The pause everyone has been waiting for is not coming.
April 2026 was the second-strongest April in S&P 500 history. The only stronger one was April 2020, and everyone was a genius then because the market ripped off the COVID lows and anyone with cash on the books got carried higher whether they understood it or not.
And this time around?
Bullish advisors are near the lows, while the market is defying gravity.
That is exactly the setup for what I call a lockout rally.
A lockout rally is a relentless upward move that leaves sidelined investors waiting for a pullback that never comes. High momentum, shallow dips, and the price action literally locks out traders who sold early or failed to buy when the risk-reward was extremely favorable.
Standard technical indicators scream overbought and stay that way for weeks until the last skeptics finally capitulate and chase at much higher prices, which usually marks the next leg up.
If you have been watching this from the sidelines waiting for a clean entry, you already know what this feels like.
I booked my Riot calls for 137% this morning. We were in the trade for three weeks over in the Trinity Trade, the target was $23, and the stock rallied as high as $23.64 today.
I think Riot has more room and I still own shares of the stock in the Million Dollar Challenge, but a plan is a plan and a trade is a trade. The one that got away was HUT, up 34% on the day. I had every box checked off for that trade and opted for some other miners, and that one absolutely kills me.
That is the lockout rally in action.
The names that fit the setup are ripping faster than the watchers can chase them, and the sentiment data tells you most institutional money is still positioned cautiously, which is why the move keeps extending.
I have been bullish since March, took some heat in February when the conditions for a low were forming but the bottom was not sticking, and the cycle work I do says we have tailwinds for at least a few more weeks before we should start to take it a little easy and prepare for a deeper pullback into October or November.
The harder thing in a market like this is figuring out what to actually do with it.
Which names still have room, where the rotation is forming next, and how to position for the rally that is happening right now without getting caught flat-footed when the cycle says to step back.
I am going to walk through all of it on Friday at noon Eastern in a live session. I will lay out where I think the next leg goes, what I am tracking into June, and the level that signals the rotation.
Click here to register for Friday at noon
– Gianni Di Poce
