Jeff Bierman, Author at TheoTrade

The Backup Plan Behind Your Stop Loss

October 10, 2026

Hey Trader, Imagine having something that limits your risk beyond your stop loss. Plenty of traders only ever look at the chart. They never look at the fundamentals. After all, fundamental and technical traders rarely mix. However, that means you miss out on one of the best ways to put a floor under your stock. You do it by looking at the valuation. Valuation tells us when long-term investors will finally step into a stock. If you manage to pick up a stock with a technical floor near a valuation floor, you’ve got double the protection. Few traders know what that looks like. That’s what I’m going to show you today. What A Valuation Floor Looks Like A valuation floor is the price where a stock gets too cheap for long-term buyers to ignore. It limits how far the stock should fall before your stop loss gets tested. As long

3 Ways to Trade Earnings

October 7, 2026

Hey Trader, The market throws a billion pieces of data at you. It’s like drinking from a firehose. Right now, I’d start with earnings as the season just got underway. You see, the report date tells you when a stock is likely to make its move. So, you know ahead of time when the opportunity to trade earnings will arrive. A quick look at the earnings calendar shows who reports before your day begins. I checked six days out on the S&P 500 and found 16 stocks. Goldman was on the list, reporting before the open on the 13th. You don’t have to hunt for earnings trades the morning of. You can build them days before. Each name gives you a choice. And options are a fantastic way to play these moves. But, it’s not as simple as buying calls or puts. So, let me show you how I build

How I Find Intraday Trades By Color

October 5, 2026

Hey Trader, People tell me they can’t find a trade. I tell them to go to the heat map. If you can’t find anything there, you’re just being lazy. There’s a trade every day. It’s the easiest place I’ve ever found to spot a trade, day in and day out. A heat map lays out a list of stocks as colored boxes. The bigger the box, the bigger the company. The color shows how far each stock moved today. Bright green is way up, and deep red is getting whacked. That color does your scanning for you. A Dow stock moves about half a percent on a normal day. When one drops 3%, the color jumps right off the screen. Merck did exactly that today. Without a heat map, you end up hunting through names you don’t recognize. I’d rather trade what’s familiar and liquid. Let me show you how

The Sizing Rules That Could Save Your Account

October 3, 2026

Hey Trader, I’m having a really bad couple of weeks. My account is down about 2% since this stretch started. A lot of my friends hold the same positions I do. They’re down 8% to 9%. They ask me how I cheated. You’d think that many of these guys, who are experienced traders, would understand the basics. Yet, they, like most people fail to master the “golf grip” of trading: position sizing. And all it takes is just a few simple sizing rules that I’ll cover today. Look, everyone wants to hit a homerun or at least maximize their potential profits. However, nobody survives without proper position sizing. That includes me. When I taught this at Loyola on Wednesday night, one of my students, Manish, came up to me in class and told me sizing was the whole deal. So, give me a few minutes of your time to show

How To Get Paid Without The Bond Risk

September 30, 2026

Hey Trader, Not all Treasury bonds are created equal. Lend the government money for three months and you get one rate. Lend it for 30 years and you typically get paid more. I want you to look at that extra yield and know if it’s worth taking. I’ll also show you where I park my own safe money while rates climb. The decision rests on one number. Bond traders call it duration. Duration measures how hard a bond’s price gets hit when interest rates move. It’s the risk you accept in exchange for the higher yield. A one-year T-bill barely reacts. Your chance of losing money on it is negligible. Stretch out to a 30-year and that chance turns humongous. Look at what’s happening right now. The 30-year Treasury Bonds are in free fall. Hedge funds are already on top of this. Some high-profile names just moved 10% to 30%

