July 2026's Volatility

I took a long trip back to China at the end of May and returned to the US on June 29th. I clearly remember that day — when I landed at Seattle airport, my mom's China stock market account had just hit an all-time high. But starting the very next day, the entire month turned into a bloodbath. As someone who practices technical analysis and believes charts can give signals at any point in time, I need to look back and figure out what I did wrong, or failed to do, to prevent the massive drawdown that wiped out a chunk of my first half-year gains. Mood clearly has a big impact on my analysis. Through the first half of the year, I was still dealing with occasional frustration at work, while at the same time, the launch of Claude Code made me feel almost omnipotent. That left me with a conflicting self-image: on one side, I feel incompetent, unable to make real changes in my job; on the other, with the power of AI and my own creative thinking, I feel like I can do anything. So after calming myself down, I did some mental and technical analysis again. We know that on smaller timeframes, the price action reflected in charts always carries more noise than signal, so I went back to testing with weekly K-charts and found them actually very useful for signaling peaks and bottoms. Through almost the whole month of June, or at least the second half of it, weekly charts for many technology and chip stocks gave clear signals — things like doji stars or large dropping candles on elevated volume. If you're not blind to it, you can catch these immediately and avoid at least half of the cruel drop. But in the long term, I still want to hold onto my conviction in AI and chip-related stocks with strong promise. That's why, starting yesterday morning (August 3rd), I loaded back into large positions in MU, TSM, and others. You don't want to get scared out of a long-term rising market just because of one month of bloodbath moves. Keep hope in your heart, always!