Growth Leaders Sell-Off; Palantir, Insulet, Micron In Focus

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0:25Hello and welcome to another episode of the Stock Market Today video. It is Justin Yielsen here, and we are looking at some interesting action in the markets today. It's August 19th, 2025. And to help me break it down is my colleague, Ed Carson, who is our news editor. Ed, we've got a lot to talk about today. I mean, it was the index has kind of masked how bad it was for a lot of growth stocks. But you've got some stocks to talk about as well, right? Yeah, I don't know if you need my help for this market to be broken down. It felt like it, even though it did it all on its own. Did it all on its own.

1:00But I want to take a look at Palantir, Insulet and Micron technology. Great. That sounds good. So let's just walk through a little bit of what was going on with the indexes. The S &P 500 down about 0.6 percent. The NASDAQ taking a pretty hard hit down about one and a half percent. Dow Jones Industrial about flat. And then we had the Russell 2000 down 0.8 percent. So, yeah, let's pull up some charts and go through it and talk a little bit about the indexes themselves. I'm going to go ahead and start with the NASDAQ, if you don't mind, and have you chat a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, the other index is really not that big of a deal.

1:42You know, it's really the NASDAQ and the growth stocks in there. And even this is masking how bad it was for a lot of names. This is coming down to the 21-day line. So even this is OK. I mean, it's not great to see this kind of drop, but it's not. This by itself, you look at the chart, it's like, okay, it's coming down to the 21-day line. It's done that a few times. No big deal. So not great to see it. It wasn't clear what did it. I mean, there was this and that. Maybe it just feels like people are getting a little jittery about AI euphoria, like maybe is it too high, that maybe we just run up too far.

2:13Because it didn't feel like there was any particular news that really was weighing on things. There was maybe meta. meta, there was reports about a reorganization and maybe scaling down the AI division. It's like, wait a second. I thought meta was going crazy with the AI. You know, it's just sort of like, so even though the news wasn't particularly bad, I mean, it's just like, you know, just sort of like something returned to me. It's just like a normal action that will seem negative in that regard. But yeah, it was not a good day for growth stocks. And as you mentioned, we are still above that 21 exponential moving average line.

2:47That's the green line on this chart, which, you know, usually tells us, hey, we are in an uptrend. But there are those times we did see a little bit of what we call stalling action in here, where, you know, it's a form of distribution. It's a little tricky where you just don't have any progress in the market. And that's something that we do pay attention to. It was one of the things for those of you that have been following the power trend, one of the rules under our market school program, The power trend has been under pressure, and that was due to really a lot of the stalling action, how it just couldn't make progress after a while here.

3:21But this is, you know, we had that move down below the 21-day moving average line on August 1st. We seem to snap right back from it, but Mike Webster, our senior market strategist, has been kind of pounding the table a little bit on this 1980 precedent where it, you know, kind of did a similar thing where we had been really going for a long time on the NASDAQ composite. it. This was back in October of 1980. And, you know, we had a similar sharp move down. We did get back up to new highs, but we just seemed to really kind of stall out and things got a little bit uglier from there. So it remains to be seen if this is going to be the situation we see in today's market.

4:04But a couple other macroeconomic things, of course, Jackson Hole is coming up. A lot of folks looking at that. You know, we've had housing starts. We still have some earnings. We can maybe check in on Toll Brothers a little bit later on, see what's happening there. But let's shift our attention to the S &P 500 because, yeah, I mean, this came down to this level that we were at previously that we broke out of last week. But it doesn't look that bad, not nearly as bad as some of the leading stocks looked, right? Yeah. And even though you'll talk about later, but if you show RSP, it shows you where the strength.

4:39RSP was actually up today. It's like, what? I mean, and the decent gain is like, so that shows you where the weakness. One reason why the indexes are masking is because there seems to be some rotation, that there seems to be not just the growth is leading the downside. It seems like there's other things that are up. Homebuilders are up. You know, there's just definitely names. There's, you know, infrastructure is up. And there's just some things that are doing fine. Financials are doing fine. Some travel names are doing well. Some medicals are doing well. I mean, depending on where you go, like some medical products and biotechs.

