The rial is trading at 1.66 million to the dollar. Inflation is running between 44% and 62%. Ninety million people are converting their savings into the only thing that holds value when a currency collapses that fast.

That desperation is driving up gold miners all over the world, and right now the retail crowd is chasing every one of them on any pullback.

That is the wrong move.

War Pains

GDX, the VanEck Gold Miners ETF that tracks the world’s largest gold mining companies, hit an all-time high of $117.18 on March 2 and has since pulled back to around $94.

Newmont peaked at $134 before retreating to $114. Barrick is down nearly 25% from its January peak. On paper it looks like a buying opportunity.

It is not… yet.

The same war driving gold higher is shrinking miners’ margins.

Diesel fuel, which powers every open-pit mining operation on earth, jumped 70% after Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz. Analysts estimate that every $10 increase in oil prices adds $15 per ounce to the cost of extracting gold from the ground.

That cost is called the All-In Sustaining Cost, or AISC.

It is the full expense of mining one ounce of gold from exploration through production. Newmont has already revised its 2026 AISC guidance to $1,680 per ounce, up from $1,358 just a year ago. Management called 2026 a “trough year” and cut production guidance to 5.3 million ounces.

Newmont is also mired in litigation with Barrick over the world’s largest gold complex in Nevada.

When the gold price rises but the cost of extracting it rises faster, the margin that makes miners profitable gets compressed from both ends.

Analysts are calling this the Great Decoupling, and it is precisely why both stocks are falling even as gold trades near all-time highs.

Buying the dip here means buying into all of that with full knowledge of what is causing it.

But here is what the retail crowd is missing entirely…

The same panic that is hurting the miners created something most investors have never seen… and will never think to look for.

When fear reaches the levels Iran has injected into this market, the options premiums on gold-linked assets reach levels that are extraordinary by any historical measure.

That fear premium is not a problem. It is an opportunity.

The Setup I Have Waited 46 Years For

In 1979, I was 17 years old when Iran threw the world into chaos and gold ran 272% in 12 months.

I watched it happen and did nothing. I have spent 46 years making sure I never miss a setup like that again.

Iran’s desperation is not a short-term trade. A currency that has lost 97% of its value in eight years does not recover because a ceasefire gets announced. That buying pressure does not disappear.

It stays in the market and keeps pushing volatility higher.

The OVX, which measures expected volatility in oil markets and directly tracks the fear premium in energy-linked assets including gold miners, spiked 358% after the conflict began.

Options premiums on gold stocks are at levels not seen since COVID. JPMorgan has a $6,300 year-end target on gold. Deutsche Bank is at $6,000. Central banks have been net buyers for 23 straight months. The long-term case for gold is intact.

The question is which vehicle you use to play it.

So what’s the right way to play gold right now?

Your Action Plan

Chasing miners here means absorbing rising energy costs, a legal war between the two largest producers, and a production trough that Newmont itself is warning investors about.

The discount from the highs is real… but there’s still room to fall further.

The extreme volatility Iran has injected into this market creates an opportunity to collect income far larger than normal and to potentially acquire the world’s best gold assets at 30% to 50% below what others are paying right now.

That opportunity exists because of the chaos, not in spite of it.

Based on my read of this conflict, the window stays open until around September 2026.

On April 29 at 2 p.m. ET, I am going live to walk through exactly how I am positioning myself, including six specific targets I am watching right now.

Registration is free. Seats are limited.

Register for My 90-Day Gold Heist, April 29 at 2 p.m. ET

The post Read This Before You Buy Gold appeared first on Trade of the Day.

The big hyperscalers – Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – built their cloud infrastructure for enterprise companies with big budgets, big teams, and time to burn on complexity.

An AI startup trying to get production inference workloads running fast does not fit that model. Too expensive. Too complicated. And right now, capacity is constrained as AI demand accelerates faster than the giants can build it.

DigitalOcean (DOCN) identified that gap and built directly into it.

