The answer is none of them.

USAR, RZLV, Bit Digital, ZENA, Lucid, Wendy's and Groupon. I walked through every one of them on camera and passed on all seven.

I'll be honest with you, my goal today was to give them a trade.

And it was one of those days where a trade was not the right call, so I didn’t force one when I didn't see something I liked.

No hedge fund on the planet gets to do that.

Think about a fund manager's year. The capital is committed and investors expect to see it working.

There's a quarterly letter, a benchmark, and a short conversation waiting if the answer to what did you do this month is nothing much.

They have to be in the market. The setups have nothing to do with it. The money is sitting there and it has to be doing something.

You don't have that problem.

Nobody's calling you in October asking why you sat out August.

And look, almost everything else in this business is stacked against you.

Worse fills, slower data, no research desk, no prime broker. But this one thing runs your way, and most people give it back within a month of funding an account.

So let me walk you through what wrong looked like.

Lucid I'd been watching for days and I was pretty sure it was going to trigger. Pulled it up and the movement had stopped. No range expansion means no squeeze coming, I don't care what the story is.

Groupon has almost nothing available to borrow, which is exactly what I want. Volume wasn't increasing though. Half a setup.

ZENA fired. The engine told me to take it. I said no, because ZENA has earnings inside seven sessions and I built the thing to skip earnings on purpose.

I wrote that rule sitting still on a quiet afternoon and I wasn’t about to break it on a livestream because I wanted something to do.

Bit Digital came the closest, and I'll tell you straight, I'd never even heard of the stock before this morning.

Put pressure was there, volatility was expanding, and volume was already at a full day's average 95 minutes in. Three of my four conditions.

The fourth one is a timer. It keeps checking whether the first three are still true, because markets go wide for a stretch and look like real pressure, then tighten right back up and there was never anything there.

Bit Digital hadn't confirmed enough times. So it never dinged, and I never got in.

And that’s the game sometimes.

I would love to just feed you winning trades everyday. But if the risk vs. reward doesn’t match up, it would be irresponsible of me to force the issue just because it’s the popular thing to do.

The reason why Alpha AI, and many of the other strategies I run are profitable is because I’ve done enough reps to know what a strong setup looks like.

And I’ve taken enough lumps on the head to know what forcing trades does to your account.

That’s the discipline aspect of trading that doesn’t grab headlines, but it’s the reason why some traders are more profitable than others.

Just like a quality hitter in the MLB, we don’t want to swing at the first pitch we see. We work the count, and wait for our pitch.

Have a great weekend. And if you’re thinking about adding Alpha AI to your tool kit, here’s the link.

Your only option,

Mark Sebastian