5:16But it's just – so it's – biotechs didn't have a great day, but there are definitely some things like insulate, which was up. So it's just there are areas that are strong or holding up. So it just makes it a little bit trickier looking at the indexes. And it's just something for those who are concentrated into growth stocks. And we can talk about it a little bit more when we look at the growth ETFs. But those are – that's where sometimes the real issue is. is that if, you know, you've probably been enjoying the ride up, but it's not so much fun, so much fun on the ride down. Right. The old, you seem to take the stairs up and then it's the elevator down.

5:52Things seem to come down a lot quicker than you went up. Takes a long time to make the progress, very little time to lose it. Let's also make sure we talk a little bit about the Russell 2000. I, you know, certainly was feeling a little bit like, gosh, here we go again with the Russell. We had, you know, back here in November, this move up that was very short-lived, had another one, and then it was just kind of disastrous. And that wasn't the first time. There were a number of these kind of false starts. What do you think? Is this another false start for the Russell where we had this huge strength and we did hold tight at first, but we're kind of undercutting the lows?

6:31I don't know. It just seems like I've so almost given up on the Russell taking a leadership role for anything, even with the, even with the recent balance, it really didn't do that much on the RS line ultimately. I mean, it was a nice day or two. I mean, but the RS line is just continually declining. I know at some point small caps will lead again, but it just doesn't seem like it's happened for so long. So yeah, it's, but again, this wasn't disastrous. I mean, one thing is that often on bad days, small caps will outperform on the downside and they'll outperform in either way. And this was down, but it certainly wasn't as bad as the NASDAQ.

7:07So in some ways, this was relatively modest or something that always seems to swing more than the S &P. And let's just go ahead and finish the discussion with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It was actually having an okay day for a little bit, but we've reversed well off its highs and did close in the lower part of its range, basically flat for the day. Yeah, I mean, technically, it's going to show that it's like close fractionally higher by like a few points. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's like when the NASDAQ's down one and a half percent, if the Dow can hold up, I mean, and everything else is down, that's not too bad of a day.

7:45But it just shows you that, you know, you can be an absolute winner and still you're not getting anywhere you're following. Yeah. And then we took a look at RSP, but I also wanted to make sure we circled back and took a look at the first trust NASDAQ 100 equal weight index. So, of course, if we looked at the NASDAQ 100, the Q's down 1.36, but a very different story when you look at QQEW, only down half of that, six tenths of a percent. Yeah, for the day, not so bad. On the other hand, it's below or just, you know, just right around the 50-day line. So it's worse over the last few weeks. It feels like, yeah, I mean, there were some mega caps that were down, but a lot of it felt like it was 100 billion, the 200 billion, or like the Palantir's, which we'll look at, or other names, some big names.

8:32They're not mega caps, but those are the names that are tumbling. And so QQEW, you know, knocked some of those out, but it wasn't like, yeah. So, you know, on the one hand, it was nice that it was a little bit mellower here. On the other hand, it hasn't been leading in the last couple of weeks, you know, lagging things like RSP, not just the NASDAQ, but the, I mean, RSPs. So it's, that's just something that's sort of interesting. Yeah. And then taking a look, you know, while we're talking about the tech heavy indexes here with the Qs and QQEW. Chips, SMH, the Banex Semiconductor, down below its 21-day line.

9:12Yeah, I mean, it's not great. It's definitely better than some other growth ETFs. Well, NVIDIA has earnings in just over a week. So if you have AI jitters right now, well, we'll see if those are founded or not. I mean, this was not... NVIDIA closed below the 21-day line for the first time since May 1st or something. So that's notable. Again, one good day, and this is at record highs, I'd say with some of the other names, it would take one heck of a good day to be back at record highs, where NVIDIA, you really could be there. So I don't want to make too much of that name. But IGV, that one looks worse.

