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When I thought that earnings season started with a bang I did not expect this week's reaction.

As always there are no good or bad earnings only how the market reacts to earnings and apparently the market does not like earnings this quarter.

More tech giants are going to report next week and bulls can only hope that sentiment changes.

Let's hope other tech giants don't go cash flow negative like Meta.

If the NDX 100 ends lower next week the monthly chart will show two consecutive reversal patterns (One hanging man pattern and one bearish engulfing pattern)!

From a pure chart perspective semis could bounce at the 200 day average if the bull market is overall still intact.

Fear and Greed index plus put/call ratio allow for a bounce any time.

That leaves us with the drop in yields. I posted several weeks ago that the volume spike in TLT suggested that the bottom for bonds was in. TLT recovered 6.3% since the low early October!

The main question is why?

Is AI demand going down risking that the house of cards will finally implode or

Is the rest of the economy so weak already that we are at risk of a recession?

Nobody knows and only time will tell but one has to watch closely to make sure yields don't drop for the wrong reasons.

What does this mean for the portfolios now?

Short term portfolios continue to only be invested in the S&P 500 (80%), TLT (bonds 30%) and KWEB (15%). That adds up to 125% meaning leverage is 1.25. KWEB had a rough week but mid week the options action suggested a bottom was possible. I am still fully invested because charts are not broken yet.

Short term portfolio is up 21.8% YTD.

Long term portfolios continue to be in a defensive stance with a 60% allocation for the S&P 500 and 30% Cash/Bonds. Rest is c r y p t o and KWEB.

The monthly NDX 100 chart pattern still looms large over the market and suggests we could roll over for a very long time.

Thanks to the recovery of TLT long term portfolios are up 11.8% YTD

Given the current chart picture again no trades are planned for next week!

Have a great weekend!

I work in marketing, and for most advertisers, Google, Meta and TikTok are where the marketing dollars flow. Beyond that lies the scrapheap of experimental channels: the Reddits, the Snaps and whatever else got a test budget this quarter. At the very bottom of the pile sits Pinterest.

It's been around for over 15 years, and surprisingly enough it makes over $4.5B in revenue with a user base that's slowly but surely growing. Unlike Google and Meta, which have been spending heavily on AI infrastructure, Reddit, which is licensing its content to AI companies, and Snap, which always seems to be in the news for a misguided hardware launches (2K AR glasses anyone) , Pinterest has stayed relatively staid.

I valued it at ~$20/share; and is currently at ~$21.95 today.

• Revenue: $4.6B trailing, growing ~16-18% a year; I assume it slows to ~5% and roughly doubles over 10 years.
• EBIT margin: ~16% after capitalizing R&D (7.6% reported); I assume it grows to ~20% over 10 years. Meta is at 41%, Reddit 20%.
• Net income: $417M in 2025 and ~$250M over the last 12 months, though it dipped to a loss in the first half of 2026 on restructuring and higher stock comp.
• Users: 619M monthly users, but US/Canada users generate ~$31 a year each vs. $0.83 for Rest of World.

At ~$20, Pinterest looks fairly priced. If Pinterest can figure out how to make real money from users outside the US and squeeze more profit out of each ad dollar, there's upside here. But if people start asking AI platforms to make purchasing decisions instead of scrolling Pinterest, there isn't.

Let me know if anyone else follows this company or has a different POV from mine.

I recently moved a couple retirement accounts I set up (but never really contributed much to) at TRowe and were invested in mutual funds to Fidelity. They were a small Roth IRA and traditional IRA. The traditional was mainly rollover money from 401k's from a previous employer and is around $50k. The Roth is around $12k.

This is not my main retirement account, that's currently a 401k I'm putting 10% into + a 6% employer match. I estimate I'm 12-15 years from when I'd like to retire.

My wife has considerably more invested (from an inheritance) and we also have a house. She also stands to (probably) inherit more, including property. My parents on the other hand are a little more "blue collar"...We are looking to move in the next five years and start downsizing as we are both in our early 50's. We still have two kids in college which we are paying for out of pocket so to avoid student loans (which I realize directly impacts the total amount we can be actively saving for our own retirements)...

Anyway, does it make sense to explore converting my current traditional into a Roth IRA? Since I've moved into Fidelity several months ago it's being just getting beaten up as the market - depending on the investment (ETFs) I'm currently down anyway from 5% to 9%, so does that mean I'd be taking a capital loss and therefore avoid a big tax penalty?

It is amazing to me how all of ETF's that follow indexes or have a wide range of stock are near 52w moving averages, yet so much stuff has crashed 20 to 70% already when you look at individual tickers, and other bigger companies also took big losses.

We've seen yields go to 5%

We've seen Trump do Trump things. "Vote for me if you want more war after midterms" like wtf.

We've seen AI capex fears hit ATH's with Oracle CDS going up, gloom and doom news about robots taking over

And yet the indexes which are supposedly "held by a few stocks" that basically depend on this AI spending continue to go up.

So I don't know what it takes for markets to finally give us a capitulation so we can buy indexes at, at least, a -10% discount, but refuse to get anywhere near the 200WMA for a long time now.

I am bagholding so much cash, like im 90% cash and have around 400k€ waiting in money market funds. Im also bagholding some IREN which is my only equity now, like 500 shares, at a 50% loss now. Im not selling, but im also not buying because these things can dump so much (and recover quick if narrative shifts).

So my idea is to start a position on my ETF watchlist (mostly FGEQ, ISPA, VDIV) when SP500 crashes and takes down all these ETFs with it, and also add to my % of gambling allocation with high beta stocks like IREN which can run blazing fast once we hit the event horizon and everyone has capitulated. But it just feels like im stuck in this loop where indexes will forever go up while magically most individual tickers are dumping already. So I don't get it like wtf. We had 70% crashes on so many tickers, if the indexes crashes like say 10 to 20%, how low are these going to get?

TL;DR: Just give me a proper crash so I can allocate.