blocking your next stage of growth.

And once you find them, watch how they meet you. Do they offer guidance, or do they manage you? When you challenge their ideas, do they defend, or do they open?

Marketers sell dependency. Mentors cultivate your liberation.

High-Flying Commodities

In the April 4th issue, I noted that Light Crude’s “loose” price action lacked the asymmetric risk-to-reward required by my swing-trading playbooks.

While it has since whipped around that same range …

… Brent Crude broke out of the Flag noted in the April 18th issue and is testing March’s swing high. Clearing this resistance targets a 1X measured move of 109.

Energy isn’t the only sector moving; Iran conflict spillovers are aggressively driving agricultural commodities higher.

KC Wheat’s breakout, noted last week, nearly hit its 1X target:

Soybean Oil broke out of a 7-week Running Wedge. As I commented in the Macro Ops Comm Center, I preferred the three upper-boundary pivots on the December contract, but early entry on the nearby July contract was rewarded.

On Friday, the November “new crop” soybean contract broke past the upper resistance level of a seven-week Ascending Triangle pattern.

And the reversal in Corn continues to take shape with price pushing further away from the neckline of a multi-month Head & Shoulders, which is part of a large double bottom formation.

We’re long a number of these commodities in our Macro Ops Portfolio, and have added multiple times this year to our position in the Bloomberg All Commodity ETF (BCI).

Rounding out a look at agricultural commodities, Rough Rice pivoted off of the 11.45 level multiple times since mid-February, forming an Ascending Triangle on the continuation chart. Note that this market is significantly thinner than those previously discussed.

Featured Forex

I’ve been tracking a potential Head & Shoulders Continuation in Yen Futures, specifically the tight coil at the right shoulder. Following a Wednesday breakdown, the Bank of Japan intervened at the neckline to halt the decline. Thursday’s surge then breached the right shoulder high, signaling a possible trend reversal.

This possibility gets much more interesting when zooming out to the weekly.

The BOJ defended a level that was first tested back in 2024. Much like the range in Coffee covered last week, a reversal from this lower boundary would offer plenty of room for a run back to the top of the two-year range.

The US Dollar continues to trade at the midpoint of its established range:

The potential Head & Shoulders Top I’ve featured in the Euro / Pound ended the week right at the neckline:

And the Australian Dollar / New Zealand Dollar has been on a tear and is coiling at highs:

The Pauses That Refresh

Responding to Collective member requests, I’ve added Sector and Industry labels to the upper right of every chart on my active watchlist. This update makes it easier to track names within specific groups or themes.

Here are the stocks that grabbed my attention during this week’s screen:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

Developing traders often see constraints as boxes that limit them. When they watch a trader commit to a single setup, a single timeframe, a single ruleset, they misread what’s happening. They think: “That trader has boxed themselves in.”

But constraints don’t create a box. They create riverbanks.

Your creative energy—the spirit of your trading—moves like water. That spirit flows through the charts you watch, the setups you track, the trade data you collect.

Without banks, that water flattens into a shallow marsh. The potential power within you dissipates rather than builds because it has no direction to its flow. But introduce riverbanks and everything changes. The banks don’t block the water. They channel it.

By narrowing the path, the water gains depth. It gains speed. And suddenly it has the power to move your understanding, your experience, your wisdom forward.

This is what I see when traders make their biggest leaps. Not commitment to trading in general. Commitment to self-imposed enabling constraints.

David Ryan made this leap after blowing up his account early in his career. He audited a year of shallow waters: buying extended stocks, chasing pullbacks, mixing styles. He made a commitment:

“I was so focused. I wasn’t buying pullbacks. I wasn’t buying extended stocks. I was buying exactly right. I didn’t care what the rest of the market looked like. I was buying one setup and one setup only.”

He went on to become a three-time U.S. Investing Champion.

The constraints you choose—if only for a season—become the banks that give your trading depth and force.

Choose your riverbanks. Let them channel the spirit of your trading forward.

Futures in Focus

In last week’s issue, I highlighted Brent Crude flagging after the impulsive move up in energy. This week, it attempted to break out.

We’re long close cousin RBOB Gasoline Futures in the Macro Ops Portfolio.

Let’s see if they follow through next week.

Also attempting to break out this week is KC Wheat. Broadening Patterns are inherently volatile. The boundaries diverge from one another, representing the expanding volatility. This makes it challenging to define an appropriate risk point.

KC Wheat, however, compressed just below the upper boundary. Such pre-breakout conditions make for excellent risk-reward setups as they offer a clean structure to define risk and frame an asymmetric trade.

KC Wheat blasted out of that short price compression on Thursday, but ran into sellers on Friday. Another one to watch for followthrough or lack thereof next week.

Coffee is at an important juncture. Price is reacting to the ~280 level for the third time in nine months. The last test was March’s failed reversal attempt from a 7-week Head & Shoulders Bottom.

Zooming out to the Weekly, the picture becomes more compelling. Coffee could be reversing off the bottom of a massive range between ~280 and ~420.

The ideal setup would be a clean continuation pattern on the daily in the lower half of that range, launching a move back to the upper boundary.

Yen Futures continue to coil, as highlighted last week:

Euro / Pound could be forming a Head & Shoulders Top, with price drifting back to the neckline:

And the Corn Futures Continuation chart is attempting to push away from the neckline of a 54-week Head & Shoulders Bottom pattern (with a cautionary flag for the downward sloping neckline).

The Pauses That Refresh

There are a number of consolidations in equities this week that are building up power just below their All-Time Highs.

Here are the names that caught my attention:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

What is the destination for your trading? Not your goals for this week, this month, this year. What is the vision for it all?

Dr. Brett Steenbarger spent four years at Tudor Investment Corporation and has worked with countless hedge fund managers since. At SMB Capital’s New York trading summit last month, he shared what he’s observed: those who dedicate a percentage of their profits to causes they deeply believe in transform their relationship with market speculation.

They’re inspired to trade well because the profits fund something meaningful. They stay disciplined because the cause matters more than any single position. And they hold better emotional balance because their identity isn’t tethered solely to market swings.

Dr. Steenbarger cites Paul Tudor Jones as an example of this principle: a man trading not for a number on a screen, but for his Robin Hood Foundation. The foundation is the destination that pulls him forward—his vision for his trading.

You don’t need PTJ-level wealth to feel this pull.

My wife and I have a young family and an equally young nest egg. We both care deeply about our local community and the next generation being raised here.

A few times a year, we’ll find ourselves driving through town and spot a commercial space for lease. My wife, an entrepreneur in architectural design, begins painting a picture of what could be created to support the flourishing of the people we care about. I soundboard. We assemble a shortlist of collaborators who could bring the vision to life.

The timing isn’t today. But there’s a real sense that the day will arrive when we have the capacity to move on one of these visions—if not multiple. The trading desk feels different the next morning. My attention is less magnetized to the minutiae: to today’s action, to this week’s performance.

I return to process—one I know will persist indefinitely, and compound until we arrive at the day the resources and timing are no longer ahead of us, but at our feet.

This is all it takes. No philanthropic foundation. No WSJ headline.

Just a destination you truly care about, and can make out clearly enough to feel its pull.

A Rip-Roaring Rally

Two weeks ago, in the April 4, 2026 issue, I featured the “loose” markets of Crude Oil and the Nasdaq, and contrasted them to the “tight” price compression on the Russell. Shortly after, the Russell popped out of that range with our Macro Ops Portfolio positioned long.

Things looked pretty good last week when I wrote I’d be watching what would develop next—potentially a bear-market “Rounding Pattern” or a tight, low-volatility consolidation.

What we got was a hot knife through butter:

In that same April 4 issue, I covered three names that had exhibited notable relative strength in the face of all the turmoil.

Bread Financial Holdings has gone on to meet both its Head & Shoulders Continuation and Symmetrical Triangle 1X targets:

Dell encountered initial selling pressure but pushed into new All-Time Highs:

Brookfield Renewable Partners pulled away from its Cup & Handle Continuation boundary on the daily timeframe, which can act as a launching pattern completing the massive Head & Shoulders Bottom on the weekly timeframe:

Of note: there is a boatload of overhead resistance to the left on the weekly chart:

Futures in Focus

Japanese Yen Futures looked like they were forming a Head & Shoulders Continuation, but volatility is contracting above the neckline. It’s a small pattern with potential to break either direction.