9:49Ironically, for a while, it was – software has been struggling for a while. In some ways, it was masked for a while because Palantir and Oracle are the two biggest names in IGV. and those were holding up so well until very recently, but now... Until they weren't. Until they weren't. And so maybe today, maybe IGV didn't have as bad of a day as... I mean, maybe software didn't have as bad of a day as IGV, but that's definitely been struggling. And it's now clearly below the 50-day line. So, and this is generally made up of big names. This is not just small fry. So, you know, it's not good action here.

10:26and FFTY, definitely have to take a look at that because that's sort of your hot growth names. And that's a big hit. I mean, that's, you know, it really hadn't decisively, maybe we closed below the 21-day line once or twice, but really hadn't gotten anywhere below that of any significance at the close, you know, really, you know, in months. And now decisively below that. Now it's testing the 50-day, essentially, 10-week. So that's something there. I think investors should be thinking, I mean, if you're more of a swing trader, you might be going way down. Might have been really heavily invested in almost nothing now if you're a growth concentrated.

11:04If you're a position trader and you have big winners, you probably want to get the ball rolling. Wanted to get the ball rolling. It's so much easier if you sell some. Okay, yeah, the market might rebound, but that's fine. That's good. You've got your core position, and you can always buy that stock back or something else. But it's much better than waiting and waiting and finally giving in. And you're the capitulation seller. You don't want to be. I mean, it's fine if you sold your last 10 % or your last quarter at the bottom. I mean, that happens. But you don't want to sell everything at the bottom.

11:36I think just people need to be taking some action. You know, just get that ball rolling. It becomes much easier either way. Either then you can hold on to the rest for a little while or then you can or you can shed when it's clearly that it's breaking lower. Yeah. Yeah. One other place to take a look is IBIT, the Bitcoin ETF. You know, got below the 21-day moving average line yesterday, but closed well. And now we're right there at the 50-day moving average line. I think just in general, this seems like something that you want to buy off the 50-day line. I'm not really encouraging it right now when it hits the 50-day line because it could go below it.

12:13It certainly has. But clearly, speculative growth is struggling right now. Again, this is where you might find support, 50-day, top of the old base. But yeah, crypto is falling just like a lot of other things. I'm Laura Thurow with Baird Private Wealth Management. You've been doing all the right things, saving, investing, building toward your goals. Healthcare can be a major expense today and an even greater one over time. Tools like long-term care insurance or a smart health savings account strategy can help protect what you've worked so hard to build. Learn more at BairdWealth.com slash WSJGuidebook.

12:57Sometimes when we do look at those pullback buys, we are kind of waiting for the strength. This is a good example here where we got that reversal, a touch of the 50-day moving average line reversal. reversal, you had some strength to rely on and a way to really kind of minimize your loss if you're wrong. You know, we expect to be wrong a lot of times, but we want to make sure that when we are wrong, we can cut our losses pretty quickly. So yeah, right now we don't have the strength part of this yet. That's a missing part of the equation. Let's go ahead and take a look. We mentioned Palantir earlier, as you were talking about IGV, of course, Palantir and Oracle and, you know, Microsoft among the big components in IGV.

13:41But gosh, as you said, this is one that's been trending so nicely above the 21 day. And I think that's the thing about a lot of this, trending so nicely above the 21 day moving average line for so long. And now this is a pretty ugly hit down 9.3, 9.4 % off today. And now if you look at the weekly, it's already 17 % off its high in just a very short, period of time. Yeah, that's for a company for a stock that goes up as fast as it does. Boy, it does not take any time at all for this to go down. And just look back just back in February. Obviously, that was a bad bear market and everything that happened.

14:20But this stock lost over lost almost half its value in just a few weeks. And really, most of that was just in the first couple weeks back in February, March, April. You can just see how it sold off so much, you know it doesn't have to hold and there were times it's like you know and just that's just the nature and that's what so many growth are it's not like palantir is like unusual there's so many names that are going to do that and you know looking back there's a lot of those other bases are 30 40 percent probably they just don't look i guess 20 they're right but 30 they you know they're not as bad as we go to the monthly i mean this this this was no bueno right yeah and you sold off to 80.

