Power Hour 8.3.26 — Gaps, Multiple Timeframes, and a Market Nearing All-Time Highs
Rob opens this Power Hour session in an unusually good mood, fresh off his youngest daughter’s wedding over the weekend, and that warmth carries into a session that turns out to be one of the more technically dense episodes in the run. The market itself gives him plenty to work with: the S&P has ripped back toward its all-time high, sitting roughly 26 to 36 points away by his own live count, and Rob spends real time walking through what that move actually means rather than just celebrating it. He’s candid that a lot of it hinges on geopolitics he can’t predict — a Middle East resolution he believes is coming, though he’s careful to admit he’s been wrong on timing calls like this before.
The session’s first big teaching moment is a clean breakdown of gap types: continuation gaps versus exhaustion gaps, and how volume is the tell that separates them. Rob walks through the market’s recent gap-up days one by one, explaining that a gap on rising volume tends to mean the move still has legs, while a gap that comes on thinning volume is often the market running out of conviction right before a pullback. He ties this to a genuinely good analogy about a fib line acting like a half-inch piece of sheetrock over a ceiling — breaking through it hurts and takes real force, but once you’re through, the ceiling you broke isn’t ceiling anymore. It’s a memorable way of explaining why a level that’s failed to hold multiple times still eventually gives way, and why chasing every attempted breakout early is usually a losing bet.
From there, Rob moves into the day’s official training topic: trading multiple timeframes, using Tesla as his live example. He lays out his own stack — daily for the big-picture bias, 30-minute for an intermediate read, 5-minute as his primary decision chart, and 1-minute purely for fine-tuning entries — and is refreshingly honest that this is his personal setup, not a rule everyone has to copy. He walks through why Tesla, despite showing a tradeable neutral-to-bearish setup on the daily, isn’t necessarily a trade a newer trader should take against a market that’s broadly bullish, distinguishing between what a skilled, experienced trader like his student Roman can handle and what he’d recommend for someone still building confidence in reading contrarian setups.
Rob also uses the episode to reinforce something that comes up across nearly every Power Hour session: the importance of actually tracking your trades. He shares his own daily tracking sheet — symbol, bias, rank, bullish and bearish targets, earnings dates — and explains that filling it out by hand every day, even briefly, is what builds the pattern recognition that eventually lets a trader glance at a setup and know what it’s telling them. Several viewers share their own numbers in the chat, including one member reporting an 84.78% win rate across 46 trades in July, and Rob uses the moment to hammer home his running theme: what you measure matters, and most traders who feel like they’re guessing are really just traders who never wrote anything down.
The episode closes with a look at the earnings calendar thinning out — most of Rob’s core watchlist has already reported, with only a handful of stragglers left before the next cycle picks up in October — and a reminder that Nvidia reports August 26th, a name he holds personally even though it’s not on his official POP list. Combined with the VIX sitting low, Rob’s takeaway is a practical one: with most earnings risk cleared and volatility compressed, this is a stretch to lean into directional setups with more confidence, while staying disciplined about not overpaying for premium on names still waiting to report.
