“That guy has called 20 of the last three sell offs.”
That’s an old saying from the floor. We used it to describe the permabears. You know the type: they tell you stocks are going to get cut in half, the US is going to collapse, and the only solution is buy gold. Or maybe bitcoin.
That person in a trader’s life outside the floor might be found on X or in some promo where they lay out the collapse of the US financial system. The DEATH OF FIAT CURRENCY they proclaim from the mountains. Meanwhile, they forget: this is America and stocks go up.
When a sell off actually happens, the S&P 500’s lows are hundreds or even thousands of points higher than where they initially said to sell. But they’ll tell everyone how right they were. Meanwhile, their followers lost four, five, or even six figures in returns.
The Other Side of the Coin
There are also permabulls out there. You’ll notice they tout how great they are and how awesome their bull picks are as the market goes straight up and the rising tide lifts all ships. They tend to disappear when the market hits a snag and their incredible picks become the worst performers.
Don’t worry, they come back with a new set of picks once the market turns around. Their former picks are old news and do not apply to this new set.
The Rare Trader Who Sees Both Sides
Rare are the traders who are bullish most of the time (as most traders should be) but can read the tea leaves of a sell off and pivot to taking advantage of a high volatility environment (when fear spikes and stocks are dropping, creating wider price swings to trade around). Even rarer is the trader willing to publicly state, while the market is still strong, that we’re about to roll over.
That’s part of the reason I like working with Olivia Voznenko, “Voz” for short. She and I are the co-founders of TradetoClose and host an afternoon show together every trading day. TradetoClose is also home to her lights out service GamePlan, which presents daily trading zones (key price levels where a stock or index is likely to bounce, stall, or break down).
Since we founded this show and then launched Game Plan, she has been bullish on the market north of 90 percent of the time. She has flipped to bearish TWICE while we’ve been working together.
The first was here:
She called it when we got the dead cat bounce (a short-lived rally after a big drop, before the next leg down) from March selling just over a year ago. Within days the market rolled over.
And now, she’s calling it again. She and I both believe there is more wrong with this market than just Iran. Hanging around the neck of this market are interest rates, private credit, and the potential for a recession, just to name a few.
I’d love to say I called it first, but I didn’t. Toward the end of February, before we invaded Iran, she pointed out that something was wrong with the market as a whole. The S&P 500 was stuck in a tight range spinning its wheels.
She said, “Mark, I do not know exactly what the underlying problem with the market is, but it looks like it’s about to roll over.”
Neither of us had a war with Iran on the bingo card. But once she said it, I took a look around at some of the underlying problems with the market and said, “Voz, I think you are right.”
The current consensus is that the market will recover when the Iran conflict ends. She (and I) disagree. She has, using her charting skills, walked our fellow traders through exactly what she sees, what her targets are, and what the downside is going to look like. It has helped our Closers, Gamers, just about everyone with access to her insight.
Here’s the good news. Next week on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, in celebration of Game Plan’s one year anniversary, she’s holding a 72 Hour Wealth Transformation.
If you want access to her insights on where the market is heading, you can join us live for three days. It’s at no cost, and it will almost certainly give you the chance to put money in your pocket.
You can join here.
Your only option,
Mark Sebastian