Why one Friday trade could change your Mondays

Most traders pack up early on Friday.

They assume nothing important happens until Monday.

That's where they could be wrong.

A well-known trading educator has been quietly teaching a Friday afternoon approach that targets a part of the market big money often ignores.

The goal is to enter before the weekend and look for a potential Monday payoff.

Some of his students have applied this to low-priced stocks and seen gains from a few hundred to thousands of dollars.

Results vary, and all trading carries risk, but the process is surprising.

Now, for $7, anyone can see exactly how it works in a short training video.

See how it works

☕️ GM Munchers! It's Friday and the last day of July. My plan for the weekend is to not look at a single chart. My realistic plan for the weekend is to look at charts on my phone while pretending to listen to my wife.

On today’s menu:

• 😏 The Market Just Did A Full 180

• 📉 The 24-Year-Old Billionaire Just Got Wiped Out

• 🍎 Apple Beat Earnings & Fell Anyway

• 🥪 Jersey Mike's NYSE Debut

• 🚀 Amazon’s Stock Flew Yesterday

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

😏 The Market Just Did A Full 180

Wednesday the Dow dropped over 1,000 points and everyone was bracing for pain. Yesterday it came roaring back. What changed? Two economic reports landed before the open, and Wall Street decided to read them as good news.

Here's the confusing part. One of those reports showed the economy is slowing down. GDP, the broadest measure of economic growth, came in at just 1.5% for the second quarter, well below the 2.1% economists expected. Normally "the economy is slowing" is bad news. So why did stocks rally?

Because the market is playing a different game right now. Investors are far more worried about inflation and interest rates than about slow growth. And the second report, the PCE inflation number the Fed watches most closely, came in at 3.7%, its lowest in two months. That's the number the market actually cared about. Cooler inflation means the Fed is less likely to hike rates again, and after this week's higher-for-longer scare, that was the relief everyone wanted.

There's also a catch hiding in the GDP miss that made it less scary than the headline. The weakness came mostly from a drop in government spending and businesses drawing down inventory, not from regular people. Consumer spending and business investment both actually rose. So the engine of the economy, the shopper AKA my wife, is still running.

• 📉 GDP 1.5% vs 2.1% expected: Looks bad, but the miss came from government cuts and inventories, not consumers.

• 🧊 PCE inflation at 3.7%: The lowest in two months, and the number that flipped the mood.

• 📊 Recession fear is low: Prediction markets now put 2026 US recession odds near just 12%, a sign nobody thinks this slowdown is the start of something worse.

• Free Report: Normally $29.97. This book is free today. (from Profits Run)

The Munch Take: This is one of those days that teaches you the market doesn't trade on whether news is good or bad. It trades on what it's afraid of at that particular moment. This week, the fear was runaway inflation and a Fed with its finger on the hike button. So a soft inflation print mattered more than a soft growth print, and stocks partied.

📉 The 24-Year-Old Who Bet Everything On AI Just Got Wiped Out

You've probably never heard of Leopold Aschenbrenner. By the end of today, you will. His story is one of the wildest rise-and-falls Wall Street has seen in years, and it happened this week.

Here's the setup. Aschenbrenner is a 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher who graduated as Columbia's valedictorian at 19. In late 2024 he started a hedge fund called Situational Awareness with about $225 million. He bet big and early on one idea: AI is going to be enormous, so own the companies that build its plumbing, the chips and data centers. For a while, he looked like a genius. The fund exploded to as much as $45 billion and returned an absurd 439% after fees. On paper, a kid barely old enough to rent a car had built a $20 billion empire in under two years.

Then July happened.

His fund was leveraged to the gills, reportedly borrowing up to $4 for every $1 it actually had. That works beautifully on the way up and catastrophically on the way down. His AI infrastructure bets, including Korea's SK Hynix and names like CoreWeave and Micron, cratered more than 35% this month. To make it worse, he had bet against software stocks, and those just went up which meant he was losing on both sides at the same time. The margin calls came, the brokers demanded cash, and he’s been forced to sell his entire portfolio of public stocks in a single fire-sale block trade to Ken Griffin's Citadel.

To be clear on what did and didn't happen: the fund is not shutting down. It sold every public stock it owned, but it survives as a private-investment firm, still holding stakes in private companies.

