The Upcoming Week 10/19/25
Happy Sunday everyone, I hope you’re all enjoying your weekend.
This was a news heavy week. Tariff threats, rumblings about trouble in regional banks, the government shutdown, a call between Putin and Trump, and the start of earnings season all led to a spike in volatility. It’s been smooth sailing for the last six months so it feels like we were “due” for this moment. All things considered, the markets continue to hang in just fine.
To put things into perspective, after everything that happened this past week, the NASDAQ and S&P500 are less than 2% off all time highs. The commentary, volatility, social media sentiment, etc. would have you thinking we’re in the midst of a legitimate correction. In reality this was a routine breather.
Despite the volatility, performance YTD is still strong:
NASDAQ: +17.6%
S&P500: +13.5%
Russell 2000: +9.8%
Dow: +8.96%
Let’s take a look at the indices below.
NASDAQ:
S&P500:
Russell 2000:
DOW:
These charts do not paint an ugly picture. You can barely even see any volatility outside of the chart of the Russell 2000, and the NASDAQ even closed at a new weekly all time high. This is why I always emphasize having a big picture mentality when it comes to trading or investing. We’re in the midst of a monstrous bull market, and a few days or even a few weeks of chop or consolidation do not necessarily change the outlook. When you own growth stocks, especially the popular ones everyone is talking about today, your account will see more volatility and larger drawdowns than the overall market when we hit turbulence. You either have to accept this or invest in a different group of stocks that have less volatility.
I want to start this off by saying one thing.
Risk and volatility is the price of admission.
If you want the luxury of participating in arguably the most transformative technological revolution of all time, you have to accept risk and volatility. You don’t get to create wealth in the stock market without it. If the market were a risk free, volatility free way to make money, everyone would be doing it. But that’s not how this works.
When you talk to most people whether it’s family or friends, they’ll often tell you the market is a scam, rigged, or that it’s something only the mega rich benefit from. Chances are they’ve either lost money themselves or know someone who got burned chasing a random stock recommendation on a message board and walked away forever. The market isn’t designed to make it easy because not everyone is meant to participate.
Most people want the reward without the risk and the upside without the potential of a drawdown. But the market doesn’t work that way. To be more specific, participating in this once in a generation stock market led by a shift in technology, innovation, and capital flow means you have to accept risk and volatility.
I also want to highlight that this past week I posted the first of many educational pieces. This one was highly requested and centered around position sizing, one of the most challenging aspects of trading and investing. It covered how to think about risk allocation, how to size positions based on conviction and volatility, and how to manage exposure across a portfolio without over leveraging or diluting returns. You can find the link to that article here.
Going forward I plan to post at least one educational article every week, each focused on a specific topic that’s been most requested by readers. I already have plenty in the backlog covering everything from how to decide if you should sell, stage analysis, being positioned in stocks before a breakout, long term investing, how to spot a macro top, deep dives into historical trade setups and lessons learned from past market cycles, etc. If there is anything specific you’re interested in, leave a comment below and I’ll add it to the backlog. The goal with these pieces is to build a catalog of educational resources one can revisit over time.
Now, it’s time for a recap of what we saw this past week, a look at the week ahead, some emerging themes and trades I see developing, and a group of individual names worth keeping an eye on.