Halfway Recap
The final Sunday of June, and the S&P 500 closes the week at fresh all-time highs. It’s a fitting way to mark the halfway point of the year—and a good moment to step back and reflect on what’s worked, what’s been shared here in these weekly notes, and the path being considered ahead.
This week’s letter includes updated charts on all active trade ideas, but before we get to that, a few thoughts on the road so far.
Back in February, this letter issued its first risk-off alarm of the year. All three signals—trend, breadth, and momentum—flipped negative on February 21. What followed was a 19% drawdown over the next 31 trading days. The timing of that alarm was one of the strongest signals this system has issued since I began publishing this letter.
By April, panic had peaked. Sentiment and US equity positioning had washed out. The bottoming process was the focus of the weekly notes, and the system began shifting back to offense. It wasn’t about calling the exact low—it was about getting the environment right. Since then, the S&P 500 has reclaimed its trend, regained breadth, and marched higher with a clean structure.
Now, we’re potentially progressing into the opposite phase—where sentiment extends deep into greed and positioning becomes stretched. It’s not that the market can’t go higher (it certainly can), but this is the part of the cycle where confidence builds quietly, corrections feel overdue, and dips get bought without hesitation. It looks confident. It feels easy. It rewards complacency. I don’t know how high the S&P 500 will go from here, but I do have a sense for how this stage tends to feel. And when the tide turns, I trust the risk-off criteria will trigger an alarm—just as it did in February.
The goal here is not to guess the peak. It’s to stay present, use structure, and manage risk as the environment evolves. This year, the system has delivered on that.
Heading into July, the market remains bullish—until proven otherwise. And as always, when the character of the trend changes, I’ll be back in your inbox with a midweek note and a clear shift in tone. Until then, the focus remains on participating in the trend, capturing outperformance through the broader ARKK trade and select individual ideas that show favorable risk-reward setups.
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Risk Off Criteria: 0 of 3 Active
For nearly the entirety of June the market operated with 1 of 3 risk criteria active, at the end of Thursday’s sessions this has resolved to 0 of 3.