Measure It And Protect It. Indicators You Can Use To Defend Your Portfolio.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
There's a lot of hype and a lot of good news already priced into the marketplace today.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
We're entering a period of so much more change that it could be a tailwind for active management.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:08)
Women are now in the protagonist seat for the family's financial story. I'm Joe Davis. And I'm Christine Kashkari. And this is season two of Better Vantage by Vanguard, an eight-part video podcast series hosted by custom content from WSJ and Vanguard.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:23)
All investing is subject to risk, including possible loss of principle. This content was created by custom content from WSJ, a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department.

**Justin Nielsen** (0:39)
Hello, investors. I'm doing my best Don Vandenbord impression right there. Welcome to another episode of the Investing With IBD podcast. It's Justin Nielsen here, your host. And we're joining you live at 5 PM as we typically do on a Wednesday afternoon. Today is August 19th, 2026 And of course, we've got Dan Vandenbord from Revere Asset Management back on the show. For those of you that aren't familiar with Don's work, he's the Chief Investment Officer over there at Revere Asset Management. And of course, very like-minded folks over at Revere using the IBD methodology with a particular interest in not just growing that money, but also making sure it's protected. It's one of those things that as we get older, we start thinking a little bit more about how little runway we have left to grow those assets and a lot of times, we don't want to see something derail our retirement plan. So the protection part is a very big part. And we're going to get into all that. But welcome back to the show, Don. How are you doing?

**Don Vandenbord** (1:38)
Great to be here, Justin. You're going to have to stretch out that intro a little bit.

**Justin Nielsen** (1:41)
Hello, Investors.

**SPEAKER_7** (1:43)
Much better.

**Justin Nielsen** (1:45)
And it just made me chuckle a little bit because of course, we're checking out the YouTube comments as they come in. And that was what Don opened it up. That's the real Don there in the YouTube comments, for those of you that are watching this live. But Don, let's get right to it. It's been a very interesting market lately. I mean, we've had a lot of the attention on our AI trade. And I think what was really interesting about the last few weeks is so much of this, again, attention that we've been looking at for some of these AI trades. I'm just going to pull up Sandisk for fun here.
This was absolutely one of the main leaders and huge move, hundreds of percent up. And then it has more than a 50% drop. Of course, when this got back above the 50 day moving average line, you have this, oh, the AI trade is back.
Now you've got something right back below the 50 day moving average line. And this is just one of many. You know, the main point here is the AI trade, it's not going away. There's still a lot of potential innings left in this, but right now it's been tricky. So maybe we start there with the AI trade and how you've been kind of measuring this.

**Don Vandenbord** (3:10)
Yeah, we pretty much got stopped out of all of our AI stocks on the Leopold bottom.
That was 729 and overnight, everybody that's been paying attention to growth stocks and the AI trade knows about his fund getting liquidated. Ken Griffin and Citadel taking it over, basically his entire book. And that actually ironically put in the bottom. We had a break. If you want to bring up the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq, you can see the break down there. It's clearer on the S&P because it broke a very tight range and then slingshotted back in and then went higher for a few days and that was where we had the follow through day in there. And some of the former leaders that had been broken started forming the right sides of bases in a tease to get you back in. But the last two days have been pretty vicious to the AI infrastructure stocks specifically and getting some of the last ones that had held up well, namely Dell and HPE had rough days yesterday and today. And growth, investors, funds, ETFs, they need somewhere to put their money. And if it's coming out of the AI trade, you want to know where it's going to next. We'll talk about that a little bit later in the show.

**Justin Nielsen** (4:45)
Yeah. Well, and let's just, I'm going to go back to Dell. Look, I've been suckered by this one a number of times myself.