They repositioned the entire company around what they call the Agentic Inference Cloud.

Production-ready GPU infrastructure paired with a full cloud stack, built specifically for AI-native companies that need to move from prototype to production without the overhead of juggling five different providers.

The pitch is not complicated: enterprise-grade performance, startup-grade simplicity, predictable costs.

It is working in a way that the stock chart already figured out before most investors did.

AI startups are actively moving workloads off the big hyperscalers and onto DigitalOcean.

One client cut inference latency by 40%. Another cut training cycle times in half. Management says demand for AI inference on their platform is currently exceeding supply, and pricing is holding or rising as a result.

They just acquired Katanemo Labs to push further into agentic AI infrastructure. They are adding 31 megawatts of new capacity across three facilities this year to keep up.

Here is where it gets interesting for traders…

DigitalOcean is a $9.7 billion company. The companies it is taking customers from are worth hundreds of billions each.

The giants are not nimble enough to serve the AI startup market the way DigitalOcean can. That asymmetry is a real competitive advantage and it is showing up in the numbers.

Last quarter beat earnings estimates. Gross margin is near 60%. Revenue growth guidance for 2026 is 21%, with management targeting 30% in 2027.

17% of the float is short right now.

That means a meaningful number of traders are actively betting against a company that just posted a clean earnings beat, raised forward guidance, is taking market share from the largest cloud providers on the planet, and has a chart that has been pointing in one direction for the better part of a year. That short interest is not a warning.

On a setup like this one, it is fuel.

Now, onto my favorite part, the chart.

The trend is stacked and clean on both the daily and the weekly timeframe. Stacked EMAs means the shorter-term moving averages are sitting above the longer-term ones in the right order, confirming the trend is pointing in one direction across every timeframe.

That is the first thing I look for before anything else gets my attention. No stacked EMAs, I move on. DOCN has them on every timeframe I check.

On top of that, a squeeze is setting up. A squeeze occurs when the Bollinger Bands compress inside the Keltner Channels.

Bollinger Bands measure price volatility and contract when the market quiets down. Keltner Channels are volatility-based envelopes around a moving average. When the Bollinger Bands tighten inside those envelopes, it signals that momentum is coiling inside the trend.

The market is taking a breath. When that energy releases, the move that follows inside a strong trend tends to be significant.

Trend. Pattern. Squeeze. All three are present on DOCN right now.

Now add the catalyst…

Your Action Plan

Earnings are May 5 before the market opens.

A hard date is sitting right in front of this setup. 17% short float heading into that date. A squeeze coiling on stacked EMAs on the daily and the weekly.

When momentum releases heading into an earnings event on a heavily shorted name with this kind of trend behind it, the conditions for a real move are in place.

If I move on this, it will happen live during Daily Profits Live.

That is where every trade gets placed, every entry gets called, and every exit gets managed in real time.

If you want to be in the room when it happens, the link is here.

The post Meet The Cloud Company Taking Customers From Amazon and Google appeared first on Trade of the Day.

The stock was selling off hard. Most people stopped there. I kept reading.

Growing revenue with strong cash flow.

A 10% dividend hike announced.

Three billion dollars in new buybacks on the same day.

And a valuation, after the sell-off, of roughly 10 times 2026 earnings.

That is not a broken company. That is a cheap one.

Last week, I walked you through the basics of put selling. Today, I’m going to show you my four criteria for choosing a stock and how I applied them in a trade I closed out yesterday in HPE.

Criteria 1: A quality company I want to own.

HPE is a server, cloud, and networking company with real earnings, real cash flow, and growing AI server demand.

Management announced a 10% dividend increase and $3 billion in additional share buybacks on the same day the stock sold off. Companies do not announce dividend hikes or buybacks if their balance sheets cannot support them.

The guidance miss was about growth rate expectations, not business quality. HPE guided for 5% to 10% revenue growth in fiscal 2026. Wall Street wanted 17%. That gap created the sell-off. It did not change the company’s value.