I’ll be watching to see if the upper boundary can clean itself up (I’m not thrilled with boundaries defined more by wicks than closes).

Brent Crude is flagging after the impulsive move up in energy. Brent Crude is a cleaner pattern than Light Crude if looking to play continuation in energy prices. December contract shown here.

I’ve been following the breakout in Cotton since initiating work on my commodities playbook earlier this year. The March break of the Declining Channel on the May contract kicked off a huge rally.

That breakout on the daily coincided with a breakout from a multi-month trendline on the continuation chart.

The Dollar continues its rangebound action between ~96 and ~100. It’s currently smack in the middle of the range. Both boundaries have been tested multiple times.

The ideal scenario for Platinum would have been a low-volatility contraction along the upper boundary of this Falling Wedge. This would have allowed energy to build for a breakout.

Instead, price bled right through the boundary, which tells me this boundary is not significant to market participants and the pattern as I labeled it is likely to morph.

Corn is trying to hold a retest of a multi-month Head & Shoulders Bottom breakout.

Note: Head & Shoulders with necklines slanted in the opposite direction of the breakout are considered weaker than those where the slant of the neckline aligns with the direction of the breakout.

A continuation pattern forming on the daily would be an ideal setup from here.

The Pauses That Refresh

A month ago, many of these same equity setups appeared ready to break out. The conflict in Iran sent them to the opposite sides of their ranges. Now, they are looking back in play.

Here’s what rose to the top of my equity screen this week:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

The best traders I’ve studied share one visible quality: the wilder markets become, the more still they appear.

In an attempt to emulate their external personas, I used to default to emotional detachment when markets came unhinged. It kept me out of trouble. And out of opportunity.

Without attunement to my inner state, the only action I could take was inaction.

This guarded against impulsive trading and protected capital. But it also suffocated perfectly valid trades that fit my playbook: opportunities I had trained for, conceived clearly—and then watched pass from behind the glass of detachment.

The traders I admired weren’t numb. They were spacious.

Numbness flattens the signal along with the noise. Space preserves the signal, and creates just enough distance to keep the impulse from pulling the trigger.

When the temptation to act arrives—to release the excitement, to resolve the unrest—the answer is not to extinguish it. It is to recognize the reactive impulse, and to pause.

In that pause, aligned action becomes clear: does this impulse fit what was conceived in calm? Does it match the trade plan built before the storm?

If yes, the pause is confirmation of the trade.

If no, the pause is the trade.

This is what separates the two traders who appear identical from the outside: both quiet and seemingly unmoved.

One has gone numb.

The other has learned to anchor in stillness without severing the signal.

Around the World

There’s been a strong focus on U.S. equities in recent issues, so this week I took to my full futures universe and grabbed the charts that caught my attention.

Japanese Yen Futures show a potential Head & Shoulders Continuation on the daily:

The Dollar continues its rangebound action between ~96 and ~100. Both boundaries have been tested multiple times. I’d love to see price tighten up against one of the two levels in anticipation of a breakout.

London Cocoa has formed an extremely tight price range between ~2500 and ~2300. Low volatility precedes high volatility …

We’re currently long the American Cocoa contract in the Macro Ops Portfolio.

The scale of this Falling Wedge on Platinum is enormous. So much so I question its tradability. Silver exhibits a similar pattern, but the upper boundary on Platinum looks cleaner to me.

The ideal scenario would be a low-volatility contraction along the upper boundary to allow energy to build for a breakout.

And, of course, there’s the Russell, whose tight price compression along the convergence of the 200EMA and multi-point trendline I featured last week.

I felt the Russell offered the best asymmetric setup of all the indices, allowing for either a conservative stop placement below the entire consolidation, or aggressive stop placement using the low of the last daily bar inside the range.

Russell popped this week, but the move lands it back in a congestion zone. The next 1-2 weeks are key: will we see a bear-market “Rounding Pattern” or tighter, lower-volatility consolidation?

The Pauses That Refresh

Many stocks continue to form clean consolidations. The following names stood out in this week’s screening:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

Markets have reached levels of extreme uncertainty. I can see it in the cascading conditionals on social media. I can feel it in the chat rooms.

As the cone of possibilities widens its jaws, it swallows our footing. Our need to know rushes to the surface. Should I be long here? Hedged? Flat?

There’s a part of you looping on unknowable outcomes. Minute after minute, day after day. Inhaling the headlines, refreshing the feeds, dredging the torrent for the data point that will finally reveal what should be done.

And there’s another part, connected to what’s actually unfolding before it becomes intellectualized, that already knows how you should be positioned.

The part that knows is not concerned with benchmarks. It’s not the voice ready to pounce on you for being “trapped” by a bear-market rally or “shaken out” by a V-reversal.

Those voices are your personality defending something—your competence, your identity as a trader, your need to not look foolish. They write the story you tell yourself about your actions.

The part that knows sits below the story. And before any probabilities are assigned, before any analysis is compiled, it simply knows.

Accessing it requires stepping out of the defended posture. The part that needs to prove it saw it coming. That it didn’t get fooled. That it beat the benchmark.

It requires curiosity instead of certainty. Wonder instead of worry.

Wonder about this moment in market history: 100% unique, impossible to backtest or probability-weight into submission.

Audit your posture right now. Is it wide and curious? Or narrow and defended?

One part aches to know. The other already does.

Loosey Goosey

Buy ‘em tight, sell ‘em loose. So goes the swing trading maxim.

It’s “tight” price action that allows swing traders to set tight stops, put on meaningful size, and attempt to capture significant price expansion. When that “tight” price action becomes “loose,” it’s not the time to put on risk. It’s time to take it off.

We discuss this internally at Macro Ops often: our highest expectancy trades are ones taken on moves out of compressed price action—”tight” ranges on the charts.

And we tactically implement fast-moving trailing stops when price reaches elevated ATR levels beyond a key moving average, systematically selling “loose” price action.

The irony is that interest in specific stocks or commodities runs just the inverse. When price action is tight, it’s seen as too boring to be of interest.

And then when price gets loose? Everyone wants to speculate on the next big leg.

Right now, there is a ton of interest in gold, oil and commodities. I understand there are important economic implications at play here.

But from a purely swing trading standpoint, these charts are way too loose to offer much in the way of asymmetric risk-to-reward according to my playbooks.

Over the last month, we tracked the price compression in the Nasdaq that broke down last week:

This week, price bounced right back to the converging resistance of the 200EMA, lower trendline, and compression range.

The Nasdaq was tight, now it’s loose.

This is even more apparent on the closing price line chart:

More interesting to me in the equity world is the Russell, which has held its “tight” price compression right at the convergence of its 200EMA and multi-point trendline.

While the Nasdaq could whip around from here irrespective of the next intermediate move for equities, the Russell may give a cleaner read when it expands from this compressed range.

Relative Strength

If the next direction in equities is up, there are a few names that jumped out as exhibiting particular strength over the past two weeks of turmoil.

Brookfield Renewable Partners (BEP) completed a Cup & Handle Continuation on the daily:

And this corresponds with completion of a massive Head & Shoulders Bottom on the weekly:

Dell Technologies (DELL) is threatening to complete an equally massive Head & Shoulders Continuation on the weekly:

And Bread Financial Holdings (BFH)—featured from the very first issue of This Infinite Game—has held its breakout from a year-long Head & Shoulders Continuation pattern, and formed a Symmetrical Triangle consolidation above the breakout level.

The Pauses That Refresh

There are a number of patterns that have held their consolidations, as well as many opportunities to play on the short side or between range boundaries.

Here are the names that caught my eye during this week’s screen:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

In March of 2023, I joined 25 others for a week-long psychospiritual retreat on the outskirts of Petaluma. Among us: a CFO of a Fortune 500 company, multiple entrepreneurs and founders, at least one billionaire. We came to unravel the unconscious patterns steering our lives.

Our phones and laptops were locked away for the retreat’s duration. We knew each other by nicknames only. No talk of professional identity was allowed until the final day.

Despite our varied backgrounds, the patterns were the same. Our facilitators had seen them time and again. Some obvious: No matter how much money I make, it’s never enough. Others, more subtle: Seeing negative emotions as personal failings.