Watch This Number Before The Market Tops

September 28, 2026

Hey Trader, If the market fell 1,000 points from here, I wouldn’t be surprised one bit. I’d expect it. You need to understand why before it costs you money. Interest rates keep climbing. The S&P 500 isn’t blinking. I call it a game of chicken. Two drivers race toward each other, and the crash comes when neither one swerves. One driver is the cost of capital. That’s what companies pay for money, and it rises with interest rates. The other driver is the return on capital. That’s what those companies earn on the money they put to work. The market can only keep climbing while returns stay above costs. Right now, costs are pushing past them… Wall Street is betting AI wins this race. Durable goods orders have climbed 17 straight months, and almost all of that growth is AI. I’ve sat in the portfolio manager’s chair. I know those

How To Pick Crashed Stocks That Survive

September 26, 2026

Hey Trader, Home Depot has crashed. It fell again on Thursday, along with FedEx. Lowe’s printed another 52-week low on the same tape. I call this the bottomless pit. Money managers are dumping good companies no matter how cheap they get. Over my 40 years in this business, I’ve seen selloffs like these make millionaires…or wipe you out entirely. You see, sometimes “cheap stocks” are cheap for a reason. For example, I think Peloton and NIO are going out of business. Yet, on a chart, they can look just as inexpensive as a company worth owning. The good news is you can separate them with just two checks, both of which I’ll share with you. Because when I ran both a couple of days ago, it gave me the confidence to buy a little semiconductor exposure, even at these prices. Cheap Stocks: Will The Business Survives Cheap stocks come in

The Dividend That Could Sink Google

September 23, 2026

Hey Trader, Picture a company telling you it’ll start paying you a dividend every quarter. You’d probably call that good news. If that company is a growth stock, the announcement can cut its price in half. Take Google. It’s a $338 stock. If it announced a recurring $5 dividend tomorrow, I’d expect it to trade at $200. Finance calls this dividend signaling. A dividend reveals what management privately believes about future earnings and cash flow. Insiders know far more about a company’s cash than you or I do. The dividend is how they tell you. That signal works in opposite directions, depending on who sends it. When Procter & Gamble or Exxon raises its dividend, the stock tends to climb. I taught a case study on this at least once a semester for six years at DePaul. I’d still bet 99% of you have never heard of it. A dividend

Why Breadth Breaks Before The Index Does

September 21, 2026

Hey Trader, The S&P 500 broke out today. I want you to ignore it. Because there is something far more important that tells you the strength of the market. You see, the index is one number. It hides what’s happening underneath it, and you pay for that blind spot when the leaders finally quit. Right now, twenty stocks are carrying this market. The other 480 are garbage that nobody even tracks. In fact, half the S&P 500 index sits in bear market territory! Let me give you an example. Merck printed a 52-week high this morning. J&J sat right on an all-time high. McDonald’s printed a multi-decade low on the same tape. Nothing is wrong with the company. I have watched that setup resolve once before. That time, we corrected from 6,800 down to 5,400. And while I love the advance-decline line, it only gives you a snapshot of things.

3 Keys to Set Your Profit Target Before Entry

September 19, 2026

Hey trader, Your profit target is the reason your winners keep turning back into scratches. You pick the number you want to earn instead of the number this tape can pay. The market went into a low volatility shell about three months ago. You’re still pricing your exits off the market that existed before that. You roll the position and wait for the bigger number. You give back gains you already had in hand. I set my FITB number out loud before that trade ever went on. Below, I’ll walk you through the three inputs behind it so you can run them on your next entry. The Market Sets The Size Of Your Number Input one is the tape you’re trading in. I run a lot of models and not one of them shows an edge here. The worst thing you can do in a market like this is force

	Today
09.00	Don Kaufman \| Pre-Market Prep \| FREE SESSION 09.20 09.30 Don Kaufman \| Early volatility 09.20 10.30 Jeff Bierman \| Market structure 10.30 11.30 Brandon Chapman \| Ghost Hour 11.30 12.30 Gianni Di Poce \| Macro overview 12.30 13.15 Elizabeth \| Price Action 13.15 14.00
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14.00	Corey Rosenbloom \| Options tactics 14.00 15.00
15.00	Blake Young \| Market wrap 15.00 16.00

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