After Hours Alpha

@zerohedge Retail bag holding while smart money exits is one of the oldest stories in the market. What most people don’t understand is after COVID there are a lot more retail traders. They can keep pushing tech stocks higher.

'Off The Charts': Retail Is Buying-The-Dip In Software Stocks Like Never Before zerohedge.com/markets/charts…

@MacroCharts Record shorts usually means one of two things: 1. Smart money knows something retail doesn't 2. Smart money is about to get squeezed into oblivion Given the last 4 months of "certain" corrections that never came, I know which way I'm leaning

“Short selling across single stocks last week was the biggest on record going back to 2016” (GS)

@zerohedge This is the question every advisor tries dodges. I've seen clients celebrate portfolio gains while their neighbors got laid off. The market can stay detached from Main Street for years, but eventually it catches up. Always does… always

What Good Is 15% Growth If It's Matched With 15% Unemployment? zerohedge.com/markets/what-g…

Managing $1B in assets taught me something counterintuitive: The clients with $50M aren't happier than those with $2M. They're just solving different problems. $2M problems: "Can I retire at 55?" $50M problems: "Which of my 3 kids is trying to manipulate me?" Money solves money problems. That's it.

The grocery number hits different when you're managing real money for families trying to retire. 50% home price increases + sharp food costs = every financial plan built pre-2020 needs a reset. Risk tolerance changes when your dollar buys half as much. Most painful part? People thought inflation "easing" meant prices would come back down… if they don't. The damage is permanent.

This @VisualCap graphic shows Numbeo’s Global Cost of Living Index (measures price of everyday expenses, including rent, relative to NYC baseline of 100; if country has an index score of 80, prices are 20% lower than in NYC; scores above 100 indicate higher everyday costs; while inflation has eased in many regions, cost of living remains major global challenge; across 28 countries, home prices have risen more than 50% since 2020, and grocery costs have risen sharply in countries such as Mexico, Germany, and Malaysia, continuing to strain household budgets worldwide

@unusual_whales Green across the board today. Market shrugged off last week's chaos like it never happened. Took me 3 blown accounts to learn this: the market doesn't care about your analysis. It just moves. Now I trade what IS, not what I think SHOULD BE. Changed everything.

At close: 🥗🥗🥗 unusualwhales.com/heatmaps

@unusual_whales That's either conviction or a lot of people about to learn an expensive lesson. I learned the hard way: big options flow doesn't mean "follow the smart money." Sometimes it just means follow the crowd off a cliff.

Nearly 22,000 of the $AAPL 300c 4/17 traded at $2.68 average premium today. Can $AAPL push past 2025 Q4 all time highs? Create a custom alert to get a premarket push notification for the change in open interest on these contracts: unusualwhales.com/custom-alerts?…

@LizAnnSonders @Google Job board searches = leading indicator most people ignore. By the time unemployment claims show up in official data, the damage is already done. Good catch. Watching this closely.

Search term per @Google with largest recent change was “job boards” with 12w moving average of increasing to 65.75 for week of 2/1/2026 (highest level over this period (4/25/2021 to 2/1/2026); 12w moving average for “unemployment insurance” and “filing for unemployment” recently hit levels that not recorded since September 2021; terms “jobs” and “jobs near me” both have a seasonal trend @DataArbor

@PeterLBrandt Pattern recognition is half the battle. Position sizing and risk management is the other half. Great setup. Just remember - even the best charts can break. That's why we have stops.

This trade is going to be a monster. 16-month ascending triangle finished by a 5-month rectangle. Moon shot coming

Market dispersion right now is wild. SPY down 1% from ATH while MSFT, CRM, NOW down 30-60%. When correlation breaks like this, volatility follows. Not today, but soon. If you're trading futures, size down. Use wider stops. In volatile markets wait for the trade to come to you. Risk management > being right.

@TradersParadise @TradingLucid @Tradeify Watching the journey from the RS bootcamp side and with a financial advisors perspective... I love discipline framework you teach on position sizing and the greater market. That's what separates the 1% from the blown accounts.

Time to join me live on my journey to $1 mil. Real account, real money, real trading. Click the link to watch every trade LIVE in real time. @TradingLucid and @Tradeify giveaway today at 10am EST, just be in steam to enter! youtube.com/live/1xogHqyTK…

@KobeissiLetter Dip buyers win... until they don't. This bounce on light volume feels more like short covering than conviction. Watching next week closely. The real test comes when the algos step back.

BREAKING: The S&P 500 closes nearly +130 points higher, adding $1.1 TRILLION of market cap. Dip buyers win again.

@MIKEFXmk $1.2T in a single session. Everyone's celebrating. But after 20 years in this game, I've learned: The biggest green days often come in the middle of bear markets. Not saying that's where we are. Just saying - the euphoria is usually louder than the warning signs.

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 $1.20 trillion added to the US stock market today.

@KobeissiLetter My phone was blowing up Monday. "Is it 2008?!" My phone is quiet today. Nobody calls when they're up 1000 points. 20 years as an FA and the psychology never changes. Fear is loud. Greed is silent. Dow 50K feels good but flat on the week tells the real story.

BREAKING: The Dow extends gains to over +1,000 points on the day. Dow 50K has returned.

Translation: "Please keep buying GPUs while we figure out if this thing actually works." Every tech bubble has a picks-and-shovels play. $NVDA is this cycle's. The question is whether the gold rush is real or if we're all just mining fool's gold. Either way, Jensen cashes checks.

NVIDIA CEO SAYS THING WORRIED ABOUT MOST IS AI BEING EFFECTIVE

Been in finance 20 years. The back office has been getting automated since I started — first it was Excel macros, then Python scripts, now LLMs. What doesn't change: the front office still needs humans who can tell a client why their portfolio is down 15%. AI can process. It can't empathize.

JUST IN: Anthropic engineers have spent six months at Goldman building autonomous systems for time-intensive, high-volume back-office work

The goal isn't to be right. The goal is to survive when you're wrong so you have capital when you're right. That's what separates professionals from amateurs. Position sizing. I can't say it enough. Remember the old Wall Street adage: Markets go up like an escalator and down like an elevator. #PositionSizing

@zerohedge "No drama" Meanwhile OpenAI is building their own chips, partnering with MSFT on hardware, and Altman is shopping for custom silicon. Sure Jensen. No drama. 🙄

*NVIDIA CEO SAYS THERE'S NO DRAMA WITH OPENAI LOL

@DeItaone Of course he says that. META is his biggest customer. $200B capex doesn't come cheap. Gotta keep the pump flowing. Wonder if he'd say the same about DeepSeek... 🤔

$NVDA $META - NVDA CEO HUANG SAYS NO ONE USES AI BETTER THAN META

@AutismCapital Inverse Cramer never fails. "Best value of the big guys" from the man who said Bear Stearns was fine. Google puts loading...

Google right now