Lance B puts his own career volume at three to five billion shares traded over more than 15 years, and George Gammon put his trading profits at more than $100 million.
Most people who follow macroeconomics trade the view. Lance B said the view on its own is what loses him money, and that he only takes the trade when the chart agrees with it.
"Without the setup, I lose."
Lance B is the trader profiled in the newest book in Jack Schwager's Market Wizards series, and he ran the interview through his own trades rather than through theory: the silver top in January, the oil short after the Strait of Hormuz closed, and a Dick's Sporting Goods gap-down two days before the recording.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 65 minutes of audio, 20 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Lance B, the trader profiled in the newest Market Wizards book, who publishes as The One Lance B and whose trading profits Gammon put above $100 million
🎙️ Host: George Gammon, the real estate investor and entrepreneur who runs the Rebel Capitalist channel and the Rebel Capitalist Pro subscription service
📰 Published: 1 September 2026 on the Rebel Capitalist Interviews podcast feed
🔴 YouTube | 🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 1 hr 5 min | ✅ Time saved: 45 min
Key Takeaways
A macro view with no chart setup behind it is the trade that loses him money He puts his own volume at three to five billion shares over more than 15 years, and says his losses cluster where he traded a view without a setup
The worst moment to add to a long-term position is the moment the story is loudest
Buying the same price on the way up is a better bet than buying it on the way down Nothing about the price changes; what changes is that he is no longer trading against the trend
He shorted oil while research firms kept moving their $200 forecast out another month The panic never produced a second high, and that was the signal he traded rather than the barrel count
He does not hedge, because the hedge tends to lose at the same time the position does
The whole method is three steps: a sentiment extreme, a break of trend, a stop at the prior low
A boring company is safer to buy into a crash than an exciting one His example of the wrong kind is a biotech firm with one drug and no other assets
1. Sell the silver euphoria
Gammon set the interview up as a translation exercise. His audience, he said, is libertarian and Austrian-school, holds gold, silver, Bitcoin and commodities, and knows "like zero" about technical analysis. He was not asking them to day-trade gold. He was asking when they should add to a position they already intend to hold forever.
Lance B took the January move in precious metals as the worked example. Silver had tripled or quadrupled over roughly six months, gold had run, and the move had gone parabolic.
He does not forecast supply and demand; he watches how loudly people talk about it. "I'm looking for extremes in narrative and sentiment." He said flatly that he is not a macro expert and never will be, so the narrative is the input he can actually read
With silver at 110 to 120, he said the commentary on X and YouTube had turned uniformly euphoric, and the phrase he heard was that the dollar was dead forever
An asset that is normally boring going up three or four times, with the story at its loudest, is his contrarian trigger. He said that combination is what lines a market up for a trade in the other direction
He knows the objection from long-term holders, because he speaks at their conferences: they will not sell, so why would they care about a chart His answer was that the chart tells them when to buy rather than when to sell — "Even if you don't sell, you got to know or it's better to know when the opportune times are to buy."
He put the moment to add at the consolidation around 4,000, not at the parabola. Gold traded below 4,000 several times, came straight back each time, then moved higher. Adding there, he said, beats adding at 5,600
Asked what he would have done at the top, he said he would have been selling, and that he tends to short and then position with the technicals "That is a good time to not buy." The rule he gave for anyone unwilling to sell is simply not to buy into that
2. Buy the range breakout
Support is the bottom of a price range and resistance is the top, and the default in a range is to buy nearer the bottom and sell nearer the top
He does not trade the range itself; he trades the break of it. "I'm going to buy the break of resistance or I'm going to short the break of support." The reasoning is attention and risk: a market that has been boring and rangebound draws buyers the moment it breaks out, and the range gives him a defined stop
He was explicit that this is not forecasting. He said he is not in the prediction game and does not know more than anyone else, only when the probabilities favor him
His example was the recent break higher in Ethereum and Bitcoin, where the setup and the sentiment pointed the same way. Ethereum had made multiple legs down and then consolidated tightly against resistance at $2,000 He said the longer and deeper a trend has run, the more likely it is to eventually turn Sentiment at that point was the mirror image of the euphoria at 120K in Bitcoin: people were announcing they had sold, and calling it another crypto winter
Once $2,000 broke, he said, the technical traders bought it and the move fed on itself, with Ethereum in particular becoming reflexive as the conversation about it restarted
3. Macro only at extremes
Gammon spent several minutes laying out his own framework for the audience, and it is his, not the guest's. He said he has never seen more bearishness on any asset than on the 30-year Treasury. He walked through the yield curve inverting, then uninverting, then producing a bull steepener where short-term yields fall faster than long-term ones, followed by a bear steepener where long-term yields rise faster, widening the gap by something like 200 basis points. He reached back to 2008, when the two-year yield rose about 150 basis points between March and July because the consumer price index had gone from about 3.4 at the end of 2007 to about 5.6 with oil at 140, and everyone concluded the 1970s were back. He said his own view is that interest rates will be lower in a year, and asked whether that view is signal or noise if he is timing the entry on a chart.