15:03I mean, because people have talked about, I know we don't usually talk about valuation. This is highly valued, even for highly valued companies. It does have a lot of growth. It is doing a lot of great things, but you could easily, you know, highly valued big winners or tend to be the big losers in a downdraft. And so if we do have a downdraft, again, this could be where we find support. Maybe you'd find support at the 10 week line. It certainly could, but you want to start getting the ball rolling because otherwise, well, where do you? Because then you'd like it can be hard to start selling, you know, it can be hard to, so it depends on what works for you psychologically.

15:34You know, you can try to sell on the way up some, you can try to sell when it starts breaking through the 10 day or the 21 day line, but find a strategy that, you know, there's no perfect strategy. You're not going to sell right at the top and then buy right at the bottom. That just doesn't work, happen, but you want to do a way that preserves the bulk of the gains and make sure that you don't like see a massive gain, you know, wipe out as well. I feel like I'm more likely to buy right at the top and sell right at the bottom. But, you know, that's just that's just my my particular talent. I don't know about that.

16:07But yeah, you're absolutely right. Again, when you're 17 % off the high, it can be a little unnerving to start your selling there. You know, so again, sometimes getting that ball in motion a little bit earlier can help because then it's one of those things where, okay, if you sell when you're down maybe 5 % off your high, then you can kind of make a decision. Okay, if you're down more, you can sell more. and if it rebounds, comes right back up, you can either buy those shares back or you still have a lot that you're participating in. So those incremental decisions are helpful. But yeah, at a certain point when you're down so much, you feel like, oh, now do I just throw in the towel with everything?

16:49Or is it one of those situations where you start saying, well, I'm down this much, what's a little bit more at this point? And that can be very dangerous. And one more point, I just was like, Like this was a really good example of selling on the way up. I think it's like people talking, like David Ryan, talking about the trend line that we had. It's sort of that last burst after earnings. It sort of punched above maybe what the trend line was. And again, maybe just taking, because there really wasn't a sell signal until today on the downside. Because again, so I mean, sometimes if it's going up and then it might have broken the 21 day earlier, but you really had to be down 12, 15 % from the highs to get any kind of sell signal.

17:29And that's not like, oh, panic, sell everything, sell signal, but just some sell signal because the drops were low volume, blah, blah, blah. But this is a place maybe when it's sort of like is gapping up and breaking that trend line and go, wait a second, maybe just take a little piece. Just take a taste. And that helps that regard because then you can – that's some ways it's easier to sell near the top when you're on the way up. Again, that's easy to be hindsight, but it's just like there was a way. that is an argument for why you sell early because there really wasn't a reason to sell on the downside until today.

18:01Yeah. And there again, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. No, no. Maybe you sell a little bit and, you know, if it pulls back and then show some strength, maybe support of the 21 day moving average line, you could pick some of those shares back up, maybe even at a lower price and all as well. And then again, if it keeps on going up, yeah, you're not participating as much, but you still have some. That's again, One of the things about incremental selling or buying, for that matter, that can really be helpful instead of doing all or nothing. It wasn't all ugly out there. Pod, Insulet, ticker symbol P-O-D-D.

18:36This was a medical products, something that we're talking about on IBD Live yesterday and today. What's happening here? I mean, a big move on its last earnings kind of consolidated a little bit. But this did not look like what most of the stocks look like out there. No, and there's definitely some medical names. And medical often does well in trickier markets, like so-so markets, because honestly, the government or insurance companies cover most of it. So they're a little bit more protected on that. So just defensive growth. And this one has strong growth. I mean, it had some tough times here, but the growth has really come back on.

19:13There's a lot of confidence about some growth in there. You can see the acceleration in the last couple of quarters on earnings and revenue growth. You know, there wasn't a lot of volume as it made that latest surge up. That is one thing there, you know, but some really powerful action. It's just something, again, it's tough to buy on a day like this. And I can see, I didn't really do any buying. But if you were to do it, the market is signaling that there are places in this market that are working. And so it's one thing to say, like, oh, maybe I'll take a little bit of foothold in some of these other areas that seem to be doing better.

