The curse of thorns & thistles

I often think about the curse that God lays down on mankind in Genesis 3.

Specifically, that he curses man to work hard, till the ground, and yet it will often yield a “harvest” of thorns & thistles rather than the crops he sought.

I think that translates to more than just farming.

For instance, yesterday I spent frantically switching all of my logistics for this newsletter from Substack to a software called Beehiiv. See, I had originally intended to use Substack to release this newsletter and organically grow it.

Alas ... 

I ran into an issue with how Substack designs their emails that terminated my plans there.

Sometimes you work hard on a thing and it just gives you thorns & thistles.

Anyway, I got up & running with Beehiiv (pronounced beehive) and I plan to move this entire newsletter over to that software on Saturday.

For you, that means that soon my Premium subscriber only newsletter sections will, in fact, be only for Premium subscribers. 

I thank you for helping me get this newsletter started, it’s been a blast! I’m excited for what’s coming down the road and I can’t wait to share everything with you. In the meantime...

Sales rose more than expected, an indication that tariffs are not yet affecting consumer spending habits.
Yahoo Finance

Bloomberg

Why it matters…

Once again we find ourselves with headlines that seem to cry out, “the market doesn’t care about these tariffs.” That may be due to the overwhelming size of the Magnificent 7 (e.g., Nvidia’s $4 trillion -- yes, trillion with a ‘t’ -- valuation is larger than most countries of the world’s GDP). The smaller cap stocks (as represented by the Russell 2000) are still lagging a bit.

I expect a drop in interest rates to help those small caps along.

Regardless, the market is humming right now, and until someone either finalizes a trade deal with the White House or Trump swings the tariff hammer hard (i.e., actually impose his big tariffs that he’s been “threatening”), I don’t expect much to get in the way of the bulls.

Speaking of Nvidia, it looks like the news on opening chip sales back up with China might be an indication of more China-US deals to come. If that happens, I expect more liquidity to jump into the market as big money breathes a sigh of relief.

Of course, as I said yesterday, I don’t think the “why” matters. What I care more about is what is the market doing today and is there something profitable I can trade? As for the market...

Comments: The bulls continue their slow climb higher. This is to be expected when the markets are making a bullish run inside a bullish market. If you want to see the big moves higher, well we’re normally in a recovery after a big bearish pullback.

i.e., the markets take the stairs up and the elevator down (...and then an escalator part way back up before it turns into stairs again, 😂)

Bitcoin is just hovering around 120K and it makes me wonder if it will hit my 125K target this week. Who knows? As long as it hovers here, it’s creating a bull flag for the next climb higher, so that’s fine with me too.

I’ve had to hunt for a possible trade idea to share. I’ve picked out one, but the reality is today is more of a sit-on-my-hands-and-wait-on-the-markets day. Meaning, I feel like I’m forcing a trade idea rather than allowing it to come to me.

Still, here’s one that mostly fits my normal trading criteria for you to consider, albeit with one big caveat...