One pattern jumped out at me: Can’t look foolish.

Across the week, I traced this pattern’s origins and the ways it had been reinforced. A home where missteps were named and shamed. A school system that rewarded recitation over experimentation. A work culture that promoted confidence over deference.

Of all the patterns we unpacked that week, this one speaks most forcefully during market volatility.

Each gap down brings cries of risk off. Each gap up, a hedge. “Nibbling here.” “Adding back.” “Reversing with a tight stop.”

I used to see this as tactical opportunism. Now I see it for what it is: the compulsion to act so that, should the market bottom tonight, “I didn’t get shaken out.” I wasn’t fooled.

These trades never add to an edge. And the mental drain of the constant in-and-out suffocates the creative flow that could be put to use sharpening one’s sword or developing new playbooks.

If you’ve found yourself tethered to each market open and close this month, consider what unseen pattern is puppeteering you. Not to shame it. To see it clearly.

The pattern you’ve been rewarded for all your life may be exactly what’s working against you right now.

Guidelines for a Selloff

In the March 7, 2026 issue, I shared that our Macro Ops team had flattened our equity book.

That Friday, the primary trend filter for my long-equity breakout system flashed risk off. It’s remained risk-off since:

From that same issue, NQ is moving toward its 22,200 measured move target:

The Nasdaq 100 Equal Weight has already reached its measured move target of 123.50:

Even the poster child of the AI revolution is threatening breakdown from a Head & Shoulders Top:

It’s important to remember what measured move targets are—and what they are not. A measured move target is not a prediction. It is neither a minimum nor an extreme.

It is simply a guideline.

In the most basic sense, a measured move target says: “Price could reasonably move to this level because, very recently, price repeatedly made the same size move within a range.”

No magic about it.

The Pauses that Refresh

There are a number of patterns that have held their consolidations, as well as many opportunities to play on the short side or between range boundaries. If these are playbooks that you have yet to develop, now could be the perfect time to do so.

Here are the names that grabbed my attention:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

Most retail traders catch the bug the same way: chasing fast money on the side. A good portion burn through their cash at the starting line. A smaller portion survive long enough to build something meaningful.

And for those who do, the goalposts shift. Trading is no longer about extra cash alongside a primary income. It transforms into a pathway to freedom.

But here’s what goes unseen: this idea of freedom gets misattributed to external circumstances, seen as manipulable by money. Traders convince themselves that hitting a certain account balance will resolve a restlessness inside them.

Some get stuck in this loop forever. The felt sense of arrival keeps receding. They hit their number, move the goalposts, hit the new number, move them again. Because freedom is overwhelmingly an internal state, not an external one.

But a small fraction—true outliers—either last long enough or hit a number so stunning, they actually pause. And in that strange space of having money concerns covered while witnessing all that money cannot solve, they ask: “What is the purpose of trading beyond individual financial gain?”

Here’s what I ask them to consider: trading has no purpose. Just as no professional title grants its holder a purpose. Instead, it’s the qualities we develop through the experience of trading that enable us to deliver on our deeper calling in the world.

Dr. Brett Steenbarger writes, “In mastering risk and uncertainty; in cultivating the ability to pursue opportunity in effortful ways; in making ourselves better as decision makers; in becoming more disciplined actors; we seize the opportunity not only to become better traders, but also to become better human beings.”

These qualities spill into every area of life. They make us better business partners, spouses, parents, and friends. And those relationships, deepened by who we become through trading, nourish us in ways money and market speculation never can.

This is where freedom actually lives. Not in trading, but in what striving for mastery builds within us.

Building a Commodities Playbook

For the last few issues, I’ve shared that equities have moved into a risk-off posture. So long as this condition remains, my primarily long equity breakout system is on pause.

When pauses such as this occur, it offers the opportunity for rich, in-depth post-analysis, and the development of new trading playbooks and complementary strategies. It was, in fact, just such a pause last year that allowed me to refine my breakout regime filters, and develop the intraday version of my end-of-day strategy.

This time, I’m turning my focus to futures, with a major focus on commodities.

Commodities have not played a major role in my trading since 2022. At that time, I traded them using the same framework and trade management as my equity trades.

Since then, my focus has been lasered in on equities: the specific patterns they form, how they move, the regimes they cycle through as definable by indices such as SPY.

And because of the intimacy I’ve developed with this asset class, the foundation I’ve used for approaching commodity futures is, ironically, equities. What attributes do they share? And, more importantly, where do they differ?

There is a single, often-overlooked page in Edwards and Magee’s Technical Analysis of Stock Trends that speaks directly to these questions. Here is what they write (emphasis mine):

“News about weather, drought, floods, etc., that affect the growing crop, if we are dealing with an agricultural commodity, can change the trend of the futures market immediately and drastically [...] Analogous developments in the stock market are extremely rare.

Under what might be called normal market conditions, those chart patterns which reflect trend changes in the most simple and logical fashion work just as well with commodities as with stocks. Among these we would list Head-and-Shoulders formations, Rounding Tops and Bottoms, basic trendlines. Trendlines, in fact, are somewhat better defined and more useful than in stocks.

Other types of chart formations which are associated in stocks with short-term trading or with group distribution and accumulation, such as the Triangles, Rectangles, Flags, etc., appear less frequently in commodities and are far less reliable as to either direction or extent of ensuing move. Support and resistance levels, as we have already noted, are less potent in commodities than in stocks; sometimes they seem to work to perfection but just as often they don’t. For similar reasons, gaps have relatively less technical significance.”

Whereas in equities, trends tend to build and reversals are rare, the opposite is true in commodities, where “immediate and drastic” reversals are commonplace.

Whereas in equities, the polarity principle—that prior horizontal resistance turns into new support and vice versa—can be used to protect stops, in commodities horizontal support is rarer and less reliable.

Whereas in equities, diagonal trendlines should be viewed with suspicion, in commodities they should be viewed with greater confidence.

An initial playbook can therefore adapt setups in equities with these differences in mind.

For my personal equity setups, two price pivots at the same horizontal level allows me to draw a support or resistance line. Three price pivots make that level tradeable. For commodities: two price pivots along the same diagonal level allows me to connect them as a trendline. Three price pivots make that trendline treadable.

Drop the rigidity of the 200EMA trend filter, as reversals are common.

Manage trades for “immediate and drastic” changes in price, rather than for the choppy backing and filling of equity trends.

The polarity principle should not be relied upon to protect stops.

Let’s look at some examples from my early chart model playbook:

A valid trendline in Soybean Oil Futures, May 2026 contract.

A decisive breakout through that trendline.

An immediate trend period.

A valid trendline in Coffee Futures, May 2026 contract.

A decisive breakout through that trendline.

An immediate trend period.

A valid trendline in Sugar No. 11 Futures, Jul 2026 contract.

A decisive breakout through that trendline.

An immediate trend period.

These are best-case scenarios: model charts that will live in my futures playbook.

They represent price action that is repeatedly identifiable, allows for a logical risk-defined entry, and offers asymmetric reward-to-risk.

Doing further work on the entry, stop and trade management techniques that fit my personal psychology, risk tolerance, and trading objectives is something I very much look forward to exploring over the coming months.

The Pauses That Refresh

There are a handful of patterns that have held their consolidations, as well as a number of opportunities to play on the short side or between range boundaries. If these are playbooks that you have yet to develop, now could be the perfect time to do so.

Here are the names that grabbed my attention:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

A colleague of mine told me about the risk manager he worked under. The relationship sounded downright abusive.

The manager would constantly watch over his shoulder, critiquing every chart analysis and order entry. “Everyone else on the floor is having a great month … what’s your problem?” he would ask.

When a trade would stop out, there was the manager again: “That was a dumb place to put your stop. Of course it got run.”

The manager never left my colleague’s side. Always pointing out what he could have done better, framing a profitable trade as a gift from the heavens, blaming losing trades on his incompetence.

He tried to motivate through criticism, shame, and pressure. This made the manager terrible at his job.

My colleague was more uncertain in his trade plan, more anxious in his order entry, more focused on avoiding the next verbal thrashing than on creatively adapting to the market environment and professionally stewarding the firm’s capital.