If I had been assigned shares at $13, I would have been comfortable holding them. That is the filter. If you would not buy the stock outright, do not sell the put.

Criteria 2: A discount of 20% to 50% below market.

After the sell-off, HPE was trading around $22.50. The $13 strike I recommended was over 40% below that level.

The strike price is the price you agree to pay for the shares if they are assigned. The further below the current price you go, the more cushion you have.

At $13, HPE had to fall more than 40% from its trading level and hold there through January 2027 for the assignment to become a real problem.

At $13, you are buying HPE at roughly 6 times 2026 earnings. That is near panic-sell-off territory for a company growing revenue, raising its dividend, and buying back stock.

Criteria 3: Probability of assignment under 25%.

The probability of assignment is a number your broker displays on any options chain. It tells you the probability that the stock will close at or below your strike price at expiration. On this trade, it came in under 20%.

The deep discount is what gets you there. You cannot achieve a probability below 20% by selling puts close to the current price.

The 40% cushion is what creates the low probability. Criteria two and three work together every time.

Criteria 4: Position sizing. Every trade.

You never know when a stock will move fast enough to put you in the shares. I include position-sizing guidance on every put sell I present to War Room members. No exceptions.

If the position is too large, an assignment ties up capital you need elsewhere. The put seller who compounds steadily and the one who blows up are often running the same strategy. The difference is almost always this.

The trade.

War Room members sold the HPE January 2027 $13 puts for between $0.60 and $0.65 per contract. The last fill that day was $0.70 in mid-October of last year. That premium was theirs the moment the trade was placed.

HPE never came close to $13. Members closed by buying the puts back for between $0.25 and $0.30 yesterday. Return on premium came in at over 50%.

Return on premium measures what you kept relative to what you originally collected.

Collect $0.65, buy back at $0.28, keep $0.37. Return on margin, which is the capital your broker requires you to set aside to make the trade, came in at over 30%.

Why a sell-off is the best environment for this strategy.

When a stock drops hard on news, two things happen at once.

The price falls, which increases the distance between the current market price and your strike. More cushion, lower probability of assignment on the same premium collected.

Implied volatility rises. Implied volatility is the market’s measure of expected price movement, and it directly inflates the premium you collect when you sell puts. Fear in the market means more income for the seller.

That day delivered both. The guidance miss sent HPE lower and pushed implied volatility higher. The premium reflected genuine fear. War Room members collected it.

YOUR ACTION PLAN

Option sellers collect a premium that is almost always priced above the actual risk.

A sell-off makes that edge larger. The four criteria are what keep you positioned to take advantage of it.

Stay tuned, because in the coming days, I’m going to share with you how I’m using this to take advantage of a massive opportunity I see in the market right now.

More on that soon. But in the meantime…

Tomorrow at 2 p.m. ET, I’m going on Monument Traders Live to share more tips on how to use put selling to your advantage… especially during earnings season. Add the session to your calendar here.

The post How I Found a 40% Discount and Collected Cash Upfront. appeared first on Trade of the Day.

Covid was over, the windfall was gone, time to move on. Most people have not looked back.

The chart has a different opinion.

MRNA is one of the strongest performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year. It’s up 85% year to date and more than 145% from its low last summer.

That kind of move does not happen in a dead company. Something has changed, and the market is pricing it in.

Moderna is no longer the Covid story.

It now has three approved products… a flu vaccine under regulatory review in multiple countries… and a personalized cancer vaccine in eight clinical trials with Merck.

It is now a platform, not a one-product story.

But none of that is why it is on my watchlist.

It is on my watchlist because of what the chart is showing me right now.

The 8-day exponential moving average (EMA) is above the 20-day EMA, which is above the 200-day simple moving average (SMA).

When those three are stacked in that order, it tells me the stock has momentum and structure. MRNA has held that stack through the recent market volatility.

The relative strength index (RSI), a momentum indicator that ranges from 0 to 100, is at 59. Not extended, plenty of room.