The guest's answer was that macro is signal only where the crowd is one-sided. "At the extremes, I find it to be signal." He said he does not care when 50 people are on each side of the argument; he wants everybody on one side
The asymmetry runs one way only. "So for me, I'm not an expert in macro. So I'm not going to take a trade just based on macro, without a technical setup." He will take a chart setup with no macro view behind it
He said the best trades are the ones where everything aligns, and that this is true of most traders: a thesis plus a chart setup is what produces the outsized result
4. The $200 oil call failed
The Strait of Hormuz closing in the spring was his own worked example of a macro panic he faded. He put the strait at roughly 20% of supply on rough pencil math, and said it had never truly been closed before
His marker was that everyone was talking about it, including people who do not follow markets. He called that capitulation in technical terms, and said it was not coincidental that it "ended up marking the high for oil" WTI shot up to somewhere around 115 to 120 on the futures open that Sunday night, with Brent higher
Over the following months the research forecast never landed and never went away. He said every oil analyst and research firm was calling for $200 oil in March, then April, then May, then June
What he traded was the gap between the forecasts and the price. "The price action was saying something totally different" — the market never made a second high and never returned to that level of panic, so he structured a short using the chart and the narrative together
He was insistent that he only does this at what he twice called major extremes
Gammon added the corroborating macro that was visible at the time and is his own reading: non-farm payrolls were extremely weak, which bears on oil demand; the gap between 10- and 20-year Treasury yields was roughly 30 basis points, which is not what a 1970s inflation scare looks like; and China's 10-year yield was near an all-time low
The point he drew from it is that the outcome was unforecastable from the facts. Told in advance that there would be a Middle East war, a closed strait and outages of more than 10 million barrels a day, and that oil would be at $80, he said every trader, hedge fund and analyst would have been wrong The world adapted, he said, and there was demand destruction. "And markets always have a way of figuring things out often way before the average person like us can figure it out."
He gave the tariff trade war of the previous spring as the same shape: markets fell something like 20% in a month, some names were obliterated, and then the market worked out that the policy was too damaging to stand
5. The right side of the V
His definition of trend is mechanical, not interpretive: lower lows and lower highs for a downtrend, higher highs and higher lows for an uptrend He credited the underlying idea that markets are cyclical to Howard Marks' books
The rule he calls the right side of the V is that he never buys a market that is still falling. "So if something's going down, I wait for that turn, that break of the downtrend, which might be a break of a trend line or something." The turn is what gives him the stop, at the lows of the move
Flipped over, the same rule keeps him from shorting a market that is still rising. He waits for the break of the uptrend and puts his stop at the highs
The time frame does not matter to the rule — he said it works on an intraday chart or a daily one, and that what matters is that the trend on the chart he is using has changed
He said "the trend is your friend" is one of the few trading sayings that is actually true, and added that the nuances are harder than the concept: "if trading was easy, everybody would do it"
6. Buy at peak discomfort
He reframed risk around comfort rather than price. The most dangerous time to buy oil was at 115 with everyone calling for 200; the safest time to sell short was the same moment; and the most dangerous time to sell was after the price had round-tripped and the story had gone quiet
The lens he offered listeners is one question. "So, one simple lens your viewers can use is asking themselves, where is sentiment right now?"