I told him he had to fire that manager. Find a new one within the firm. Or move firms entirely.

He told me he couldn’t. Because wherever he went, the manager would follow.

The manager didn’t work for the firm. The manager was the voice in my colleague’s head.

Most people battle with their inner critic. They try to silence it, argue with it logically, suppress it. This only entrenches its authority.

The real issue isn’t the voice. The issue is believing it’s an effective manager.

See through this fallacy. See that the voice is driven by fear. That it hasn’t improved your trading one bit.

Then, give that manager the performance review he deserves, and fire him.

Trade Tactics for Bear Markets

Last week, when I shared a chart depicting my long equity regime filter closing, a member of The Collective asked if I simply inverted my trade tactics for bear markets.

My response: “I wish it were so simple …”

Bear Market declines in equities are not the mirror reflection of Bull Market advances, as much as I’d like them to be.

Two things work against trading equities to the short side in Bear Market Regimes: 1) the volatility of the regime and 2) the math of short-side trading.

Let’s start with the math.

On the long side, the math works with you. A $100 stock moving to a measured move target of $130 in three $10 legs requires 10%, then 9.1%, then just 8.3%. Each leg gets easier. Each dollar gain is a smaller percentage ask. Momentum compounds favorably.

On the short side, the opposite is true. That same stock falling that same $30 measured move requires 10%, then 11.1%, then 12.5%. The market must accelerate in percentage terms just to sustain the same dollar move.

While stocks can crash dramatically in percentage terms, maintaining a large dollar move to the downside means the percentage hurdle keeps rising at every step.

And as traders, we are paid by dollar moves.

This asymmetry makes simply flipping a long setup to a short one a more mathematically challenging trade.

This is also why the old saying, “stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down,” is only partially true in percentage terms.

Which brings us to the second major difference about Bear Market Regimes: volatility.

In the Classical Charting bible, Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, Edwards & Magee note that “[Bear Market] down trends are far less regular and uniform in their development than Bull Market advances.”

A figure early in the book highlights a prominent price action feature of Bear Markets: “’Rounding patterns’ [...] typical of rallies in a Primary Bear trend.”

The sustained Bear Market of 2022 exemplified this pattern beautifully:

Far from the “regular and uniform” Bull Market advances, these Rounding Patterns wreak havoc on breakout entries.

Individual equity names will breakdown coincident with a swing low breaking in the indices:

The weakest stocks will make progress toward their measured move targets. The most resilient will just poke through the lower boundary of their consolidations.

Both happen right before a screaming rally back toward the long-term moving average:

I’ve found that these massive rallies, which form the crest of each Rounding Pattern, can stop out even the best looking short setups.

So, as traders, we have to adapt to these market conditions, and adjust our tactics for the Bear Market Regime.

Looking at the charts above in hindsight, the worst place to have shorted would have been in those red boxes. And the worst place to long? The green boxes.

Consider instead: going long in the red boxes and short in the green boxes.

Do not mistake what I’m suggesting as trying to bottom fish or top tick. These are a fool’s errand.

Instead, if we understand that short setups fail and reverse in the red boxes … why not long a failed short setup in this regime, targeting the opposite side of the range?

And if long setups fail and reverse in the green boxes … why not short a failed long setup in this regime, targeting the opposite side of the range?

I’ve found these tactics to be far better suited to Bear Market Regimes than simply inverting my long-side tactics built for “regular and uniform” Bull Market advances.

When the environment is different and the math is different, the tactics, too, must adjust.

Nasdaq’s Roundtrip

In last week’s issue, I covered the consolidation in the NASDAQ between roughly 25,430 and 24,430. I mentioned that this one-month consolidation stood right at the convergence of the (potential) Ascending Triangle’s lower trendline and the 200EMA, which would warrant any breakdown meaningful.

Monday saw the 25,430 level vigorously defended, further showcasing its importance for market participants. By Friday, we round tripped right back to it.

The Nasdaq-100 Equal Weight continues to look like an underside retest of a breakdown.

Expect heightened volatility around the 200EMA of NQ next week. The level has proven significant to market participants, and those who defended it are now under real pressure.

The Pauses That Refresh

There are a number of opportunities to play on the short side or between range boundaries next week.

Here are the names that grabbed my attention:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

Markets can move for many reasons. Irrational exuberance. Leverage unwinds. A new technology capturing the zeitgeist. A major player missing expectations.

This week, markets moved on violence.

When big moves occur, especially those that force positions past their risk points, I walk away from the screen and widen my aperture. I found myself on the living room floor beside my six-week-old daughter, kicking on her playmat.

One day, she will ask me how human beings can kill other human beings.

This only intensified my unrest.

My body demands I do something. That I act. Ten years ago, action would have been my strategy. Today, I know better. I must clear what’s surging through me—adrenaline preparing my body to fight a non-physical threat.

Half an hour of lap swim. Three rounds of contrast therapy. The chemicals inside have burned away. I now see what fueled them.

The lack of agency over the violence. Mourning the loss of innocent life. The senselessness. My privilege to be so far removed. The guilt woven through that privilege.

A part of me that is not these emotions, but stands before them, acknowledges each. I do not whisk them away. I sit with the lack of resolution. To seek resolution would label these concerns as “problems to be solved,” driving them back underground, still charged—primed to fuel a resurgence of physical survival instinct.

Instead, I stand momentarily with each, and I commune: at times, we lack agency. At times, the world is senseless. In certain contexts, we are privileged and don’t know why.

I hold this posture, regulating their unrest. Knowing that each time I do, I expand my capacity to hold greater uncertainty, senselessness, and contradictory truths.

Knowing she will one day bring these questions to me for the first time. Knowing that when she does, I will need to hold what cannot be answered for us both.

An Equity Cleanse

Our Macro Ops team was in an internal meeting last week discussing our new-member experience. We wanted to streamline the process for following our model portfolio. There had been a lot of action in our book through the first nine weeks of 2026.

Our Lead Value Investor, Brandon, commented: “When our book gets this active, it usually means we’re starting to top.”

At the moment, it seemed like an offhand mention. But I suspect his subconscious had already pattern matched the present environment to his past market experience. And that subconscious knowing was starting to brim at the surface.

This week, we made the decision to completely flatten the equity side of our book.

Here’s what MO Team Lead, Alex, shared in the Comm Center:

“The market right now is a bad table. Too many unknowns, too much headline risk, too many players making moves that have nothing to do with the cards in front of them. In poker, one of the most underrated edges isn’t your ability to bluff or read tells—it’s knowing which table to sit at, and when to pick up your chips and walk. The best players in the world routinely leave good tables because they’ve spotted a better one elsewhere. The second-best move they make is leaving a bad table altogether. This is one of those times.”

The cash raised will act as fresh powder when conditions clear.

While Brandon and Alex have a deep felt sense for market conditions and historical analogues, I lean on technical tools to understand current conditions. Perhaps it is no coincidence that on Friday, the primary trend filter for my breakout system flashed risk off.

Some of these signals end up short lived. At any moment, a peace deal struck could snap the risk appetite right back. But so long as this condition persists, long equity breakouts — viewed through my lens, on my time horizons, with my trade management — have proven negative EV.

From a technical analysis standpoint, two charts have my eye with regard to the next leg.

The NASDAQ 100 has formed a four-month range between 26,260 and 24,000.

The higher low at the start of February, paired with price action contained above the 200EMA, gives the formation a bullish bias as an Ascending Triangle. However, such formations can morph, with price breaking down the lower trendline.

And a smaller consolidation between roughly 25,430 and 24,430 has formed within the larger one.

This smaller consolidation stands right at the convergence of the Ascending Triangle’s lower trendline and the 200EMA, which would warrant any breakdown meaningful.

The smaller consolidation, which could be considered a Launching Pattern, is even clearer on the 4H.

Should the smaller consolidation complete to the upside, I’d expect another test of the highs at 26,260, and renewed conviction in the Ascending Triangle interpretation.

Should it complete to the downside? A measured move target would land at roughly 22,200.

The Nasdaq-100 Equal Weight looks even more dire. It has arguably already broken down its lower boundary and lost the 200EMA.

The smaller consolidation here looks more like an underside retest of the breakdown. A measured move target stands at 123.50.

