Momentum Monday – Defeatism Sells…and A Stone Age Rally?

Howard Lindzon Howie Town

16 hours ago

4 MIN READ

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Good evening…

Tomorrow we see if Iran gets sent back to The Stone Age. It’s like Fred Flinstone meets World War 3 meets social media meme war right now. I am mostly watching oil prices and interest rates (which show no signs of coming down) and how the Strait of Hormuz gets settled up. The banter is sheer inanity. The trolls of Iran on Twitter versus the ‘truths’ of Trump. It’s sad, dumb and mean and the media is loving it. The New York Times and the TV talking heads are joyous with their essays and rants about the end of America. Defeatism sells, especially to a global subscriber base of people that love a soap opera that involves the end of America.

Serenity now!

I follow price because the news, the macro and the fundamentals are mostly confusing. If it is fundamentals you want, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, penned a 10,000 word essay on Stagflation and his worries. Surprised he still has such beautiful hair. Goldman Sachs is lowering global growth numbers. I guest those numbers don’t include space and the universe because Elon’s SpaceX is looking to IPO at $2 trillion.

JP Morgan, Goldman, Elon, Sam Altman, the sovereign funds and most of Silicon Valley is all about getting SpaceX, Anthropic and Open AI public. Their big hope is retail stays excited. It is a race to ‘slop’ these IPO’s at the highest possible price to retail. Even the indexers are in on this race approving rule changes for SpaceX so that they can be indexed day one. If you index (like $QQQ ( ▲ 0.6% ) or $SPY ( ▲ 0.47% ) ), whether you like it or not, the day SpaceX IPO’s, it will be a 5-10 percent position in your portfolio. It is why I mostly direct index with portfolio company FREC.com so I can deselect stocks and change their percentage allocations.

Missile to my head…I think the next big move up or down will be a doozie, so I am just trying to see the red or green of their eyes before I make any major decisions.

As always, Ivanhoff and I focus on what is working right now in today’s show…which is oil stocks, space, select AI agent tailwind stocks, optical and memory stocks, select biotech and military stocks and gold. If you like trading and staring at your screen the markets are nirvana right now. Not for me.

Scroll down below the show for all the segments if you just want to find what’s interesting for you…

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

In today’s episode of Momentum Monday, Ivanhoff and I discuss the following:

Market Sentiment and Wall of Worry
Macro Drivers and Oil Spike
Relative Strength: $XOM ( ▲ 1.67% ) vs. $NVDA ( ▲ 0.14% )
Optical, Fiber, and Space Stocks
Gold, Rails, and Inflation Hedges
The Agentic Economy: $NET ( ▲ 0.04% ) & $DOCN ( ▼ 3.27% )

In This Episode, We Cover:

Market Sentiment and Wall of Worry (0:02)
Macro Drivers and Oil Spike (2:44)
Relative Strength: $XOM ( ▲ 1.67% ) vs. $NVDA ( ▲ 0.14% ) (4:16)
Optical, Fiber, and Space Stocks (5:56)
Gold, Rails, and Inflation Hedges (11:01)
The Agentic Economy: $NET ( ▲ 0.04% ) & $DOCN ( ▼ 3.27% ) (12:13)

Here are Ivanhoff’s thoughts:

Last week, we saw an oversold bounce on expectations that the Middle East war would soon come to an end. QQQ and SPY rallied to their declining 20-day moving averages, where they found initial resistance.

It is remarkable how resilient stocks remain despite the price of crude oil nearly doubling in just six weeks. Historically, almost every U.S. recession since WWII has been preceded by a sharp rise in oil prices. Given that the average recessionary drawdown is approximately 24%, the market appears somewhat optimistic – the S&P 500 is trading about 6% below its all-time high. The market even bought the bad news on Thursday – stocks gapped down on Trump’s war comments and quickly recovered.

Despite all the scary headlines and excessive volatility, there might even be a follow-through day in the indexes next week. The IBD definition of a FTD is a 1% gain in an index above the previous day’s volume if it comes 4 to 7 days after the latest market low. The good news is that there are stocks to buy if there’s one. I am not that confident that such buys will amount to much.