The Munch Take: This is the whole lesson in one story. A brilliant guy, right about the big idea, AI really is huge, and he still got flattened. Being right about the destination doesn't save you if you use too much leverage getting there. He wasn't wrong that AI infrastructure matters. He was wrong that it would only go up, and he borrowed against that certainty until a normal-sized pullback became a career-threatening event. There's a reason the oldest warning in this business is that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Leverage turns "I was early" into "I was liquidated," and those two feel identical when the margin clerk calls. The most dangerous words in investing aren't "this time is different." They're "I'm sure."

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STOCK OF THE DAY

🍎 Apple Beat Earnings & Fell Anyway. The Reason Matters.

On the same day Microsoft added $450 billion in value, the largest company on earth reported a strong quarter and dropped over 4%. That contrast tells you almost everything about where the market's head is right now.

Apple ($AAPL) beat on both lines. Revenue hit $109.42 billion against the $108.65 billion expected, earnings came in at $2.02 per share, and iPhone sales jumped 22%. On paper, an excellent quarter. The stock fell anyway, partly on soft guidance for the current quarter that management blamed on supply constraints. It also happened to be Tim Cook's final earnings call as CEO before John Ternus takes the reins September 1.

But the bigger story is what everyone keeps whispering about Apple: while its rivals torch hundreds of billions on AI, Apple is basically sitting the arms race out.

• 🏗️ The spending gap is staggering. Microsoft alone plans about $190 billion in capital spending this year. Apple's whole strategy is the opposite: lean, on-device AI and a light cloud, spending a fraction of what its peers do.

• 🤖 Apple Intelligence has underwhelmed. Siri's big AI upgrade has been delayed and criticized, and Apple has quietly leaned on partners rather than building a frontier model of its own.

• 💰 It's minting money regardless. Services hit $30.74 billion and the iPhone is still a cash machine. Apple doesn't need AI to be wildly profitable today.

• Free Report: Get a piece of OpenAI pre-IPO (by InvestorPlace)

Here's the real question. Is Apple being disciplined, or is it being left behind? The bull case says Apple is smart to let everyone else spend billions figuring out AI, then swoop in later with the polish and the billion-device head start it always has. The bear case says AI is the biggest platform shift since the smartphone, and the company that invented the smartphone is showing up late to the thing that might replace it.

The Munch Take: Two of the biggest companies on earth reported this week and told opposite stories. Microsoft spent big on AI and got rewarded. Apple barely spent on AI and got punished, despite beating its numbers. That gap is the entire market's obsession in a single day. The honest truth is nobody knows yet who's right. Maybe Apple's patience looks brilliant in three years, or maybe it looks like Kodak watching digital cameras. What we do know is that "we're being disciplined" and "we missed the boat" can look identical for a surprisingly long time, right up until they suddenly don't. My wife asked if Apple not spending on AI was good or bad. I said ask me in 2029. She said that's my answer for everything lately, which, in a market like this one, might be the only honest answer there is.

MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

💻 $MSFT Microsoft had a historic day, climbing over 15% and adding a staggering $450 billion in market cap. A company that spent most of the year in the doghouse erased the whole slump in a single session and is now down less than 5% on the year. That's what a $100 billion cloud business will do for you.

☕ $SBUX Starbucks added 1.64% after strong same-store sales drove an earnings beat and a raised full-year forecast. The turnaround under Brian Niccol keeps stacking up quarters, and the market is finally buying it.

🛢️ $SHEL Shell rose 2.46% as high oil and gas prices powered its strongest quarterly profit in four years. When crude spends the month flirting with $100, the oil majors eat well.

💾 $MU Micron popped 18.36% and $SNDK Sandisk surged 25.99% after Samsung warned that memory-chip demand could outstrip supply through 2028. Funny how fast the mood flips. Days ago these names were crashing on China fears, now a supply shortage has them ripping.

🐊 $CROX Crocs fell 7.38% after weak third-quarter guidance overshadowed an earnings beat and a raised full-year outlook.

🥪 $SUBS Jersey Mike's slipped 5.70% in its NYSE debut, even after pulling off one of the largest restaurant IPOs ever. Big sandwich, rough first bite.

TRADING SUCCESS

🤑 Friday Motivation

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 🇺🇲 Trump’s Emergency Dollar Reset (Ad)

2. 🚀 Amazon’s stock flew yesterday.

3. 😬 The Yen continues to get destroyed.

4. 🍟 Is McDonald’s a buy right now?

🍪 Munchy Memes

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