A Real Gusher

While we’ve purged our book of equities, we’re happy holding our oil longs, T-Bond shorts, and a handful of uncorrelated futures positions.

Our oil long in particular has been a wonder to watch. I can say that because our Head Macro Operator, Alex, has played this one just beautifully and I, along with members of our Collective, have watched him do it in real time.

Rewinding to this past December, crude had been in a multi-year downtrend since peaking in 2022. What began to form on the chart in December—well before this month’s escalation overseas—was a potential double bottom around the 55 level.

That chart was precisely what Alex shared in the Comm Center on December 17, 2025, as the Macro Ops Portfolio entered a buy stop at 56.95 for an initial position.

I combed through the subsequent trade alerts to piece together how things played out from then through this week.

Expertly played.

The Pauses That Refresh

While long equity breakouts may temporarily be off the table, there are a number of opportunities to play on the short side, or between range boundaries this week.

Here are the names that grabbed my attention:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

What happens when trading platforms evaporate, and all that remains is the prompt? This reality is so close I can see the whites of its eyes.

Today, right now, I have an intraday version of my breakout strategy running autonomously in a virtual environment. At the New York Session open, code screens for stocks that match my criteria, populates symbols into order tickets, determines trade levels and position sizing, and submits orders through my broker’s API. It manages positions that fill, closes working orders that don’t, and takes my account flat five minutes before session close.

When I want to alter anything about the strategy—screening criteria, risk levels, suppression rules, trade management—I never open a trading platform. Instead, I write a prompt.

This particular code contains my rules. But a stone’s throw into the future, anyone in the world will be able to direct their AI platform of choice to “trade Qullamaggie’s strategy in my personal brokerage account,” and an approximate replica—soup to nuts—will go to work.

All remaining friction between a human being and their ability to risk capital in financial markets is disintegrating. The technical execution layer of trading is compressing into an invisible layer humans simply speak to. As this occurs, where will edge remain?

The retail prompt trader of tomorrow may say, “I will just let the AI run and not touch it.” Just as traders across time have told themselves, “I will just leave my stop where it is and not move it.“ Or, “I won’t double my position size when I feel I’m due for a win.” Or, “I won’t switch strategies when I hit an extended losing streak.”

But they will intervene. Alter size on hope. Strategy hop during panic. Instantaneously.

Naval Ravikant released a new podcast last week outlining his vision of our AI-saturated future. At the 37-minute mark, he states with stark directness what I have seen myself:

“If you have [an AI] trading bot out there, it’s going to be nullified or canceled out by every other trading bot until all the remaining gain will go to the person with the human edge.”

When execution earns nothing, what will your self-mastery yield?

Narratives Not Required

Our team has had a close eye on T-Notes. The 2-Year has been stabilizing above the long-term moving average for a year and half, with volatility compressing into an extremely tight range over the last six months.

Compressed volatility precedes expanded volatility. That expansion can move in either direction … but we’re leaning to the upside, and our Macro Ops Portfolio opened an anticipatory long position in late January.

In This Infinite Game two weeks ago, under “T-Notes on deck,” I featured a chart of the 5-Year T-Note, stating it “may have already tipped [bonds’] hand, breaking out of a five-month channel.”

This week, that breakout began to follow through.

With regard to this potential move in bonds and its implication for rates, a Collective member in our Comm Center raised the concern that he simply doesn’t see any existing narrative that would support such a move.

It’s a distinction that warrants discussion.

I am not a macro trader. But I have traded hundreds of technical pattern breakouts. And in my experience, “narratives” are a phenomenon of momentum. Narratives perpetuate a trend that has already taken hold.

In many—if not most cases—the initial breakout from a valid technical level is accompanied by no narrative at all.

A breakout may be accompanied by a discrete, moment-in-time “catalyst” such as a big earnings beat, or a change in policy stance, or geopolitical turmoil. But just as often there is absolutely no clear rationale for a breakout at the time that it takes place, and narratives take shape after the fact, once a clear trend has been established.

Perhaps the most vivid example of this phenomenon has been gold’s arc the last two years.

Gold broke out of a 12-and-a-half year base in March of 2024, and has gone on an astonishing 150% rise across 23 months.

Looking at the chart of gold today, our minds play a trick. They label the entire move explainable by a world of elevated geopolitical tension, policy unpredictability under Trump, and tariff shock.

But the truth is that this narrative formed deep into gold’s trend.

The “Liberation Day” tariffs, to cite the most clear-cut timestamp, were not announced until April 2, 2025, a full year after the initial breakout occurred.

An honest look back to March 2024 will show the initial breakout framed as a “shock” or “head‑scratching” move: price ripping to new highs faster than the visible fundamentals seemed to justify. The commentary leaned on generic explanations like rate‑cut hopes, geopolitics and technical momentum.

Gold’s move has been absolutely historic. I would never expect something as dramatic in bonds. But if you are a trader who combines the macro with the technical, as we do at Macro Ops, don’t let your mind fool you into believing in revisionist history, and passing on excellent risk-to-reward trade profiles because a clean narrative for such a move has yet to reveal itself.

The Pauses That Refresh

We rang the register on CASY this week following what has been one of the most resilient trends of this recent regime.

Many of the consolidations that had appeared in my screens for weeks have broken structure and been taken off my watch list until they set up again.

Here are the names I’ve seen hold structure as we move into next week:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

For the better part of 2022, I was immersed in the world of Jared Tendler, a mental game coach specializing in high-stakes performance for traders, poker players, and athletes.

Jared’s unique perspective comes from having a master’s degree in counseling psychology spliced with a background as a three-time All-American collegiate golfer who competed in major amateur events.

There was one personal anecdote Jared slipped into a YouTube livestream that sank so deeply into my bones it has become unconscious instinct.

“I had a lead with nine holes to go. My hands were shaking so much I could barely get the ball on the tee. And the advice I had been given was to ‘Take a deep breath and relax.’ Well, I took a deep breath, and I didn’t relax. Now I’m panicked because I can’t relax [...] The breakthrough was realizing: ‘Okay, my hands are shaking. This is the reality. I am going to hit this golf ball with shaking hands.’”

So often, we believe some condition outside our control hinders our ability to perform. In actuality, it is our resistance to accepting the condition that sabotages us.

Each time I size up a strategy and the floating PnL gains an extra digit, I feel a rush of chemicals screaming to close the position early. Rather than resist the rush, I accept it: “I’m going to execute this trade plan with a racing heart.”

Each time I schedule deep analysis but sleep poorly the night before, I hear frustration declare the day is lost. Rather than resist the frustration, I accept it: “I’m going to drop into flow with dry eyes and a foggy mind.”

Just this week, my newborn daughter began wailing over the baby monitor right at the New York Session open. Rather than resist the chaos, I accepted it: “I’m going to hit every part of my morning process with this four-week-old strapped to my chest.”

There is always a condition to falsely accuse. “If only I weren’t so nervous.” “If only it were quieter.” “If only the setup were clearer.”

The condition is not the problem. Your rejection of it is.

Love the resistance. Accept the condition. Perform at your best right through it.

The Index Is Not the Environment

Before moving forward, I must mention that Collective members have access to my hour-and-a-half presentation, The Mental Game of Trading, which covers many of Jared Tendler’s most powerful concepts, including A-to-C Game Analysis, Mapping Your Pattern, Injecting Logic, and his Error Journal Template, all modeled using examples from my own real-world trading.

Onward …

In the February 7, 2026 issue, I contrasted the performance of my bottom-up breakout strategy in late 2025 to its performance thus far in 2026 to exemplify the market environment shift currently underway.

In late 2025, narrow thematics, the illusion of participation, and many failed breakouts left me feeling stuck in the mud. This year, the complete inverse: the crowded 2025 themes have taken shots across the bow, indices have stalled, yet quality setups are proliferating and breakouts are following through with strength.

Some readers wanted to know how much of this shift in environment was a feeling and how much was informed by my trades themselves.

For me, it has been 90% informed by my trades.

To make this as clear as possible, I wanted to contrast the exact same setups from Q4 2025 to those in Q1 2026.

Here is what my breakout trades looked like in Q4 of 2025:

Note that all of these trades fit my breakout criteria: 1) continuation patterns, 2) multiple months in duration with 3) minimum of three reactions to the same horizontal price level, 4) confirmed by the 200 EMA trend filter.

