What's going on, everybody?

Peter Lynch once said insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons.

They buy them for only one: they think the price will rise.

I keep a chart of exactly that.

It tracks how many dollars executives put into their own stock against how many they pull out, straight from their Form 4 filings (the paperwork an executive files with the SEC when they trade their own shares).

Over the last 15 years, every big spike on it lines up with a moment when somebody in power stepped in to save the market.

That chart has started to turn back up, and it's where I spent a big chunk of I'd Trade That this morning. I also went through a list of the most hated stocks in America. One of them ran from $12 to $21 the last time the tide turned, and I'll show you how I'd trade it further down.

Fair warning: I didn't sleep last night. No script, no slides, just my one improv class at Second City.

Check out the replay or read the wrap up below:

Walk the spikes: Lehman Brothers, the start of QE in 2009, the European Central Bank caving in 2011, China, another round of QE. Then COVID, the mother of all QE.

Lately the spikes come more often, but they don't get as big. One reason: the rescues come more often too.

Now remember 1987. Greenspan kept saying the Fed would never step in to prop things up. Then the crash hit, the credit system seized, and he decided he'd better step back in.

That's been the policy ever since. And I will trade that until it breaks.

Everybody tells me this time it's different. I'll take the odds that they keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. They've already done it three times in the last year: Japan, trade, and intervention on the yen.

A Funny Kind of Calm

It's been 10 days since the Russell 2000 flipped to negative momentum. It's only down 3.6%, and it feels like a lot more, because so much else keeps getting pummeled.

Nvidia gets eight cents of every dollar that goes into S&P 500 funds. That's more than the bottom 240 stocks in the index combined.

Somebody told me this morning, "Peak fear, and the VIX is at 18." Sure. But the MOVE Index (the VIX for the bond market) reads 101, and single-stock volatility runs around 40.

My watch list for the next couple of days: RSI (a momentum gauge that runs from zero to 100) at 30, and MFI (the same idea with volume added in) at 20. Even 33 and 22 gets my attention.

On big names like Nvidia and Amazon, the oversold line on RSI sits closer to 20. Then I pair it with Bollinger Bands on the Qs (bands that mark how far price has stretched from its average). We hit the third standard deviation, bounced just enough, sold back down, and we're still hugging that line.

Stanley Druckenmiller pointed out years ago what happens next. You hit the third standard deviation, and the shorts cover.

I believe we're going to get some sort of policy accommodation. I've watched it happen over and over again for 18 years.

The Robots Don't Have a Soul

From here, we get one of two things: a bull trap or a dump.

Before this market takes a real tumble, we tend to get a squeeze first. We saw it in February, and we saw it in 2025. It lasted a week or two.

So while everybody else talks about how terrible everything looks, remember that the robots don't have a soul. They could squeeze this right back up into the Fed meeting on the 28th, and then we roll over.

More than half of this market trades on people and machines that don't care about price. They don't ask Warren Buffett's question about what something's worth. They ask what the prospectus tells them they have to buy and sell.

So I trade this a day at a time. I set up VWAP (volume-weighted average price, the average price everybody paid today) next to the Bollinger Bands and a third standard deviation line. When price pushes outside both, the algos start talking to one another, the shorts cover, and you can scalp a move that might only last three or four minutes.

I also anchor VWAP to the previous day. If the Qs got above that line, I saw about $6 of room to run. While I was on air, they went from 710 to 716 and tagged it.

It's a hard thing to stay bullish for an hour while the news screams at you. That's the job.

Now watch the semiconductors. When SMH breaks key moving averages and SOXS (a 3x leveraged bet against the chip stocks) starts to move, that's not just the semis selling off. That's leverage leaving.

Funds borrow against their Nvidia shares to lever up. When they need cash, they sell what sells fast, without looking at the price. We watched it in July when Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund took margin calls and sold its public stock book to Citadel.

My favorite chart for this: FNGD, a leveraged bet against the biggest tech names. Nothing good happens above the 20-day moving average of the FNGD.

Still a Company

Take USA Rare Earth (USAR). The rare earth story still holds up, but heavy shorting has the stock making lower highs and lower lows.

I'm trading the stock itself, no options, for a move from $9.88 back up to the previous day's VWAP. Stocks don't go straight down. Covering happens, and the algorithms step back in and buy.

Then pull up highshortinterest.com: Hertz, Groupon, Lucid, Xponential Fitness, and Children's Place, which I make fun of all the time.

Groupon. That's still a company. I'm blown away by that.

But when momentum flipped positive on April 7, Groupon went from $12 to $21. When we get that positive flip again, and we will, you start watching the volume on these heavily shorted names.

How do you trade one right now? You wait. When the eight-day moving average crosses above the 20-day, you buy, and when price drops back under the eight, you sell.

Maybe it's three bucks. You take what the market gives you, and you don't get emotional because you only made $3 on a $17 stock.

Bull trap or dump, I want my list ready before it happens. I build it every weekday at 9:20 a.m. ET on I'd Trade That.

See you there,

Garrett