Hey Trader,

I want to give you an update on where I am with Reboot.

But before I do, you need to understand just how crazy March was.

This month, a tweet from Donald Trump moved stock market valuations more in one minute than Black Monday did during the 1987 crash.

There were a handful of moments just like it in March.

That's the kind of crazy I'm talking about.

The $1.8 Trillion Tweet

On March 23rd at 7:05 AM EST, President Trump tweeted that he had productive conversations with Iran and a complete and total resolution of hostilities in the Middle East. In the amount of time it takes you to read that tweet, the market cap of the top 500 companies in the United States was revalued by $1.8 trillion. No hyperbole can do justice to that fact.

Forget that it was two and a half hours before stocks opened on a Monday morning. Most people were probably making coffee. Forget how long it takes to open a trading platform and log in. Forget how long it takes to find the ticker you want to trade, enter an order, or decide how many shares to buy. This $1.8 trillion revaluation was over before most people could have even read it, even if they knew there was one to read. (Licia wrote about how someone likely knew.)

That's the kind of month March was. Headline tweets dominated. Hundreds of billions in equity market cap repriced in a literal instant. That's just stocks. Bonds, gold, oil, everything moved insane amounts. The shockwave of those big moves is what makes for a trader's market. Big, fast moves where technicals dominate over fundamentals. Traders over investors.

Macro Caught in the Crossfire

The core of how I trade is macro focused. Macro relies heavily on fundamental data, much like investing. But it's also more active, like trading. Macro falls somewhere on the spectrum between trading and investing. In this wild environment though, traditional macro got smoked, and I wrote about it as early as March 11th. It only got worse as the war dragged on.

One signal I learned from my option floor trading days kept me out of that mess. The VIX futures curve flipped into backwardation. One signal. That's the difference between a portfolio manager and a trader. Traders know how to be nimble and take what the market gives them. Portfolio managers can be stubborn.

One Factor Markets Are Rare. The Real Game Has Dozens

This one-factor market is rare. But it's a simplified example of macro trading. One factor drove the price of every market on earth in the same direction at the same time, instead of the dozens of factors that normally drive price action.

What made it so challenging is that this one factor, war on/war off, can't be modeled like normal data. On top of that, the moves it generated were enormous compared to how markets react to normal data.

It almost never works that way. In normal markets, different asset classes and different sectors of the stock market pay attention to many factors. Interest rates. Jobs reports. ISM manufacturing. CPI. PCE. Money supply. Consumer sentiment. These forces run underneath the surface like currents in the ocean.

They determine whether growth stocks outperform value. Small caps versus large caps. Homebuilders versus utilities. Tech versus materials. Domestic versus international. The sector rotation that seems to just magically happen? It's driven by these undercurrents. They ebb and flow like seasons. And they're measurable.

The Macro Barometer I'm building measures the data and reads the seasons.

What the Barometer Does That Nothing Else Does

Every Fed governor, macro hedge fund, and sell-side research company has their own version of something like this. They all measure these same underlying forces to get a read on what's really happening in the economy.

The difference is that mine goes all the way to actionable trades. Some of their models are forward-looking, some are backward-looking. They give a picture, a map. But they stop short of telling you what to actually do with that information. And the handful of people who do have something fully actionable? They certainly aren't publishing it.

That's what I'm building. A system that reads the weather, identifies the season, and points all the way down to specific sectors and stocks that should benefit from whatever environment we're in right now. I'll take that one step further and use my years of trading experience to determine which stocks have the best risk-reward setups. And publish it.

Here's what's coming next

First, I'm going to show you how every position you hold right now is already a macro bet. You bought tech? You made a call on growth and rates. You own utilities? You're betting confidence is eroding. I'll walk through real examples with charts that make the connection impossible to ignore. Once you see them, you won't be able to unsee them.

After that, I'm going to break down the components that drive the Barometer, payrolls, CPI, ISM, PCE, rates, in plain English. Not just what they are, but why you're betting on them already without even knowing it. These things move the sectors you're already trading.

That's the foundation. Once it's laid, I'll show you the full Barometer, how it reads the current environment, and how it shows you where you want to be.

Enjoy the process,

Tim