The three stocks above even had the additional tailwind of moving into new All-Time Highs.

Yet price repeatedly stalled out following each breakout, and collapsed back inside the range.

Compare the looks of those breakouts above to the ones here in Q1 2026:

Just this week, XP, Inc. (XP) broke out of a nine-month range with a wide-body bar, and followed through with equal strength on Friday:

All this while the indices have gone absolutely nowhere.

Mark Minervini puts it this way:

“One of the best decisions I made in my career was to stop looking to the market indexes as a barometer of health for breakout stocks and leading names, or even specific industry groups. The big turnaround for me came when I started letting the individual stocks themselves do the talking, and I did the listening.”

I’ve seen individual stocks with identical setups result in dramatically different outcomes across these two time periods.

When your trading is this structured and methodical, it is not something you must feel or intuit.

Price is truth, and the behavior of price in individual stocks will tell you when the regime has changed.

Our Macro Ops portfolio is up +36.9% YTD. Every one of the active breakouts above was featured in the watchlist section of This Infinite Game for members of The Collective. If you'd like to go deeper on the price action principles behind this strategy, and follow along as I execute entries, exits, and position sizing in live markets, you can join The Collective here.

Futures in Focus

Futures is not my primary universe, but there are some excellent Classical Charting patterns out there right now.

Some of my favorites:

The Pauses That Refresh

While the market environment remains supportive, I will continue to take swings at the plate.

Here are the pending breakouts I’m watching as we head into next week:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

In a group of highly talented macro traders, I trade math. I screen for predictable, repeating price structures that offer asymmetric reward-to-risk. My setups frame a return four times my risk. I aim to turn over this edge as many times as possible.

One of Macro Ops’s favorite Market Wizards, Peter Brandt, also trades math—much better than me, I’ll add. He’s spoken openly about this focus being birthed out of the worst trading year and longest drawdown of his life.

“I almost quit trading. Really close to it. I had enough money to call it quits for life. Through the help of fellow trader friends, I became obsessed with the math and probability behind trading. Trading became a mathematical challenge, not just a matter of finding a new trade.“

Yet if Peter is obsessed with the numbers, why is he also adamant that human emotions are a trader’s biggest enemy? Shouldn’t that be a problem confined to discretionary traders?

Consider the foundational research of Kahneman and Tversky: losses are roughly twice as powerful psychologically as are gains. The reward-to-risk of my breakout setups may be 4:1. But the pleasure-to-pain ratio is 1:2.

So while the math says “great news!“ After ten 1R losing trades and only three 4R winning trades, your account is up 2R in an adverse regime. The psychology says “not so fast!“ Each of those 1R losses generated two units of pain. You’re running an eight-unit pleasure deficit.

Trading math looks one way: clean, elegant, rational. But it feels dramatically different. Which is why trading this way is simply intolerable without conscious inward investigation.

Peter’s Factor Report regularly opens with personal commentary. In the August 1, 2025 report, he wrote just two words: “Tough week!“ In the next report: “Tough week!“ And in the report after: “Tough week! AGAIN!“

This continued for twenty weeks, evolving from “Tough week“ to “Tough markets“ to “Tough Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.” When his Factor Service finally closed out 2025 and this four-month stretch ended, he shared his Rate of Return for the year: 70.7%.

“Tough year!”

A launching pad in energy

Dominion Energy has been on my watchlist since late last year. It fit every criteria I look for in my breakout setups: 1) a continuation pattern, 2) multiple months in duration, 3) directionally supported by a long-term trend filter, 4) with three or more reactions to a clearly defined price level.

But there was something unique about this particular Rectangle Continuation pattern …

Zooming out, this pattern formed the Handle of a much larger, 15-month Cup & Handle Continuation—which fit all of my breakout criteria in its own right:

When a smaller pattern appears nested within a larger pattern, and completion of the smaller pattern would also trigger completion of the larger, that smaller pattern can be referred to as a “Launching Pattern.”

The smaller pattern “launches” the larger.

Such patterns are some of my absolute favorite setups.

Last week, I featured Dominion Energy in the active watchlist section of This Infinite Game.

This week, a breakout of the six-month Rectangle Continuation “launched” completion of the 15-month Cup & Handle.

Our Macro Ops portfolio opened a risk-defined position.

Outcomes are unknowable.

But I’ll take this trade 10 out of 10 times it appears.

T-Notes on deck

There is a strikingly similar setup to Dominion Energy in 2-Year T-Note Futures:

And 5-Year T-Note Futures may have already tipped their hand, breaking out of a five-month channel on Friday:

For an analog of how such channel breaks can play out, see Soybean Oil Futures:

Meanwhile, the NASDAQ 100 Equal Weight ETF looks absolutely atrocious: breaking down a seven-month support level while below the 200EMA trend filter.

Tech stocks down, bonds up?

The pauses that refresh

As mentioned last week, the names on my active watchlist are narrowing. But there remain a number of high-quality setups pending breakout.

Long setups are currently tilted 2:1 defensive-to-cyclical, spanning financial services, healthcare and life sciences, and consumer and industrial distribution.

Here are the symbols that have my attention going into next week:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

In discussions with Collective members since releasing The 4 Rules of This Infinite Game, one question has repeated most frequently: “If there are no rules to the game, how do I know which approach to trading I should pursue?”

My best advice is Naval Ravikant’s advice: audit your current trading process for what “feels like play to you, but looks like work to others.”

Which part of your trading process gives you energy? Which part depletes it?

Which part do you find yourself becoming lost in—where you begin, and shortly thereafter your sense of time completely falls away?

For some, this may be paging through history books, building a mental vault of era analogs. For others, studying geopolitical dynamics and power shifts. Others still may wait in eager anticipation to crack open a dozen fresh 10-Qs come earnings season.

For me, it’s pulling up my trade logs and tinkering with alternative screening criteria, trade management techniques, and position sizing. Entire days have passed while I’ve played in the sandbox that is my trading database—40-plus columns, 1,000 rows, dozens of tabs—now supercharged by AI’s ability to craft formulas light-years beyond my technical capability.

When others catch me in a post-analysis sprint, they cringe. “That looks like a lot of work.”

I beam. “To me, it’s play.”

We all have parts of our trading process that are administrative necessities. But if you feel you “should” study more geopolitics, I suggest trading macro is not your unique path. If you feel you “need to” grind through recent 10-Qs, I suggest fundamental analysis is not your unique path. And if you feel you “must” build out an advanced, dynamic, AI-powered trade log to achieve your desired results, purely technical trading is likely not how you’re meant to engage with markets.

Let the “shoulds” and “need tos” wither. Align yourself with what feels like play.

That feeling—an uptick in energy, a loss of time, flow state—is the marker of your intuition pointing toward the unique trading path you are meant to walk.

View from the bottom

My breakout trading starts with a bottom-up screening process across thousands of individual stocks.

Doing so gives a much different perspective on the market’s health and resiliency than other approaches, such as top-down screening or using indices alone.

After the sharp market sell-off last April following President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, my bottom-up screening process had me feeling stuck in the mud for much of the remainder of 2025.

Market trends were contained within narrow thematics—AI infrastructure, metals, large-cap tech. The slow drift higher in the indices created the illusion of wide market participation, but the reality under the hood was not so. Candidly, it was a very challenging period for my strategy as there were so few setups—and those stocks that did set up outside of the aforementioned themes failed to follow-through.

What I have experienced in my bottom-up process since last December has been the complete inverse. The crowded themes that defined 2025 have taken shots across the bow. The indices have stuttered and stalled. SPY’s return YTD stands just over 1%.

And yet quality setups have proliferated in my screens, and breakouts are following through with strength.

Capital appears to be rotating out of the overcrowded 2025 thematics and into new sectors of the market.

Evidence of this can be seen clearly in the positions of our Macro Ops portfolio:

Kodiak Gas Services (Industrial Services) put in a monster week.

Exxon Mobil (Energy) broke out a month ago and has not looked back.

Simon Property Group (Financial Services) kissed its breakout level on earnings and pushed higher the remainder of the week.

It’s clear that the market environment has shifted. This week’s volatility was quarantined to specific overcrowded sectors and did not cascade into a broader risk-off stance.