Your Action Plan

The stock is consolidating just below its 52-week high of $59.55, forming what appears to be a bull flag. Trend, pattern, and squeeze all check out.

One thing to know going in: Moderna reports earnings on May 1 before the open.

When a company crushes earnings, the stock does not just jump once and settle. It keeps drifting higher for days. Sometimes weeks.

These are among my favorite trades to take. Not only are the gains massive, but they also come fast.

And with several of the big names reporting this week, you owe it to yourself to watch this video today.

The post Most Traders Wrote This One Off Two Years Ago appeared first on Trade of the Day.

Add this event to your calendar now! Click here.

– Bryan Bottarelli, MTA Co-Founder

The SEC just eliminated the $25,000 pattern day trading requirement.

I’ve been complaining about this for years. Last week, finally, it got fixed.

Here’s the quick background…

The pattern day trader rule was created in 2001 after the dot-com crash. Regulators decided that anyone making four or more day trades in five business days needed to maintain $25,000 in their account or face restrictions.

It was meant to protect retail traders from themselves, but what it actually did was lock out millions of smaller investors from actively trading their own money.

That changes now. The SEC approved the elimination of the rule on April 14.

The $25,000 requirement is gone. Day trades will no longer be counted. Brokerages will monitor risk exposure in real time instead of penalizing traders for how frequently they trade.

Traders of all account sizes can now react to markets the way professionals have always been able to… and make the trades they want to make. It’s a win for all traders.

But an even bigger winner is already emerging: Robinhood (HOOD).

Here’s why this matters specifically for HOOD…

Robinhood’s entire business is built around the smaller retail trader. The average customer account balance is well below $25,000.

The PDT rule was hitting HOOD’s core demographic harder than any other brokerage.

With the rule gone, that friction disappears. The traders who were most restricted, Robinhood’s exact customer base, can now trade freely. That means more activity, more volume, and more revenue for Robinhood’s platform.

The numbers already reflect the strength of this business. Robinhood ended 2025 with record annual revenue of $4.5 billion and net income of $1.9 billion.

Total platform assets sit at $314 billion across 27.4 million funded customers.

The number of gold subscribers, HOOD’s premium tier, is up 58% year over year. The prediction markets segment, a product that barely existed a year ago, is growing at 286% annually.

This rule change does not just help Robinhood at the margin. It removes the biggest structural barrier to growth in their target market.

YOUR ACTION PLAN

You can see how the stock moved sharply higher off this news last week.

I think the upside could easily continue. As new traders trade more frequently without having to maintain a $25,000 account balance, HOOD could easily return to $100 per share and above.

One more catalyst worth noting: HOOD reports Q1 2026 earnings on April 28 – just eight days from now. Wall Street consensus sits at $103.77.

That is another potential leg higher right around the corner.

Given this new rule, I consider HOOD a buy on any dips back into the $80s.

The post Huge News for Traders Everywhere appeared first on Trade of the Day.

The S&P gained 4.5% last week, crossed 7,000 for the first time, and recovered from a correction to an all-time high in just 11 days, the fastest move of that size in 98 years, according to Bespoke.

Most of the attention went to the names that led that run.

TJX was not one of them. It sat quietly in a rising channel, compressing above its moving averages, loading up.

This morning, futures are modestly lower, peace talks faded over the weekend, and Iran tensions are back. Honestly, after a run like that, a pullback was probably coming regardless.

I am not reading this as a crisis. I am reading it as a market that needed to breathe.

In that kind of tape, I go back to the same thing I always go back to. I blew up two accounts early in my career because I chased noise without a process.

What I built after those failures was TPS: Trend, Pattern, Squeeze, in that order every time. TJX is what it finds right now.

All three boxes are present.

The Trend

The trend is the direction of price over the larger timeframe. A trend is up when the price makes higher highs and higher lows, and the moving averages stack in the right order.

An EMA, or Exponential Moving Average, is a line that tracks the average price with more weight on recent data. A faster EMA above a slower EMA means momentum is moving higher.

