Hey trader March CPI came in at 3.3%. That sounds manageable after years of post-pandemic price chaos…but it’s not. Dig a little deeper and we find what we all expected: Gasoline surged 21.2% in a single month. Fuel oil jumped 30.7%. The official methodology strips energy out of its “core” reading because it is considered too volatile. That works fine when oil spikes for a week and fades. March CPI at a Glance Look at the gap between “all items” and “all items less food and energy.” The headline says 3.3%. Core says 2.6%. That 0.7% difference is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Almost the entire monthly increase was driven by energy. Strip it out and you get a number that looks almost normal. Leave it in and you get something much closer to what your wallet already knows. The Problem With “Core” Inflation Every month, the Federal Reserve

  Hey trader,  Crude oil hasn’t been this volatile since the COVID crash.  The Strait of Hormuz is closed…headlines are changing by the hour…people are either frozen or chasing every spike. Indecision has a cost.  Every session that passes without a plan is a session where crude hands money to someone else.  The moves are happening.  The only variable is whether you have a framework to capture them. While I won’t give away all my secrets, I do want to illustrate how I do this. During this morning’s 10% Club session, I called a Bollinger Band breakout on crude oil futures:  The entry was at 115.69.  The stop was defined before the order went in, 114.72 The target was 117.03. It worked like a charm. The entire trade followed a repeatable system that works whether the catalyst is Iran, OPEC, or a random Tuesday. The Setup Crude oil opened strong

Hey trader,  After I take a loss, I move on…most of the time. That’s what you’re supposed to do. But sometimes that can leave money on the table. So, when walking away is discipline and when is it an overreaction to a single loss? This could be the single most valuable lesson you can learn

Hey trader,  “Dance like nobody is watching; love like you’ve never been hurt; sing like nobody’s listening; live like it’s heaven on earth.” Both Mark Twain and William W. Purkey have been credited with this saying. Regardless of its origin, the sentiment holds. My reading of this quote is simple: live authentically, and don’t let

Hey trader, Wednesday morning, I took a textbook Bollinger Band breakout on the euro.  Every rule was followed…Every box was checked.  I lost $100 in under fifteen minutes. The euro spiked 20 pips and gave back all 20 within minutes. Gold did the same thing. So did the Nasdaq. So did the S&P 500. Four

When is a chart pattern NOT a chart pattern?  When it hasn’t been CONFIRMED! Far too many of us jump the gun, letting FOMO drive our decisions. The scary part is you probably do this without realizing it. That’s what I am to correct today. I want you to trade signals, not possibilities. During today’s

Hey trader, One of my favorite books of all time is The Count of Monte Cristo. I love the story so much that I even enjoy the 2002 film adaptation. I’ll be honest, though. The movie loses a bit of its magic for me because of what it cuts out. The changes Hollywood made trimmed

Hey trader,  There are two types of entry signals:  One fires when price hits a level. The other fires when price accelerates through a level with volume behind it. Far too many people assume they’re interchangeable.  That assumption costs money on days when the tape shifts from momentum to chop and back again within the

Gas prices are up 40%.  The average American now pays roughly a dollar more per gallon than they did months ago. But the opportunity is not in hoping for cheaper oil… …it’s in trading the sectors that get crushed when energy costs stay elevated. You see, the gas price increase hits every household budget in