We are in a different market environment than 2025.

And I, for one, welcome the change.

Pyramiding in micro regimes

Well-studied traders implement regime filters as a way of increasing the probability that their trades will follow through.

Regime filters increase the win rate and overall expectancy of a setup without changing anything about the setup itself. Rather, they allow the trader to sidestep periods when market conditions are adversarial to their style.

Trend traders, for example, may use a series of moving averages which, when stacked and sloped in one direction, give them the green light to push their edge.

My own breakout system has both a trend filter as well as a whipsaw filter which systematically switches on or off my willingness to put capital at risk, dependent on market conditions.

In the December 06, 2025 issue, I featured an exploration of how I thought about compounding gains in trends that have already proven themselves. By screening for High Bases and Flags within my own active breakout positions, I was essentially defining a “micro regime” within my larger trending regime.

The higher-timeframe trending regime enabled breakout positions to initiate in the first place.

The breakout trades that followed through defined a lower-timeframe micro regime within which short-term patterns such as Flags and High Bases become favorable setups.

This week offered two wonderful examples of such opportunities …

First, Macro Ops portfolio position Caseys General Stores (CASY) completed a small Flag on Monday and rallied the remainder of the week.

And second, East West Bancorp (EWBC) completed a High Base on Friday after consolidating above the breakout boundary for nearly two months.

HURN’s Flag, covered last December, played out beautifully. As did CASY’s this week.

Will EWBC?

There is no way to know.

But such setups offer everything a technical trader could ask for: repeatedly identifiable asymmetric bets where a meaningful risk point can be defined.

The pauses that refresh

For the first time in months, the number of setups in my screeners is shrinking rather than growing—not because setups are failing or morphing, but because so many are following through.

Here are the names I’m watching going into next week:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

Lance Breitstein’s interview with Kenny “Shark” Sharkness, the number one trader at SMB Capital, crossed my desk this week. In it, Lance asked Shark about the largest drawdown of his career: the prolonged 2022 bear market in which the majority of his strategies stopped working.

Shark offered the tactical adjustments he made to claw back to his high watermark. But Lance pushed him on mindset—on how he endured an extended losing streak unlike any he’d experienced before or since.

His response:

“It wasn’t great. It wasn’t as fun anymore. But I always enjoy the challenge, even in the setbacks. ‘How can I figure this out?’ is part of the fun. And, additionally, I always separate trading from life. I had my family, I had a young baby, [I had] my friends. So at the end of the day, I always do my best to try and leave it at the screen and enjoy life elsewhere, and realize [trading’s] not everything.”

So many of us channel our identity fully into trading—a profession that promises immediate, measurable, objective proof that we are who we believe ourselves to be. One who outthinks, outmaneuvers, and outperforms in any domain we touch.

When the inevitable drawdowns occur, those whose sense of self is fully entwined with their PnL can feel their very existence is under threat. The body responds as if it must literally fight for survival, flooding us with panic and blinding our perspective. From that state, maintaining the open, curious mindset Shark speaks about becomes impossible.

They say, “don’t trade with money you can’t afford to lose.“

Just as important: don’t trade with an identity you can’t afford to lose.

What’s in a name?

In the Comm Center this week, Collective members had a good laugh over the “Chair with Ottoman” pattern that formed on Kansas HRW Wheat futures.

If you haven’t heard of the Chair with Ottoman, you’re not alone. You won’t find it in either of the foundational works on Classical Charting by Schabacker or Edwards & Magee.

Instead, this pattern is an original of Peter Brandt.

I’ve never actually seen Peter formally define the Chair with Ottoman pattern. Instead, I’ve come to my own understanding of this bottom reversal pattern through Peter’s many visual examples. For me, the defining characteristics are as follows.

The pattern begins as a downtrend consisting of large, volatile swings. The turn of each swing is relatively sharp. Price spends little time at any specific level, representing a lack of consensus by market participants.

Then, following the last swing high, the sequence of large swings is abruptly interrupted. Rather than turn over and put in the next swing low, price appears to find a floor.

Volatility drops as market participants come to consensus. Where the next large downswing should have occurred, a small consolidation pattern forms—often a rectangle. This consolidation is the “ottoman” to the prior downswing’s “chair.”

Squint your eyes and use some playful imagination, and you’ll be able to spot the profile view of a recliner and accompanying footrest in the last downswing and subsequent price consolidation.

Peter spots this pattern in commodities often enough to dedicate a name to it.

While commodities are not a major asset class for my trading, I’ve found the primary characteristics of this pattern—the abrupt change in character followed by a low-volatility consolidation—to be equally useful in other asset classes.

Two of my favorite examples are BTCUSD’s local bottom last April, and the definitive regime shift in equities from bear to bull in early 2023.

Let’s take a look back at each …

In December 2024, BTCUSD finally hit the $100K milestone. Then, as 2025 began, BTCUSD lost $100K. Then it lost $90K. Then $80K.

Was this it? Was the top in for the cycle?

Debates swirled regarding institutional demand, liquidity, and the four-year cycle. My guide, as always, was price. And in mid-April, a small change in character appeared.

Rather than put in a new swing low, price appeared to find a floor. Volatility dropped as market participants came to consensus. Where the next large downswing should have occurred, a small consolidation pattern formed.

BTCUSD then put in its next leg to $120K.

Turning to equities, SPY experienced a series of volatile downswings throughout the 2022 bear market. The market was characterized by overnight gaps, and dramatic reactions to news—especially CPI prints and FOMC meetings.

Then, in January 2023, that volatile sequence was interrupted. What followed was a multi-month, low(er)-volatility consolidation.

It was in large part this change in character—the “ottoman” to the final downswing’s “chair”—that gave me the conviction to declare the bear regime in equities officially over.

We’ve been in a multi-year equity bull since.

Whatever you name it, I encourage you to look for these characteristics in the markets you follow: volatile downswings, a pattern interrupt, a low-volatility consolidation. They offer excellent asymmetric, risk-defined trading opportunities.

The pauses that refresh

Currently in my screens, there is a mix of consolidations at their highs, threatening to breakout, and those at their lows, threatening to breakdown.

Here are the setups that have my attention going into next week:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

My wife and I welcomed our new baby girl this week. When we received her due date many months ago, there were a dozen reasons why January wasn’t ideal.

We live in the Sierra Nevada Foothills; January is frigid. My wife’s business picks up following the holidays; it would disrupt her client work. My parents had home renovations planned; they would be tethered to the San Francisco Bay Area. January just felt too messy for something this important.

But our daughter had her due date. And it was non-negotiable. And despite all the perceived imperfections and not-quite-rights of January on our calendars, the first day of her life—and our life with her—came into being.

Had we been the ultimate orchestrators of creation, we may well have held her arrival until spring. Now that she’s here, it’s unfathomable to think of her little life—and our transformation as a couple—delayed by even a day. God forbid, postponed indefinitely.

The truth is, we are the ultimate orchestrators of creation in ways we tragically overlook. And unlike our daughter’s due date, we can manipulate the timeline. When we do, we delay the coming into being of new life that has already been conceived.

There’s a better relationship with your partner gestating under the surface. Name the day for that necessary conversation. There’s a more joyous version of yourself gathering in the depths. Establish the date you put down the old ways of being and initiate the new. There’s a deeper level of mastery in your craft ripening in the dark. Mark the day you venture from the shallows—the day you size up, launch the fund, undertake the research project.

The healthier relationship, the truer self, the deeper mastery all lie in wait. Name the day for creation. The messiness is an illusion. This is not about productivity. This is about bringing into being what’s already been conceived and ready to be born.

Between order and disorder

Markets are cyclical, oscillating between opposing regimes. High volatility precedes low volatility. Trend periods precede consolidation periods.

The last two years of action on the SPY could be characterized as a series of orderly price trends which formed multiple upward channels, followed by disorderly breaks below those channels before price found its footing anew.

As wild as this past week’s news-related volatility has felt, price action on the SPY suggests equities are continuing to stabilize in a new, orderly rising channel.

Financials on the ropes

Financial names initially led the broader market higher last fall. XLF was completing a Head & Shoulders Continuation right around the turn of the year, pulling many of the names from my active watchlist into fresh breakout territory.