TJX is trading at $160.90, sitting above its 8-day EMA at $160.21 and 20-day EMA at $159.59 on the daily chart. Both are pointing higher and stacked correctly on the weekly chart as well.

The 200-day SMA, the long-term baseline, sits at $146.54, well below the current price.

The trend is intact across multiple timeframes. That is the first box.

The Pattern

The pattern is what price is doing within the trend. After running to $165 in February, TJX pulled back into its rising channel and has been compressing just above the 8- and 20-EMA levels. Each pullback finds support at a higher level than the last, with RSI at 53 and room to run.

That is the structure I want to see before a squeeze fires. The second box checks.

The Squeeze

The squeeze occurs when volatility contracts before a move. Think of it like a coil tightening. Price stops making big swings and starts moving in a narrower range, loading up for the next leg.

The daily squeeze is setting up on TJX right now. The coil is loaded. The third box checks.

The Business Case

TJX runs TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods. In a high-tariff, uncertain macro environment, off-price retail is exactly where consumers go when wallets tighten. When other retailers get stuck with excess inventory because tariff costs disrupted their supply chains, TJX buys that inventory cheaply and passes the value to customers.

The macro that is hurting most of retail is a direct tailwind for TJX’s business model.

The numbers confirm it.

Revenue of $60.37 billion, ROE of 59%, and EPS growing at nearly 18% annually over the last three years. The company returned $4.3 billion to shareholders last fiscal year through buybacks and dividends.

The stock is up 103% over the last three years and 137% over five.

This is not a speculative name riding a theme. It is a compounding business that is also technically being set up.

Next earnings are May 20, before the open. That gives this setup roughly a month to develop and fire before event risk hits. I want to be in and out before the number drops.

Your Action Plan

This is a watchlist idea, not a trade alert.

TJX moves more slowly than the setups I prefer in Daily Profits Live, where I go after stocks that can move fast in 24 hours or less.

But the TPS is clean, the business earns it, and the chart is coiled in a market where nobody is paying attention to it.

If you want to learn more about TPS and how I use it to find quick gains, click here.

The post A Quiet Setup Just Started Loading in One of the Strongest Charts I Am Watching appeared first on Trade of the Day.

They wait for a pullback that takes too long, miss the move, and then chase it higher out of FOMO. Either they buy too late and overpay, or they wait forever and never buy at all.

Put selling is the way out of that trap.

Here is how it works.

When you sell a put option, you are making a specific agreement with the market. You are saying: I am willing to buy this stock at a price I choose, below where it is trading today.

In exchange for that commitment, the market pays you cash upfront. That cash is yours to keep regardless of what happens.

How a Trade Becomes Profitable

Most people assume you have to wait until expiration to see the outcome. You do not. You can close the trade at any time by buying the put back in the open market.

If the stock holds steady or moves higher after you sell the put, the premium you collected decays in value. You can buy it back for less than you sold it for and pocket the difference as profit. That is exactly what happened in the trade below.

If the stock falls sharply and the put moves against you, you can close it for a loss rather than wait for assignment. You are never locked in.

There are three possible outcomes when you sell a put. First: the stock stays above your strike, the put expires worthless, and you keep the full premium. Second: the stock moves in your favor and you close early for a partial profit.

Third: the stock falls to your strike and you get assigned shares at the price you chose.

Two of those three outcomes put cash in your pocket without you owning a single share.

The biggest risk is not the market. It is leverage. If you sell puts using more margin than you can cover, a sharp move can turn a manageable situation into a serious problem.

The mistake most investors make is treating put selling like a lottery ticket rather than an investment commitment. If you sell a put, you need to be willing and able to own the shares at that price. That discipline is what separates consistent winners from the ones who blow up.

Here is a real example.

Last year, I liked Marvell Technologies (MRVL) as a company, but not at the price it was trading. I wanted to own it cheaper. So instead of buying shares, I sold puts below the market price.