19:54And as you mentioned on IBD Live this morning, since you were hosting, Learn LRN, which is the company Stride, had a very similar look. This one was also up for the day with a similar look. Micron, just to finish the conversation here, we are still looking for setups, right? We don't give up on setups, and this looks like it could be a cup with handle in the formation. What do you think of this one? It's not in the formation anymore. It just takes another hour for market surge to recognize it. This is going to be a cup with handle in just another – just very shortly. Yeah, that's five days. That's a handle.

20:34So it's not much of a savings, but it's just taking a rest after that. And while the relative strength line might be coming down, if you compare this, I'm sure, to the NASDAQ. uh now this is a nice you know this is nesk but it's like it would just be a different thing and versus growth stocks and versus is just doing much better uh than a lot of names today i mean a one percent decline uh holding yesterday's low those are just not things we saw on many on many tech growth friday's low i mean friday's low i think are uh kind of spectacular right now Yeah, you're right. So it's just something to watch out for.

21:13I mean, they gave positive guidance just a week of last week. So that's probably one reason. It's like people feel confident that the near term, at least, business is strong for this. But yeah, strong volume on the way up the right side, drying up a lot. I mean, it's very little volume today, micron level volume, I would say. Yeah, right. And so it's just one we don't see. Now, maybe tomorrow people say, you know what? I don't know why people are excited about Micron. There'll be a big downgrade and this will fall 7%. I don't know. This is why you do it. It's like we wait for at least, I would say, wait for a down, break of a downtrend.

21:49And with the growth, with the tech market being sort of struggling, you know, I'm going to be fairly cautious about tech stocks. I'll be honest. And if I do something, it'd be with a very, like a pilot position at most. But, you know, if there is that strength, this looks like a stock that wants to do well in the face of real headwinds for the tech sector. Yeah, yeah. So now it's a matter of it wants to do well, but can it. So bottom line here, Ed, I mean, we have been kind of throwing up some cautionary signals on the Stock Market Day video here over the last few days. You know, Webby's talk on Friday, we've been, you know, kind of saying, hey, be on the lookout for exit strategies, you know, just in case things, the stalling kind of starts getting accompanied by distribution as well.

22:40So given the hit today, what should people be thinking for those that maybe didn't do enough selling? And I personally sometimes always feel like I don't do enough selling ahead of time. But, you know, for those that maybe feel like they didn't do enough selling or, again, we could snap right back. How do you prepare for a potential bounce? Well, I probably wouldn't do anything right at the open tomorrow. That's one thing. You never know. We could snap back or we could fall for the first five minutes and then we rebound. I don't know. And look, Powell is, you know, Fed Chief Powell is speaking on Friday.

23:14some of this seems like AI focused or growth focused and not just, but obviously if, if Powell spurs a massive rally, gross, these growth names are going to bounce too. So that that's going to happen in that regard. So, I mean, I just think that, yeah, I think that you'd definitely be thinking, okay, if things aren't, you know, like if I should have sold some of these things, well, if, if it's like half an hour in an hour in, you know, start some of that process. I mean, the worst thing that happens is that you sell a little bit of a stock and then it goes up. I mean, oh, no, that's how, you know, it's like, that's really what you want.

23:48You don't want to sell a little bit and then have the rest of it drop in some ways. So I would just think get that going, get those, you know, start working on it. You know, like it's sort of like if maybe it would have been a good thing to sell today or even earlier. But you should don't freeze. Don't say just because I did it today, I can't do it. Like get going on it. if we bounce back tomorrow morning, it's like, well, okay, maybe you'll be lucky. Maybe, or maybe you'll use an opportunity to cash out a little bit. If you feel like, you know what, maybe I was too concentrated, you can even use a bounce to get out that.

24:22You just have to do things that get yourself to a level that you feel is comfortable for, you know, your exposure level and in this kind of environment. And one thing to just check on, we mentioned this at the outset, that Toll Brothers was having its earnings report. Looks like right now, wow, it was just a moment ago. Well, I think they just reported. So this one could swing all around. Yeah, it's not, I haven't seen the numbers, but I think it was supposed to report. You know, it beat views by a little bit. I don't know what their guidance was like. Obviously somebody didn't like something.