S&P 500 Leads As Indexes Continue To Deliver; Argan, Shopify, JPM In Focus | Stock Market Today

17:35Justin Nielsen:Yeah, nice upside reversal at the 21 day line in the previous week. Okay, just a couple more here. XLY, you have your Tesla and your Amazon in this. So no surprise to see a little bit of a hit on Thursday with that Tesla earnings reaction. So XLY down 1.6 % on Thursday, but recovering somewhat today. And we've got Amazon earnings coming up next week, as I mentioned. Now, here's a look at XLY continuing to show its leadership here. You have your GE, your Boeing, your Uber in this area, Justin. But we're continuing to see strength in industrials.

18:16Alissa Coram:Yeah. And I mean, look, there's a lot of these industrials and kind of like the machinery and the electric contract, you know, all these different things that are, again, supporting the moves in AI, again, the infrastructure part. And so it's interesting that this is as strong as it is, but certainly, certainly very good looking.

18:34Justin Nielsen:All right. And we'll cap things off with a look at materials, which led on the day on Friday up about 1.2%. Yeah.

18:43Alissa Coram:Yeah. And you can thank NEM earnings for that one. So NEM, Newmont had a very strong day, was really kind of driving that XLB up. Gold was a little bit lackluster, but GDX had a very different look. And I think, again, GDX is the gold miners as opposed to the spot price of gold for GLD. And so Newmont definitely having an effect there. But you've got a lot of these that have been looking pretty decent, you know, and set up probably also worth looking at silver SLV. Even though that came in a little bit, it's still, you know, above its 21 day moving average line. And then I also want to give a little bit of credit to FFTY, which is the innovator IBD 50, because of all of these sectors, IBD 50, the IBD 50 was really strong.

19:35Alissa Coram:And that's been, that's been trending very nicely lately. Although I will say FFTY, half the gains basically today came from FIX, FIX, a huge move on earnings there, up over 22%. So that was, again, half the gains on FFTY were due to this one stock.

19:55Justin Nielsen:Yeah. And it was, I think, hard to get positioned in a name like this ahead of the earnings report. And you would think building AC, well, this is that AI adjacent type play. At least that's how the market is treating it. You can tell right away with how it responded to the deep seek day in January. So what do you do with it now here? Well, after a gap up, see if it can hold the gap up low, form a new base structure. And it doesn't have to be a full on base even. A number of us were trading Credo, which had a gap up on earnings, let it settle down a little bit, maybe even get an undercut to shake some people out.

20:36Justin Nielsen:And then when it starts to reverse, you can get in. So maybe even that type of setup could potentially be on the horizon for something like fix. We'll just have to see.

20:46Alissa Coram:Yeah. There's always, um, when you want to get into a stock, there's always ways to do it, right? Uh, we do try and make it so that we can manage our risk. And that's one of the benefits of waiting for some digestion because it gives you a higher stop to use. Um, it's, you know, If you buy on the gap right at the open, okay, where do you put your stop? But once you have some trading, okay, now you've got a place to put your stop. And that just allows you to manage your risk. And that's what gives us a little bit more comfort to go into a position when we can manage that. This podcast is brought to you by Federated Hermes.

21:17Alissa Coram:We put our investments through a ruthless vetting process because the market can be unpredictable. And we don't think your investments should be. Learn more at federatedhermes.com slash US. Investments are subject to risk and may lose value.

21:30Justin Nielsen:All right. Let's now take a look at those three stocks that we wanted to highlight, Justin. AGX, this is Argan. Speaking of that building sector, this definitely in there, up 5.1 % on the day, up 14 % for the week, a big outside week, upside reversal here. Yeah.

21:51Alissa Coram:And I like how you pointed out that deep seek day, January 27th. So that is kind of a day that tells you a little bit about those that are AI adjacent. You might not recognize, oh, building heavy construction. Yeah, I'm diversified away from tech. But as you mentioned, that was kind of became very obvious with that DeepSeek news, who really was exposed to that because of the infrastructure, telecommunications and everything like that. But this is one that we were talking about earlier this week. It had that nice support at the 50-day moving average line. And, you know, that that reversal was a little tough, you know, because it didn't quite make enough make up enough ground, but really strong the next day.

22:36Alissa Coram:And then I like where you drew your line because that's a great place to kind of say, OK, here was an area of resistance that it kept on bumping its head up against. And then today it really broke through in a strong way. This one has a while before earnings. So we've kind of been talking about how there's all these setups, but earnings around the corner, you kind of have the option here without earnings. It was a strong day-to-day 5%, but you've got that 50-day moving average line that you could use if you had gotten in a little bit earlier. Or, you know, a lot of times for swing trades, we'll use the low of the entry day.