My War Room members sold puts for between $1.02 and $1.06 per contract. That premium was theirs to keep the moment the trade was placed.

The thesis was simple. Either MRVL would fall to my strike price, and I would get the shares at the discount I wanted, or it would stay above that level, and I would keep the cash. Both outcomes were acceptable.

Thirty-five days later, members bought the puts back for 42 cents, keeping a profit of 60 cents to 64 cents. That is a 63% return on premium in just over a month.

Marvell never had to fall. The trade worked simply because time passed and the stock stayed above the strike price. That is the part most people never consider when they first learn about put selling.

Options are “time-decaying assets.”

Next week, I will explain exactly how I found that trade and the specific criteria I used to select it. For now, the mechanics are what matter.

Two Ways I Use Put Selling

The first is as an anti-chasing strategy.

Everyone has done it. A stock you have been watching for months finally starts to move, you buy it because you are afraid it will get away, and then it pulls back immediately.

Chasing is one of the most expensive habits in investing.

Put selling removes the emotional decision entirely. Instead of chasing, you set the price you are willing to pay and collect cash while you wait.

If the stock comes to you, great. If it does not, you kept the premium and you look for the next opportunity.

The second is as an investment strategy. A cheaper way into stocks you actually want to own.

Most investors see put selling as a trading strategy. I see it differently. When I find a company I want to own for the long term, I use put selling to get in at a discount.

Instead of buying shares at the current price, I sell puts at a strike price 20% to 30% below the market. The premium I collect lowers my effective cost even further.

If I never get assigned, I have been paid for my patience. If I do get assigned, I own a quality company at a price well below what everyone else paid.

That is not a consolation prize. That is the plan.

YOUR ACTION PLAN

Put selling works because of a structural advantage. Option sellers collect premium that is almost always priced slightly above the actual risk.

Over time, that edge compounds. It is why market makers and institutional desks sell far more options than they buy.

The retail investor rarely gets to be on that side of the trade. Put selling is one of the cleanest ways to get there.

Done correctly, it is one of the most consistent strategies I have used across decades of investing. It turns patience into income and discipline into returns.

Next week, I will walk you through exactly how I apply this: the specific criteria I use, how I choose strike prices, and what my track record looks like on this strategy.

You’ll want to read that one.

FUN FACT FRIDAY

The world’s first documented “options trader” was a broke philosopher (Thales) who used his weather-prediction skills and a small upfront payment to corner the olive-press market – and made a fortune without ever owning a single olive tree or press outright.

He essentially turned a smart bet into leveraged upside with limited risk, proving that options (and selling the other side of them) have been a clever way to play uncertainty for over 2,600 years!

Modern option selling (especially on exchanges) is much safer today thanks to clearinghouses and standardization, but the core idea – collecting premium for taking on obligation – hasn’t changed since those ancient Greek days.

The post The Strategy That Turns Patience Into Income appeared first on Trade of the Day.

When a company beats earnings by more than the market priced in, institutions do not come in and buy their full position the next morning.

They buy over time, gradually, day after day.

The stock grinds higher the whole time.

This is one of my favorite setups to trade, and I run it exclusively in Profit Surge Trader.

Wednesday night, I recorded a breakdown of exactly what I look for.

Three things matter the most.

The stock has to beat the expected move – not just beat EPS – but actually move more than the market priced in.

A high short float makes the setup stronger because shorts have to cover, adding fuel. Ideally, there is room to run, meaning the gap takes the stock above a significant level of prior resistance.

Your Action Plan

I walk through a real trade that covers all three in Fastly (FSLY).

The stock gapped above years of sideways price action on earnings and kept grinding higher for weeks.

The indexes were getting hammered. This stock did not care.

I also show how I apply my TPS system to it.

Watch the full breakdown below.

The post The One Number That Matters This Earnings Season appeared first on Trade of the Day.

Quantum stocks don’t move like this unless something bigger is shifting.

