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February 8, 2025

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The Finance sector is leading the market with a new high this week and the Bank SPDR (KBE) is extending on its breakout. Today’s report will outline the lessons of the early January setup and show the mid January breakout. We then show how to set a re-evaluation level that would prove the breakout wrong.

Let’s first review the setup from mid January. The chart below shows KBE hitting a new high in late November and then falling into mid January. The new high affirms a long-term uptrend and KBE remained well above the rising 200-day SMA. Thus, this decline was viewed as a correction within a long-term uptrend. During such pullbacks, I look for Bullish Setup Zones using retracement levels, prior resistance breaks and support levels. These are zones to watch for firming and a reversal.

Three items mark the Bullish Setup Zone on the chart above (see 1, 2 and 3). First, corrections within uptrends typically retraced 1/3 to 2/3 with 1/2 (50%) being the base case. A 50% retracement represents one step backward after two steps forward. Second, a key tenet of technical analysis is that broken resistance levels turn into support. KBE broke resistance around 55 and this area turns into future support. Third, KBE held the 53 area with two bounces in late October and early November (support). Taken together, the 50% retracement, broken resistance and support mark a Bullish Setup Zone in the 53-55 area (blue shading).

The strategy at TrendInvestorPro is to find and trade pullbacks within leading uptrends. Each week we bring you setups in ETFs and stocks. Click here to take a trial and learn more.

Once prices reach the Bullish Setup Zone, it is time to start drawing patterns and marking resistance levels. KBE formed a falling wedge and established short-term resistance with the January 6th high (pink line). Note that falling wedge patterns are typical for corrections within bigger uptrends. KBE broke out with a gap-surge in mid January and extended higher into February. The indicator window shows the price-relative (KBE/RSP ratio) turning up with a relative breakout. KBE is also leading again.

With an active breakout and extension higher, it is time to mark a re-evaluation level. This is the level that negates the wedge breakout and tells us something is wrong. Strong breakouts should hold so a failed breakout shows weakness. The breakout zone in the 55-56.5 area turns into first support (blue shading). A close below 55 would negate this breakout and call for a re-evaluation.

The strategy at TrendInvestorPro is to find and trade pullbacks within leading uptrends. Each week we define the market regime (bull or bear market), identify the leading groups using ETFs and highlight tradeable setups in stocks and ETFs. This week we featured the three biotech ETFs, two biotech stocks, a Mag7 stock and an industrial stock. Click here to take a trial and gain full access.

Trudeau’s comments, first reported by the Toronto Star, were picked up on an open microphone when Trudeau believed the media had been escorted out.

“Mr. Trump has it in mind that the easiest way to do it is absorbing our country and it is a real thing. In my conversations with him on…,” Trudeau said, according to audio from the Canada-US Economic Summit in Toronto shared by CBC News, before the microphone cut out.

Trudeau made the comments after delivering an opening address at the summit, and after journalists had left the room, CBC reported.

He added that Canada becoming another US state was “not going to happen.”

Trump followed through with his threats to impose tariffs on Canada last week, announcing a new 25% duty on most Canadian goods imported into the US. However, after Trudeau made commitments to bolster security at Canada’s border, Trump announced Monday a pause on the proposed tariffs for at least a month.

After a call with Trump, Trudeau said Canada would be implementing its previously announced $1.3 billion border plan, as well as committing to appointing a “fentanyl czar” and listing cartels as terrorists.

This post appeared first on cnn.com

OpenAI said on Thursday that the company is considering building data center campuses in 16 states that have indicated “real interest” in the project, which is linked to President Donald Trump’s Stargate plans.

On a call with reporters, OpenAI executives said it sent out a request for proposals (RFP) to states less than a week ago.

“A project of this size represents an opportunity to both re-industrialize parts of the country, but also to help revitalize where the American Dream is going to go in this intelligence age,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, said on the call.

Shortly after his inauguration last month, President Trump introduced Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to bolster U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure. Key initial technology partners will include Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle, as well as semiconductor company Arm. They said they would invest $100 billion to start and up to $500 billion over the next four years.

The 16 states OpenAI is currently considering are Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia.

Construction on the data centers in Abilene, Texas, is currently underway. In the coming months, OpenAI will begin announcing additional construction sites “on a rolling basis,” according to the presentation. Each campus is designed to support about one gigawatt of power or more.

OpenAI is aiming to build five to 10 data center campuses total, although executives said that number could rise or fall depending on how much power each campus offers.

The company also said it expects each data center campus to generate thousands of jobs. That includes construction and operational roles. But Stargate’s first data center in Abilene could lead to the creation of just 57 jobs, according to recent reports.

When OpenAI executives were asked how much electricity and water the data centers are expected to consume and how many workers they will employ, Keith Heyde, director of infrastructure strategy and deployment, said there were some sites where the company may look to partner with a utility and help develop other power-generation methods.

Heyde also said the company is looking into a “light water-footprint design.” Lehane declined to offer specifics about water usage.

Large-scale data centers have sparked controversy in recent years for their staggering environmental costs. The facilities consume a much as 50 times more energy per square foot than an average commercial office building, according to Energy.gov, and they’re responsible for approximately 2% of total U.S. electricity use.

In 2022, Google said that the average Google data center the prior year consumed approximately 450,000 gallons of water per day for server cooling. At least one data center it built could use between one and four million gallons of water per day, Time reported.

But the pressure to advance AI in the U.S. is picking up due to the speedy pace of development in China.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup lab, saw its app soar to the top of Apple’s App Store rankings after its debut and roiled U.S. markets early last week on reports that its powerful model was trained at a fraction of the cost of U.S. competitors.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has praised DeepSeek’s model publicly, calling it “clearly a great model” at an event last week.

“This is a reminder of the level of competition and the need for democratic Al to win,” Altman said at the event, adding that it points to the “level of interest in reasoning, the level of interest in open source.”

Lehane said it’s all adding urgency to efforts in the U.S.

“Right now, there’s really only two countries in the world that can build this AI at scale,” Lehane said on Thursday. “One is the CCP-led China, and the other is the United States, and so that’s sort of the context that we’re operating in. Up until relatively recently, there was a real sense that the U.S. had a material lead on the CCP.”

He added that reports surrounding DeepSeek made “really clear that this is a very real competition, and the stakes could not be bigger. Whoever ends up prevailing in this competition is going to really shape what the world looks like going forward.”

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS