How We’re Winning Through the Age of Chaos

By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily

In This Digest:

This strategy is up 18% in a chaotic year
How we’re dealing with this whiplash market
These natural gas stocks are flashing a buy right now

More Iran war whiplash…

On Saturday, President Trump gave the Iranian government 48 hours to reopen the Strait of Hormuz – or face strikes on its power plants.

This came 12 hours after he said he was “winding down” the war.

Then this morning, Trump said he’d delay the attacks on the power plants by five days due to ceasefire talks… which Iran’s state media has denied… and then Trump doubled down.

On this last group of headlines, Brent crude oil fell more than 7%. And the S&P 500 surged 2%, making up for all the losses since Friday’s open.

This is, if you’ll pardon our French… totally nuts.

It’s also completely in keeping with our Age of Chaos theory.

As we’ve been hammering on in these pages for years, we expect the 2020s to be the most chaotic, turbulent, and opportunity-filled decade in living memory.

And as we progress through the decade, the intensity of the chaos keeps ratcheting up.

The whiplash didn’t start with the Iran war…

It started in 2020 when the COVID pandemic triggered a 32% collapse in the S&P 500 in a matter of weeks… and a full recovery within months.

That taught markets to treat any apocalyptic news with a pinch of salt… and be ready to buy back in at a moment’s notice. And the systems built to trade on news flow learned to move faster with every shock that followed.

Inflation panic and the Fed’s rate hikes in 2022 sent the S&P 500 down 25% in nine months… and into a full recovery just over a year later.

Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement in 2025 caused the S&P 500 to drop more than 20% in two days… and recover those losses in less than a month.

Now, the war with Iran has run headlong into an AI disruption trend that has taken the S&P 500 down 5% this year.

And we’re waiting to see what happens next.

This is the Age of Chaos. And frankly, it’s damn hard to deal with if you’re reacting to every headline.

But if you let the data guide the way like we do here at TradeSmith, you can make a lot of money in a market like this.

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A 222% gain in 8 days. A 94% gain in 24 hours. A 1,285% gain in 48 hours. Years worth of gains during some of the worst crises on record. Now, with the most dangerous market setup in 25 years quietly building, this former $200 million money manager is revealing his full playbook. See his 10X strategy here.

This data-driven trade made 18% in 11 weeks…

That’s what subscribers to our Chaikin Flash Portfolio advisory have been able to make since we launched this automated portfolio on Jan. 5.

It takes the top-rated stocks according to Wall Street legend Marc Chaikin’s Power Gauge and combines them with our Short-Term Health tool.

If you don’t know Marc or the Power Gauge, you’re missing out.

As the founder of Chaikin Analytics, Marc relies on data and algorithms to navigate the markets.

Over the course of his 50+ year career in markets, he’s managed money for billionaire hedge fund managers like Paul Tudor Jones, Steve Cohen, and George Soros.

These days, he shares his award-winning investment tech – and his market forecasts – with more than 800,000 everyday investors around the world.

His most popular indicator is the Power Gauge – a rating system that scores each company on the health of its earnings, revenue, and institutional buying activity.

A Very Bullish rating means the fundamentals support the price action – not just a momentum trade, but a company firing on the right cylinders. A Very Bearish rating means the opposite – poor fundamentals combined with poor momentum.

We’ve combined the Power Gauge with our Short-Term Health indicator to build a 5-stock portfolio with strong underlying fundamental quality and technical momentum.

Here’s how the Chaikin Flash Portfolio works:

Find stocks in the tech-filled Nasdaq 100 in Short-Term Health Green Zones that also rate Very Bullish in the Power Gauge.
Run these stocks through TradeSmith’s machine learning algorithm.
Hold the resulting strongest five until the momentum breaks and they enter Short-Term Health Red Zones.

Eleven weeks later, the Nasdaq 100 is down about 5% from that starting point. But our Chaikin Flash Portfolio is up an average of 18%.

That gap is what a disciplined, two-factor approach can deliver, even when the broad market is struggling.

We’ll be launching more strategies like this one in 2026, including one coming up in just a few weeks. So stay tuned. This has become one of our favorite trading strategies… for good reason.

Are you in the natural gas trade?

Last Wednesday, Iranian missiles struck Ras Laffan Industrial City in Qatar – the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and export facility.

The attack knocked out about 17% of Qatar’s LNG export capacity. Repairs are expected to take three to five years.

Qatar supplies roughly 20% of the world’s LNG – and countries like China, South Korea, and India have no domestic supply to fall back on.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz and taking energy shipping offline is one thing. Taking out capacity to produce energy is something else entirely. And no matter what happens in the war, that LNG is going to stay offline for some time.

That means we should look closely at the natural gas-focused stocks lighting up Green on our Short-Term Health indicator.

Here’s a list of the recent buy signals in our system across the S&P 500, S&P 400, and S&P 600 oil-and-gas companies:

EQT (EQT), the largest natural gas producer in the U.S., has been in a Green Zone for more than four weeks and is up more than 12% as of Friday’s close.

EQT’s Appalachian Basin output feeds the pipeline network supplying U.S. Gulf Coast LNG export terminals.

Antero Resources (AR) and Range Resources (RRC) are also Appalachian-based natural gas exploration and production companies. Both have been in Green Zones for more than four weeks and are up 28.7% and 23.7% since those Flash Buy signals fired.

And Murphy Oil (MUR), Par Pacific (PARR), and SM Energy (SM) are oil-focused names also showing up in the same screener with recent entries.

Short-Term Health signals can stay green for months, even years, when the underlying trend is strong enough.

If we’re looking at a lengthy supply disruption in LNG – and the repair timeline for Ras Laffan suggests we are – the most recent buy signals in this group are worth a close look.

And keep in mind, our Short-Term Health system was pinging these names well before the attacks on Qatar’s LNG production capacity.

The energy trade is also lighting up on our Quantum Edge system…

Short-Term Health isn’t the only TradeSmith tool highlighting natural gas stocks. So is our Quantum Edge system.

Every stock in the TradeSmith platform gets a Quantum Score – a single number between 0 and 100.

That score combines two factors: how strong the company’s fundamentals are (earnings growth, revenue, margins) and how strong the technical picture is (price momentum and unusually large institutional buying volume).

Anything above 80 is a buy. The higher the score, the stronger the case.

Here’s a look at the top 10 stocks by Quantum Score in our system right now.

A few things stand out immediately.

Oil and gas are well represented at the top:

VALARIS (VAL), an offshore oil-drilling company, scores 97.1.
NPK International (NPKI), which makes equipment for oil and gas operations, also scores 97.1.
USA Compression Partners (USAC), a natural gas midstream company, scores 95.9.

Right now, that number is telling you that the market’s real strength isn’t in the Nasdaq. It’s in the Energy sector, particularly stocks involved in natural gas production and shipping.

To building wealth beyond measure,

Michael Salvatore signature