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Editor’s Note: Last week, I introduced you to my InvestorPlace colleague Jonathan Rose.
I compared today’s market to my new Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing: powerful, fast and unforgiving if you don’t know how to handle it.
Then Jonathan showed you what that kind of control looks like in the oil market, where he watches specific signals to identify where money is already moving.
Today, he’s going one step further.
In the essay below, Jonathan explains the core philosophy behind his approach: He doesn’t try to predict every headline months in advance. He looks for the evidence showing up right now – and he’s sharing a free stock pick that he believes fits this market.
That’s an idea I respect. It’s not so different from what I’ve spent my career doing with my own quantitative systems: identifying strength, institutional buying pressure and stocks with the characteristics that can lead to market-beating returns.
And tonight, Jonathan is taking that same approach to with my good friend Marc Chaikin.
At 8 p.m. Eastern, they’ll reveal a brand-new signal that combines Jonathan’s research with Marc’s institutional Money Flow work – including the five stocks it’s flashing on right now.
The event is free, but it starts tonight. So don’t put this off.
Now, here’s Jonathan…
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A few weeks ago, I was at a conference in Washington, D.C.
Some of the best market analysts in this business were in attendance — people I deeply respect, including a few names you’d recognize from InvestorPlace and Chaikin Analytics. Really, really smart people.
And I sat there listening to the presentations, noticing the same thing over and over.
Everyone was talking about the future.
Where is lithium going in five years? Are we in an AI bubble? What happens to oil if the Iran situation gets worse? Where does the Fed go in 2027?
Brilliant takes. Genuinely useful frameworks. I learned things.
But I kept thinking: This just isn’t how I trade.
The analysts in that room have built incredible track records doing things their way. I’m not saying they’re wrong.
91抖阴’s Stock Grader quant system has been beating the market for nearly 50 years. 91抖阴 was shorting dot-com stocks while Wall Street was still buying — and made his subscribers a fortune when the Nasdaq fell 80%. And Marc Chaikin has spent 60 years building tools that institutional investors pay a fortune for.
These people are serious… and successful.
But I realized that I come from a completely different tradition — and it produces a completely different kind of edge.
I spent 20 years in rooms where nobody cared about five years from now. The CME floor. Bond futures desks. The CBOE. You cared about right now. What’s moving? Where’s the volatility? What’s the cheapest way to ride what’s already happening – right now?
I still think that way. Sitting in that conference room, I realized the gap between those two approaches is actually where my edge lives.
Here’s what I’m going to walk you through today.
First, the core principle I trade by — one sentence that sounds simple but took me 20 years on the floor to fully understand.
Second, what that principle looks like when it’s working — with some real numbers from the past year to back it up.
And third, a free stock pick that’s a direct expression of this exact approach right now.
It fits the current market setup better than almost anything else I’m watching.
Let’s go.
The Principle I Trade By
Here’s my whole trading philosophy in one sentence:
Nothing is ever cheap. Nothing is ever expensive. Everything is relative.
When people ask me about it, I use the example of buying a house. When you’re shopping for a home, you don’t walk in off the street and just decide what it’s worth. You look at what everything else in the neighborhood sold for. You find the one whose asking price hasn’t moved with the group. You buy that one.
Trading is identical.
I don’t say “lithium is going to be higher in five years because EV demand is structural.” I wait for the price of lithium to actually strengthen. When it does, I look at the lithium stocks and find the one that hasn’t moved with the rest yet. I buy that one.
I don’t predict. I react. And then I find the most efficient way to express that opinion.
This keeps me out of the trust-me trades. The “this has to work eventually” trades. The trades where you’re crossing your fingers instead of following evidence.
Here’s what it looks like when it’s working.
Earlier this year, the Iran-U.S. conflict escalated, and crude oil volatility spiked. Many investors were glued to the news, trying to figure out what would happen next.
My members and I weren’t asking that question. We were asking where the smart money was already moving.
The answer showed up clearly. Institutional positioning was concentrating in energy names before the broader market caught on.
We entered a bullish trade on Occidental Petroleum Corp. (OXY) on February 19 and exited about 42 days later with a 780% gain.
Shortly after, the same approach pointed us to another energy name — IREN Ltd. (IREN) — where we locked in a 485% gain in about two months.
We didn’t predict the war or what it would do to energy prices. We followed the footprints.
That’s rinse and repeat for us. Quarter after quarter, same process, different names.
Over the past year:
- A 1,076% gain on a pharma name: Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY).
- A 959% gain on a lithium trade: Albemarle Corp. (ALB).
- 700%-plus on a rare earths name: MP Materials Corp. (MP).
- Two separate doubles on a copper miner, Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (FCX), in the same month.
I’m not sharing those to brag. Those numbers come directly from the process. And the process works precisely because it’s not built on prediction — it’s built on waiting for the evidence to show up, then moving.
The Free Stock — and Why It Fits Right Now
One name I want you to look at right now is Ameresco Inc. (AMRC).
This isn’t a glamorous name. It won’t get your pulse racing the way AI plays do. But that’s often exactly where the best setups hide — the unglamorous names where the fundamentals are quietly improving and the smart money is moving in before the narrative catches up.
Ameresco does energy efficiency projects, renewable infrastructure, microgrids, and grid modernization. Its customers are governments, utilities, hospitals, and schools — the kind of clients who sign long-term contracts and don’t disappear when the market gets choppy.
Here’s why it fits my framework right now.
The AI boom, electrification, and aging infrastructure are creating enormous pressure on existing power systems. That pressure has to go somewhere. And it’s increasingly going to companies positioned to modernize and reinforce the grid — quietly, before the headline story fully takes hold.
Ameresco recently reported strong backlog growth tied to renewable infrastructure and distributed power systems. At the same time, institutional positioning around energy modernization names has been building — the same kind of footprint we track before a move develops.
This is not a “five years from now” thesis.
This is a right-now setup. The money is already moving. I’m just pointing to the trail.
Which brings me to tonight.
Earlier, I mentioned Marc Chaikin. Marc has spentsixty years in markets. He is the creator of the Money Flow indicator that’s now built into every Bloomberg terminal on the planet, and a former research provider to Paul Tudor Jones, George Soros, and Steve Cohen.
I’ve spent the last several months working with Marc, and we discovered something when we started comparing notes: We’ve both spent our entire careers tracking the same thing — the smart money — just from different angles.
My work identifies where big, high-conviction positioning is showing up. Marc’s Money Flow confirms where institutional capital is actually flowing in the underlying stocks. One signal measures conviction. The other confirms the direction. Together, they form something neither of us had alone.
We combined them and backtested the result against nearly 200 of my real trade recommendations. Confirmed setups produced 45% higher average gains. Win rate jumped 17 percentage points. And the filter would have kept us out of two-thirds of losing trades.
We’re calling it the Convergence Trigger. We’re going public with it for the first time tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern.
AMRC is one of five stocks where that trigger is active right now. The other four are in the report you’ll get when you .
And again, get all five stocks before the event if you sign up for the VIP list.
The smart money is already moving. The question is whether you’re in front of it.
The creative trader always wins,
Jonathan Rose
Founder, Masters in Trading
