Easiest $50,000 Trade: 1/26/26

I’m a day late in writing this, but the good news is the trade is going to stand just the same. Monday was a crazy day in the markets. I did walk out green, but I made it a mission to leave the screens early - and I paid the price. We finally saw what appears to be the blowoff top of one of the hottest names of the last 3 months… Silver.

Silver was undoubtedly yesterday’s Easiest $50k Trade. The chart alone tells the story. But the point of these posts aren’t just to show you a chart and say: “Look, it was THIS easy!”

Instead the point of these posts is to learn where the proper entries were for the trade, proper exits, and to be better prepared for the next. I will continue to tie trading concepts from previous posts into these analyses, and throughout the next few years, I hope to have an aggressive backlog of examples made to be prepared for any type of trade that comes my way. And for those of you following along here, this backlog and review will be yours to keep as well.

So let’s break down the signs of SLV so we can be ready for the next!

(By the way, if you nailed SLV, let me know down in the comments below)

Topping Indicators in the Stock Market

The power of hindsight is a great one, especially when it comes to things like “calling tops.” Fortunately, though, there were a lot of signs of a potential top in real time for those who were in front of their screens and prepared (not this guy). But perhaps the most useful indication was simply volume alone.

Taking a look at the daily candles of SLV, you’ll notice that the volume over the last few days/weeks was rising, but overall pretty consistent. Volume sat at roughly 100M-200M shares per day traded on the SLV ETF. That was pretty impressive, especially given the gaps that SLV was making day after day. I was surprised that there wasn’t a blow off day earlier.

But then the stars aligned for this gap - SLV ETF broke $100/share for the first time ever. We have to think about the significance of this number. In the markets, certain prices create a level of psychological support/resistance. In penny stocks, we see this a lot with whole and half dollar numbers. In the case of SLV, that big ol’ $100 level was pretty important. Of course, there were plenty of other aspects to this trade. I won’t sit here and say that $100 was that important in the grand scheme of things to a commodity like Silver. But it is something certainly worth noting.

Back to the main point - volume. Take a look at the massive volume candle we got on the day where SLV broke $100/share.

Over double the average volume it has been trading recently. This is one of the most important aspects when it comes to finding a potential top. Naturally this candle is only seen after the trading day is over, but by midday yesterday, the volume on the day was already the size of the average day for SLV. What this is to say is that, if halfway through the day the volume already matches what it normally does in a full day, we can assume it is going to trade significantly more volume than average. Make sense?

Why Does the Volume Matter?

I know this might sound super basic for some of you, but bear with me. Understanding the mixture between volume and time gives us a psychological edge when it comes to reading price action. For now, let’s keep the talk of volume strictly to the sense of a “Blowoff Top”

When we refer to a blowoff top in the market, it usually is a handful of factors all happening at the same time:

• Shorts being margin called/liquidated

• Peak euphoria

• FOMO Buyers rushing in

• Uncle Joe buying in 3 weeks after his nephew told him to because he doesn’t want to miss any move higher

End result? Blowoff top volume, and often, the medium-to-long-term top of the run. You have to think about the implications of that volume. Going back to my last post about Confirmation Variables, we talked briefly about why it matters that 90% of traders lose, and this is a great time to really see that in action.

If Uncle Joe buys SLV at $102/share and is briefly up on the position, he’s not going to sell. Why? Because he’s “in this for the long haul.” He’s not concerned that the next day SLV is at $98 per share. He’s barely down. Of course, this thing has to keep running.

But the longer that he is down on his money, the more skeptical he becomes as to whether or not SLV is going to rebound. Was the whole thing just a bunch of hype? Is there really anything wrong with the USD? Maybe at this point, he’s beginning to realize that he shouldn’t have bought SLV at all.

As time goes on, Uncle Joe is simply waiting for SLV to come back even kind of close to the price he bought so that he doesn’t have to sell for a big loss. It doesn’t matter if he even makes it to breakeven. Just back to $98/share would be great.