23:11Alissa Coram:Or you could use the top of that area, the resistance level that it just broke through and say, okay, well, if it comes back into that, you know, maybe it's not the right time. Uh, so again, having a place where you can cut your loss quickly, um, is, is, is great. And it doesn't mean that you have to wait until this breaks above the traditional buy point at 246, 60, um, you've got this kind of early entry and then you can add as it breaks through the traditional buy point. And so that's a good way to kind of increase your exposure to things that are working.

23:44Justin Nielsen:Mm-hmm. All right. Moving on to shop. Sounds like we both own it, Justin, up 1.9 % on the day, finding support at the 10-day moving average.

23:55Alissa Coram:Yeah, but I'm willing to bet that your entry is better than mine. This is one I've been trading around a little bit, get knocked out, get back in. And also, I think it's worth mentioning that this was, I believe, our New America for this week. I think a great thing to look at there are these New America articles because it really gives you a sense of what is going on with the company. What is the story behind it? Because as much as we love to look at charts, there's a company behind these stocks, right? And if you can kind of understand what's going on with the company, it can give you some extra conviction.

24:28Alissa Coram:So I highly recommend reading those New America stocks, you know, some great analysis. And it's not a fluff piece, right? This isn't, you know, written by the PR department of the company. We're really kind of looking at, okay, what does the competition look like? What are the obstacles for them growing? what is their growth trajectory look like so there's a lot to dissect there this one does have earnings coming up in a couple weeks so just be aware of that and a strong move here it came in a little bit but again holding the 21 day moving average line for quite a while here it keeps on getting support at that level so this was just one more example of that support another touch well not quite a touch but came came down to that and it's it's looking pretty strong yes

25:13Justin Nielsen:uptrend here still intact. And let's go to JP Morgan. So speaking of financial sector names and bank stocks, here's a look at one of the big ones. Yeah.

25:25Alissa Coram:So you could look at this and say, okay, well, it had this little consolidation after some strong weeks there really ramping up. And then, you know, not much happened on earnings with these. It was kind of a muted move for a lot of these banks that came out, but it's kind of consolidated in a very short pattern here. Probably not something that I would normally look at as an entry for a position. Sometimes you can get away with those shorter patterns with the swing trade. But another way to do this, another option, if you will, came from Gavin McMaster, who does our options material. So he wrote an article today that was about using a long call.

26:03Alissa Coram:And why that can be important is because, OK, look, if you're going to buy 100 shares in this stock, you're looking at about a$30 ,000 position, a little bit less. But if you wanted to go with the option, you could actually get similar exposure for just $5 ,000 or actually less than that. So if you're kind of at a point where you don't want to give up too much ground on some of the positions that you have, maybe you're running out of buying power. This can be a way to get a position. Now, look, this is also something I have to be very frank with you. If you're dealing with a smaller account, be very careful because while it can be great to say, oh, yes, I'm getting exposure, almost the same kind of exposure as having 100 shares.

26:48Alissa Coram:If you're dealing with an account that's, let's say,$30 ,000, you almost have a$30 ,000 position in this one stock by buying the option. So you have to be aware of that because leverage does cut both ways. Options use leverage. And if it works in your favor, that's great. But if it doesn't, you could quickly lose it all in a very short period of time. And so the option that Gavin chose in this case was actually a pretty far out there option. He chose June of 2026. So that gives you a full year. And the option that he chose was a 270 strike that has about a 75 delta right now. And so it's like owning 75 shares of the company.

27:33Alissa Coram:Think of it that way in terms of your exposure for every point that it moves up. You're basically getting a 75 cent move in your option. So you're getting a lot of participation for a lot less money. And look, if you're a little uncomfortable with that, some other things you could do is you could use a sold call to make it a bull call spread. So there's a lot of things to do that. And that's one of the great things about our options content. We give you options with it.

28:00Justin Nielsen:Exactly. And paper trading, right? If you're new to options, try out the paper trades and see how that works for you. And here's that article right there if you want all the details on this JPM long call option strategy. Thanks so much for highlighting that, Justin. Let's go over to you and some additional charts on this Friday to give us deeper perspective on where we're at in the market trend. We're going to bring him back because we have an additional chart to show.

28:36Alissa Coram:And ready when you are. Okay, let's see. Here is my thinkorswim. So for folks that have been watching Webby, you're familiar with his regression channel lines. I basically just duplicated what he does in TradingView on my thinkorswim. So as a reminder, what we're looking at here is starting the regression channel line back on April 22nd, which was the follow through day. And I think Webby, as he's been going through, he keeps on moving it to the day because that's what we do, right? We keep on moving it along, but then we want to freeze it at a certain point. And we usually choose 50 days as our point to freeze it.