Capital is rotating into high-risk, high-reward areas of the market.

Speculation is back.

Investors rotated into defensive positioning as geopolitical risks, rate concerns, and AI bubble fears drained liquidity from early-stage growth names. That environment punished nearly every speculative corner of the market.

But markets don’t turn when fundamentals improve. They turn when capital flows shift back to speculative areas of the market.

And right now, the tape is telling you that investors are willing to take risk again.

Commandment No. 9

The development of speculative interest lines up with one of my “Ten Commandments of Trading”:

Speculation – not fundamentals – drives stock prices.

Stocks are driven higher because investors are willing to put $1 into the market or stocks with the expectation that they will get $1.10 back. They’re speculating on higher prices.

It’s that simple.

Fundamentals build long-term narratives. Yes, they are needed to confirm speculation, but speculation drives near-term prices and is often the catalyst for new bull runs in stocks.

It all comes down to the idea that investors trade what they believe, not what accountants report.

Quantum Computing Represents Pure Speculation

We’ve seen this move before.

In the early days of the AI trade, capital flooded into companies tied to the theme long before revenues justified valuations. The narrative came first. The fundamentals followed later.

Stocks like Nvidia (NVDA), Alphabet (GOOG), and Amazon (AMZN) didn’t wait for earnings to move. They moved on expectations.

That’s how bull markets begin.

Now, quantum computing stocks maybe following the same path.

Last year gave us a preview. IonQ (IONQ), Rigetti Computing (RGTI), and D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) delivered huge gains, not because of profitability, but because of future potential and speculation.

That run ended when speculation collapsed in November.

But it’s back.

The move in quantum stocks is a shift in market sentiment, not a fundamental breakout. Capital is starting to rotate back into early-stage names where upside is driven by possibility, not performance.

That’s where the quantum stocks live.

Volatility, sharp pullbacks, and narrative swings come with the territory.

But if speculation builds, price will follow along with renewed bullish trends.

Quantum Computing 101 (Condensed)

Quantum computing isn’t new, but it’s finally becoming investable.

The concept dates back to the 1980s, when physicists like Richard Feynman proposed using quantum mechanics to process information. For decades, the idea remained theoretical due to hardware limitations.

That’s changed.

Advances in superconducting qubits, ion traps, and quantum algorithms have pushed the industry into early-stage commercialization. Companies like IBM and Alphabet are racing to scale systems capable of solving real-world problems.

We’re still early, but no longer in the concept phase.

That’s why investors are eager to return to these names as market uncertainty subsides.

Quantum Stocks Are Still in Discovery Mode

Quantum stocks are in what I call Discovery Mode.

This is the phase where a stock attracts new capital based on potential, not proven results. Volume expands, volatility increases, and price becomes highly sensitive to sentiment and technical levels.

It’s where the biggest opportunities and risks both exist.

In Discovery Mode:

• Price moves faster than fundamentals
• Volatility increases
• Technical levels matter more than valuation

If you’re trading this group, understand this…

Price action is the signal. Fundamentals are context, not the driver.

IonQ: A Real-Time Example of Discovery Mode

IonQ is a textbook example.

The company is still early. Revenue is growing over 100% year-over-year, but profitability remains distant. Like most companies in this space, it’s investing aggressively in long-term development.

Expectations are what’s driving the stock, not current results.

IonQ went public around $11 and quickly rallied over 200% on partnership announcements and commercialization potential. That move wasn’t about earnings, it was about belief.

The same dynamic is playing out again.

Recent price action tells the story:

• Sharp selloff
• Slow, bottom-building process leading to buying
• Increased price and volume

From a technical standpoint, key levels are clear:

• $50 → Resistance
• $40 → Near-term pivot
• $30 → Critical support

IONQ’s 50-day moving average is in the process of shifting into a new bullish trend. This will be the first since September 2025. That bull market trend resulted in a 95% rally in just one month.