In this hypothetical example, Uncle Joe gets lucky. After being down on his position for a few days/weeks, he gets that $98/share he was looking for and gets out with a small loss.

But not all are so lucky. Especially this time - because on that particular candle, the most people (in a single day) bought SLV at the highest price ever. And not all of those buyers were like Joe and willing to sell for any loss at all.

They see this hypothetical bounce to $98 and think “see, I was right. Silver IS coming back.” And instead of selling, perhaps they even buy some more, not realizing how impactful that daily volume was. There are thousands of Uncle Joe’s who are going to create selling pressure as they come back to breakeven (or close to it).

Does this mean the top of Silver is in simply based off that volume candle? Not at all. In fact, as I write this, SLV is back over $100/share in the afternoon trading today. The daily candle volume is quite high today too. I have no idea what comes next, but I want to make the point that there was a reason to be convicted in a SLV trade yesterday based off the volume alone, and there was a lot of money to be made on the trade.

So let’s break down where I believe the easiest trade was on this and why it was such a monstrous opportunity.

The $50k+ Entry

I’m a firm believer in “The Trend is Your Friend” when it comes to trading. I love trends and I love the break of trends. They keep trading simple for me. There are other factors towards entering a trade than simply the break of the trend, but we kind of already had that thesis in mind with the monster gap up + break of $100/share + the insane volume flooding in.

The trend break for SLV couldn’t have been simpler, and for the first time in a long time, the price action changed noticeably on the trend breakdown.

There wasn’t much choppiness, there wasn’t an instant snapback. It was just clean and simple. Better yet, the downtrend that followed lasted for quite some time, meaning a trader didn’t need to go full size right at the breakdown of the initial uptrend.

I heard a saying once that I love - “You should have the most size when you’re the most right.” And this applied to SLV perfectly. Starting in at the trend break would have given a trader roughly a $106 average, meaning they would risk about $0.70 per share with the top being at $106.70.

But the trade got a lot simpler after. All we saw were lower highs after lower highs for nearly $10/share straight, giving really easy opportunities to add into the trade as it worked with more size and a lower risk level. These are the trades we dream of.

In this particular post, I’m not going to talk on exactly where to cover or exactly how many shares you would have needed. Because I know some of you right now are thinking “I don’t have enough money in my account to have made $50k+ on that trade Bryce, it only moved $10/share.” And that is more than fine, the point of these posts is to show what the best trade of the day is with hopes one day you’ll be able to lock in $50k+ on these.

In the case of SLV, there were other instruments to trade this as well, which is another reason I don’t want to get too specific. A trader could have sold calls on SLV, bought puts, shorted AGQ (2x leveraged), or even bought ZSL. The options were endless, and the style by which you wanted to execute that would’ve been completely up to you. Personally, I like the leveraged ETFs in these types of trades, especially when they themselves have a time-decay aspect to them like ZSL and AGQ.

Final Thoughts

That’s going to wrap up today’s recap of the easiest $50k trade - even though it’s yesterday’s trade. We’ll have to see if there was one today. Personally, I don’t see a ton that has the type of opportunity I’d like to see for one of those big trades. Maybe SLV again, but I don’t think there was as much conviction today as there was yesterday.

On a side note, I am currently 2 days into my 5-day fast, and I gotta say - it’s a wild feeling. I feel like I’m writing this whole piece in slow motion (not in a bad way) and feel significantly more present. The first day was quite challenging with hunger, but when I woke up this morning I was surprised at my lack of appetite. Though, as I write this, a steak does sound pretty good.

I’m curious to see if this fast impacts my trading moving forward, so I’ll keep you posted as to how I feel when the fast is over and if it made a difference. Just from review alone, I feel much more motivated to stay on top of things.

Anyway, that is all I have for today. I hope you were able to take something away from this piece to help you in your trade analysis. Let me know in the comments what you think the easiest $50k trade of the day was today (if any) or what you took away from this post. Excited to hear, and I’ll see you in the next one!