29:15Alissa Coram:So 50 days trading days, I should say from April 22nd is July 2nd. And so that's where is frozen. Now you can see that, okay, the white line is your regression channel line. Your solid lines are one standard deviation above. That's the red line. And then your green line is one standard deviation below. And I think this got messed up. I think it didn't do the 75. So I'll need to change that. But imagine this line down here a little bit lower. It went to the default of half a standard deviation. But it gives you kind of this idea of how the index has been trading. And this is the S &P 500. So as much as it might seem like we're extended, here's the regression line.

29:58Alissa Coram:We're actually still below our regression line. Again, this has to do with how strong it was at the beginning. Now things have settled down a bit. So this to me doesn't look like we're super extended. We're not that extended from our moving average lines, again, because things have gotten a little bit tighter lately. So it's a good look here. Now on the composite, which I think this one does have that 75. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, negative 75. That's where that's what it should look like. We're seeing the same thing. You know, it did come out really strong right out of the gate kind of came up to this one standard deviation above came back down tested over at the regression channel line.

30:38Alissa Coram:And now we got support here at that point 75 below the regression channel line standard deviations below the regression channel line. And that's where we got support. We've just been kind of hanging out here between the regression channel line and that 0.75 below. So things are not looking extended by my observation here. And that can kind of give me a little bit more of a comfort zone knowing that, okay, I might be extended in some stocks, individual stocks, make no mistake. This is the indexes we're talking about. So that tells me it's okay for me to keep my exposure up. But remember, you still have to use the individual stocks for sell signals because I don't care how great the indexes look.

31:22Alissa Coram:If some of my individual stocks aren't looking great, I need to protect myself, either protect my profits or protect myself from losing capital.

31:29Justin Nielsen:All right. So as we wrap, give us your battle plan for the week ahead, Justin.

31:34Alissa Coram:Well, first of all, watch the earnings cheat sheet show with Alexis and Ed, get a handle on what earnings are coming up. And over the weekend, look, it's a good idea to always have your watch list fresh. Keep those, you know, keep those fresh so you're looking and aware of setups that might be coming. And then also make sure that you've got an understanding of where you're gonna be stopping yourself out. Now, for a lot of these positions, you might've started with your stop, you know, let's say 5 % below your entry price. Well, if you've got a 20 % gain at this point, move that stop up. Where is a reasonable place that this stock, if it does come in and correct, where it should get support.

32:14Alissa Coram:Or for a lot of times, if it's not a stock that you have particular conviction in, you might be taking some of those gains at 20 to 25%. And look, you can even move it into some of the stocks that are maybe a little bit stronger. So there's a lot of different ways to play that portfolio management side of the game, but it really does come down to, you know, making those decisions ahead of time. Because if you try and make them in the heat of the battle, sometimes your emotions can creep in. And that's where the trouble starts. So to that end, one of the things that we have as an option for folks this weekend is that we have our level two seminar webinar that we're going to be doing.

32:53Alissa Coram:Last time we updated this was, I think, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So we're going to give it a refresh. Scott St. Clair, myself, Joe Fami, we're going to go through all of the elements of the IBD methodology. So people have in one nice spot, kind of the whole rules-based system to help, hopefully, help them with their portfolios now and in the future.

33:15Justin Nielsen:It's a great foundation for any active trader. So highly recommend checking that out over the weekend. If you can't make it live, you can also watch the on-demand version. So that is an option for you as well. So we look forward to that, Justin. Thank you so much.

33:32Alissa Coram:And even if you do make it live, you still have access to that recording. So it's not like, oh, let me take all these notes and make sure I remember everything. You're going to have access to that recording for quite a while.

33:44Justin Nielsen:It's super exciting. All right. We'll see you then, Justin. Thanks so much. And thanks, everyone, for tuning in. That is it from us for this week. And next week, IBD Live is going to be your go-to place for all the latest real-time stock analysis at the opening bell. And for the first hour and a half of trade, as these big earnings reports continue to filter in, we'll tell you how to or how we are managing our portfolios, socks on our radar, and so much more. So join us and tune in at investors.com slash IBLive. We'll see you there. Hope you have a great weekend and we'll see you back here next week.

34:28Thank you.

34:58Justin Nielsen:medical, surgical products, and supply chain solutions serving all points of care. With a focus on what healthcare needs next, Medline strives to make healthcare run better. See how Medline is woven throughout healthcare and learn more at Medline.com.