The past two weeks, however, have threatened that breakout, with XLF falling back below its breakout level.

The Head & Shoulders Pattern Negation level stands at 51. Note: this is not a Stop Loss, but rather the level at which the market structure would develop a lower low compared to the Right Shoulder, thereby negating the Head & Shoulders interpretation.

There are some silver linings here. The Pattern Negation level is currently protected by the 200D EMA (currently 52.31), which often acts as support for long-term trends.

Further, looking over the Financial names that have broken out over the last month, many have held onto their breakout levels despite the general sector giveback.

Some have even bucked the trend entirely and moved counter XLF into fresh highs:

The pauses that refresh

Should the Financial Sector find support at its long-term moving average and resume trend higher, there are a number of names on this week’s watchlist that held their structure during the selloff. Notably, there are also a few Financial Sector breakdown candidates.

Stock picker’s market?

The names I’ll be watching this week include:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

This past fall, I asked members of the Collective to send me their greatest gifts and shadows in trading. The most mentioned gift: patience.

Time and again it appeared. Patience waiting for setups. Patience handling pullbacks. Patience taking profits. This surprised me because lack of patience is one of the most common challenges developing traders face. This speaks to the quality of our community.

For those struggling with patience, I often hear “discipline” prescribed as the medicine. I could not disagree more.

If a part of you is jumping with urgency, tasking another part as an armed guard ignites inner confrontation. This increases chatter, heightens emotion, and turns up the noise.

Instead, shift to the seat of witness and ask that hurried part: “What do you fear?” It may respond in ways entirely unrelated to the trade at hand.

“I fear my trading has no real edge, and I won’t know unless I see results now.”

“I fear my method will stop working, so I need to extract everything I can while it lasts.”

Rather than discipline that part into submission, welcome it with consolation.

You’ve put real work into your trading. Of course you want to see its edge play out. Of course evolving markets make your current method feel vulnerable.

Diffuse the anxiousness. Make that part of you understand its concerns have been heard. Thank it for wanting to protect you—and your account.

It is communion, rather than conflict, that deflates urgency. What then is left? Patience.

The next time you feel rushed in your trading, remember: hurry is fear.

Signs of life

Crypto may finally be waking up from its long period of underperformance. In the December 6, 2025 issue, I noted that ETHBTC was attempting to achieve price acceptance right at its long-term moving average of the 365D EMA. Fast forward one month and price equilibrium appears to have been found. Low volatility precedes high volatility …

Our Macro Ops portfolio has risk-defined exposure to BTC already. This week, we placed a Buy Stop entry on ETH futures. There is ample overhead supply on both, but we’re starting to see some early constructive action. We’ll be quick to protect any gains should ETH pull us into a position.

Concepts from the Comm Center

Collective member Mitul Patel has been on a heater. This week he took profits on Moderna, based off of the Head & Shoulders Continuation pattern I featured last November.

Head & Shoulders Tops and Bottoms get all the attention. People love picking tops and bottoms. And for this reason, the Head & Shoulders Continuation pattern gets much less notoriety, despite the godfathers of Classical Charting, Edwards & Magee, discussing the pattern in their book Technical Analysis of Stock Trends.

Moderna gives us a chance to see how chart patterns can evolve over time, with developments in price action causing shifts in the paths of least resistance, and offering revised risk-defined setups.

Moderna’s price structure began in November as a Head & Shoulders Continuation—and with many of my favorite attributes going for it: 1) a continuation pattern, 2) multiple months in duration, 3) directionally supported by the 200 EMA, 4) with three or more reactions to a clearly defined boundary.

Moderna even had the bonus characteristic of the right shoulder forming an independent Rectangle “launching pattern.”

Shortly after, Moderna experienced a false breakdown at the lower boundary. As I wrote in the December 20, 2025 issue, I’ve heard this setup called by many names, from “End Run” to “Bear Trap” to “Undercut” to “J Hook.”

The common feature is that price breaks out in one direction, then aggressively reverses back inside the pattern boundary. This rapid shift catches traders offside and forces them to cover, fueling a trend in the opposite direction.

“From failed moves come fast moves” and price raced back to the upper boundary of the Right Shoulder.

This then established the Head & Shoulders Continuation Failure pattern: breach of the Right Shoulder’s upper boundary would signal a failure of the initial Head & Shoulders Continuation, and allow for a risk-defined long entry.

After a bit of discourse with me and Brandon in the Comm Center, Mitul framed a trade around this risk-defined setup, and nailed it. Well done.

The pauses that refresh

I have an alarming number of setups on my screens right now. There is a ton of pent-up energy right now waiting to be released.

You can see it both my way, bottom up in the individual stock charts, and top down, as the tight, coiling action in the indexes. Whichever direction comes next, it should be explosive.

Here are the most prominent names on my watchlist going into next week:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.

Over the last two weeks, 2025 returns—by funds, by firms, by individual traders—have been flying all over my screen. Some report by mandate. Others, machismo.

The numbers can be eye-watering. And while there is ample fiction, many are true.

When those eye-watering, auditable one-year returns appear, temptation arises to chase the hot manager. “It’s his regime right now.”

Whenever this happens, I’m reminded of the very first memo from Oaktree’s Howard Marks. In it, Howard recounts the performance of a fund manager whose equity portfolio could never break free of apparent mediocrity.

Year after year, the manager ranked between the 27th and 47th percentile. Solidly second quartile, never spectacular and never terrible. One might say: perfectly unremarkable.

Yet this manager remained perfectly unremarkable for 14 years straight. And across the decade and a half he did so, his perfectly average performance compounded into a 4th‑percentile ranking. Just 3% of his peers did better over the full period.

There’s a trader out there who has been working at his craft for years in obscurity. Each December, he watches his performance buried by an avalanche of revolving names topping the leaderboards.

Yet one day, someone may look back at that seemingly unremarkable performance from the vantage point of a decade, and name that trader an industry hero.

Maybe that trader is you.

Capturing price acceleration

In the last issue of This Infinite Game before the holiday break, I showcased a beautiful rising channel in Platinum, and pointed out that price was attempting to break out.

Here was the chart at the time:

And here it was the following Friday:

For short-term swing traders positioned to capture this move, I had advised the following:

Rising Channels can be thought of as slanted Rectangles. The difference is that price is already trending in the direction of the breakout—the slant of the channel—before the breakout takes place. This makes successful breakouts, by definition, trend accelerations that call for tight stop management in the form of fast-moving MAs or trailing prior bar lows.

Here is the difference in what three different trailing-stop techniques would have captured from this move: 1) trailing prior bar lows (green); 2) a Macro Ops favorite: the fast-moving 5-period DMA (orange); and, for comparison, the slow-moving 20-period DMA (blue):

While Platinum wasn’t a position in our Macro Ops Portfolio, Copper has been. And our head macro trader, Alex, deployed the 5-period DMA this past week to capture partial profits on our position. A member of The Collective asked Alex how he chooses between the 5-period DMA vs. the 20-period. Here’s what he shared:

The 5DMA / 20DMA trail stop differentiation is really a function of two things 1) position size / overall portfolio correlation and 2) technical overextension levels. The more overextended a position is and the larger the position, the tighter the trail stop (5 vs 20 DMA) and vice versa.

Concepts from the Comm Center

Right before the end of the year, Collective member Mitul Patel shared a picture-perfect breakout trade in the Comm Center. While Euronext Paris is not part of my personal screening universe, Société Générale (GLE) fits all the criteria I look for in a breakout candidate:

1. A continuation pattern (Ascending Triangle here)

2. Multiple months in duration (3+ here)

3. Directionally supported by a long-term trend filter (the 200 EMA here)

4. With three or more reactions to a clearly defined price level (~59.40 here)

Breakout trades don’t get much cleaner than that. Great trade.

The pauses that refresh

Defensive names in Financial Services, Industrials and Consumer Staples have been carrying my portfolio since December. Yet my screens are brimming with pro-cyclical setups.

Here are the symbols I’m watching going into next week:

Active watchlists, real-time trade alerts, and live portfolio tracking are reserved for members of The Collective, our premier service offering discussions on high-level theory and performance, differentiated research, and a global community of serious traders and investors dedicated to mastery. Learn more about The Collective here.