Epic Bear Invasion Is Here
What a week. Inflation's still a thing, Micron dropped another earnings bomb, and Chuck Norris is hanging with Bruce Lee in heaven. Watch this clip with respect because they don't make 'em like this anymore:
Now let's go through the 5 things you need to know.
The Bears Are Here
The latest AAII Sentiment Survey shows that just 30.4% of investors are bullish.
This is the 7th straight weekly decline, and the lowest bullish reading since September 11, 2025.
And 52.0% of investors are bearish. This is the highest bearish reading since May 1, 2025.
Meanwhile, the CNN Fear & Greed Index is at 17, signifying extreme fear.
Finally, the CBOE equity put-call ratio hit 0.90 Wednesday. This is a fairly high reading and close to the 1ish level typically seen at near-term bottoms.
But has enough negativity seeped into the market to form a short-term bottom?
That is the #1 question we need to ask ourselves.
Because if we get good news on Iran over the weekend, a lot of bears may throw money at the market.
March… What a Stinker
March has been a real mess.
Our ETF monitor shows that everything is red for March, aside from Ethereum (ETHE), Bitcoin (IBIT), and Energy (XLE):
And many of the strongest sectors from early 2026 (like silver, gold, and uranium) got spanked.
The SPY is down a not-so-disastrous -5.6%, but the average individual name in the index is down -7.2%.
Plus, there have been very few individual winners in March, as you might expect from the lousy ETF numbers.
Just 65 SPY names are positive.
And to catch them, you had to be long energy, or had the guts to buy oversold software names like Datadog (DDOG), Intuit (INTU), and Palo Alto Networks (PANW).
Otherwise, you got hit hard.
The Fed Is a Total Mystery
Following this week's FOMC meeting, hot PPI report, rising rates, and ongoing tensions in the Middle East, the market has flip flopped on rate expectations.
1 week ago, the market was pricing in a 60.9% chance of lower rates this year.
Now it's pricing in:
- 5.4% chance of one 25 bps cut
- 57.9% of rates staying the same
- 30% chance of one 25 bps hike
- 6.0% chance of 50 bps in hikes
- 0.6% chance of 75 bps in hikes
So we went from pricing in a 60.9% chance of lower rates to 5.4%.
Housing stocks sniffed this out because they've been in a nasty downtrend for the past 6 weeks:
JR Romero Nailed Super Micro (SMCI)
In August 2024, JR Romero said he considered Super Micro (SMCI) to be the “Bernie Madoff of tech.”
Today, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged three men affiliated with Super Micro with conspiring to smuggle Nvidia (NVDA) AI chips to China in violation of U.S. law.
One of those men was Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw.
Doesn't get much worse than that.
So JR was right. This company can not be trusted.
But if we look at the news another way… is this not the biggest endorsement of Nvidia AI chips ever?
Based on an SEC filing, Liaw owns over 15 million SMCI shares, which were valued at over $450 million as of yesterday's close.
Smuggling these chips is so lucrative that a guy this rich was willing to risk his company's future.
ALLEGEDLY.
But you know who's not crying today?
Dell (DELL) longs:
Because the market assumes some of Super Micro's $40+ billion in annual sales will get shifted to Dell.
And you figure Nvidia just might hold back on chip allocations to Super Micro.
The 4 Horsemen of the AI-pocalypse Are Still Dominating
On January 30, I identified these memory/storage leaders as the 4 Horsemen:
SanDisk (SNDK)
Seagate (STX)
Western Digital (WDC)
Micron (MU)
And they're still crushing it this year.
And you know a group is how when the worst name (Micron) is up a crazy 47.3%!
David Prince of T3's Inner Circle shared his thoughts on this white-hot set of names:
What does the $MU report mean for $SNDK $WDC and other peers?@epictrades1 says the “business is on fire” but that doesn't mean the stocks will go up forever…
Learn more from DP: https://t.co/VExJsdNZtf pic.twitter.com/sgHoxLykn4
— T3 Live (@t3live) March 19, 2026
The story here is simple. AI data centers can't get enough memory and storage. These companies could probably double capacity and sell it out in minutes.
If you want to see how this is playing out on the ground, I bought a SanDisk 2TB SSD drive for about $200 3 years ago.
Today, they're going for $349:
This is insane.