The stock’s 200-day moving average is currently sitting just above the stock at $46.45. A move above that long-term trendline will spark another round of buying interest from the quant and technical traders out there.

And if that happens, expect FOMO-driven acceleration as retail investors begin to hear about a renewal in quantum computing stocks.

My 4-6 week target on IONQ is a move to $50. That’s 12% higher than today’s price.

YOUR ACTION PLAN

The next few weeks will be volatile.

That’s the nature of Discovery Stage stocks.

We’re going to see sharp rallies, fast pullbacks, and constant narrative shifts. But there’s only one thing that will determine direction… price action.

Investors will be looking for opportunities to buy into these names on weakness from the current two-week pop. That will create a feedback loop where dips get bought as long as speculation remains intact.

Upcoming catalysts, including earnings and forward guidance, will matter, but not because of current results, only because they will fortify investor’s beliefs in the quantum movement.

Watch price and technical activity for your timing signals. That’s how Discovery Phase stocks work.

If you want more info on how to trade earnings season, I just recorded this playbook for you to watch.

The post Quantum Stocks Signal the Return of Speculation appeared first on Trade of the Day.

Right now, it is building AI.

Most traders write CSCO off as a slow, boring infrastructure name. The chart disagrees.

If you know anything about how I trade, you know I do not care about the story until the chart tells me to pay attention. Right now, the chart is paying attention.

I blew up two accounts early in my trading career. Not because I picked bad stocks. Because I lacked discipline and a repeatable process.

The system I built after those failures comes down to three things in a specific order: Trend, Pattern, Squeeze.

All three are present on CSCO right now. I am waiting for the trigger. When it fires, I act, and when it does not, I stay out.

The trend is the direction over the larger timeframe. A trend is up when the price makes higher highs and higher lows, and the moving averages stack in the right order.

An EMA, or Exponential Moving Average, is a line tracking average price with more weight on recent data.

CSCO is sitting above its 8-day EMA at $81.90 and 20-day EMA at $80.78 on the daily chart. Both are pointing up and stacked correctly on the weekly chart as well. The 200-day SMA, the long-term baseline, sits at $73.85, well below the current price.

The trend is intact across multiple timeframes.

The pattern is what price is doing within the trend. CSCO has been compressing, building higher lows along an ascending support line while the moving averages stack underneath it.

Each pullback finds support at a higher level than the last. That is the structure I want to see before a squeeze.

The squeeze occurs when volatility contracts before a move. Think of it like a coil tightening. Price stops making big swings and starts moving in a tighter range.

On CSCO, the daily chart shows a low-compression squeeze developing right now. The coil is tightening.

Now the company behind the chart.

Cisco builds the switches and routers that connect AI chips in every hyperscaler data center under construction right now.

When Google, Microsoft, or Amazon pours billions into a data center full of Nvidia GPUs, every one of those chips needs to talk to the others at high speed.

That is Cisco’s networking infrastructure. You cannot run an AI cluster without it.

AI infrastructure orders hit $2.1 billion last quarter, up from $1 billion the year before. They are guiding for $3 billion this fiscal year.

Total revenue last quarter was $15.3 billion, up 10% year over year. Networking product orders grew more than 20% for the fourth consecutive quarter.

Gross margins at 63.97%. Return on invested capital at 16.13%.

The CEO called it the company’s strongest year in its history.

They also completed the $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, which positions Cisco as a cybersecurity and data observability leader. More than half of their revenue now comes from software and services.

This is not the Cisco that sells boxes. It is the Cisco that runs the secure fabric holding enterprise AI together.

Your Action Plan

Earnings are on May 20, after the close. Five weeks out. A watchlist idea today has runway before earnings become a factor.

I do not have a position. It has everything I like in a setup, and a catalyst that’s relevant in today’s market. However, I prefer to go after stocks that can move faster and trade shorter time frames.

Which is what I do in Daily Profits Live.

The post It Has Been Building the Internet for 40 Years. Right Now It Is Building AI. appeared first on Trade of the Day.