On the downside version of the same extreme, he pointed at Bitcoin in 2022 at around 15K, when the consensus was that crypto was dead and the experiment had failed. That, he said, is when he wants to buy "No, you buy Bitcoin when you don't want to ever ask me to buy Bitcoin." His test is whether ordinary people are asking him whether to buy
His clearest example of buying capitulation was oil in 2020. With the world shut down and prices going negative, he bought December 2022 futures — going two years out to give himself time — at around $35, and said they rerated to $75 or $80 a couple of years later
The entry price matters for what it does to the holder's behavior, not only for the return. "The difference if you buy it at $70 and it goes to $200 is way better." The harder question, he said, is whether the buyer sells in a panic on the way there "That's why timing is actually so important and not buying when it's euphoric and being more comfortable buying when it's uncomfortable."
He drew a line around the middle of the range and said he avoids it. The extremes are where he trades; the in-between is where it gets dangerous
For a long-term holder, buying in the middle is fine — "I'll buy the S&P 500 blindly." He said he buys it every month and every year without trying to time it
The rule he ended the section on is about discomfort rather than price. "But if you want to buy at the best moments, you're generally looking for when sentiment is most negative and when it's most uncomfortable."
7. The moving-average rule
A moving average is the average closing price over a set period, and he named the 30-day and the 20-day as the common choices. Simple or exponential does not matter to him; both are trying to capture the same thing
The rule of thumb is a position filter, not a signal. "So, one rule of thumb in technical analysis is that you want to be long something that's above the moving average or you want to be short or flat and sell something that's below the moving average."
He said the same concepts work on a one-minute chart, a 30-minute chart, a daily, a weekly or a monthly, so a long-term holder can use the rule on whatever chart they already read
His example of a panic worth buying was Tesla. With Teslas being burned in the streets and Elon Musk saying publicly that it was crazy, the stock had gone from about 450 to about 200. "It's safer to buy there than at 450."
A second trader he named runs a whole strategy on nothing more than this. Kristjan Kullamagi, the Swedish momentum trader he is friends with, buys the strongest stocks on a breakout, holds for days, weeks or months, and stays long while the stock holds above a 20- or 30-day moving average, selling when it closes below He said Kullamagi has made more than $100 million doing it, and that the nuance is in the stock selection and the entry rather than in the exit rule
Gammon compressed the method into three steps for the audience: start with the macro view, then check the sentiment, then wait for the price to cross the 20-day moving average in the intended direction before acting
8. Shorting needs a setup
Gammon put his audience's position to the guest directly. They believe the market is at the tail end of a credit cycle, they point at private credit and at capital spending on artificial intelligence, and they conclude that the S&P 500 has to roll over. His own advice to them is that buying puts is the wrong expression, because of how much money flows automatically into index funds every month, and because the market can stay irrational longer than they can stay solvent.
The guest's first answer was that the base rate is against the trade. He said he would be cautious of it in general, because the S&P 500 goes up most of the time along with economic growth Doing it on a schedule loses: "the markets go up. That's what happens." He corrected himself mid-answer from selling puts to buying them, which is the version he meant
He buys index puts only when the index itself has gone euphoric. His markers are price accelerating, several up days in a row and the size of the up moves expanding — the point at which, he said, the move has run too far
Asked what he would do if the market ground lower for years rather than crashing, on the model of the Nikkei after 1990, he said he would still want the capitulation first before concluding a major top was in
The setup he described for that is what he calls the bouncy ball short. "So, I would love to see the market make a sharp move down, then have subsequently lower bounces against some support." He executes on the break of that support
The condition is absolute, and he stated it about his own record. "Without that technical setup, I am not going to be doing this trade." He said his losses cluster where he let the view override the missing setup He put his own volume at "three, four, five billion shares of trading" over more than 15 years, and said that gives him the sample to know it "I need the view plus these very specific setups." Without one, he said, he goes and finds a setup somewhere else or does nothing
9. Why he never hedges
Gammon then walked through a trade of his own and asked to be told what was wrong with it. He is negative on the S&P 500 but will not short it, because of the scale of automatic index-fund buying — he cited Mike Green, who describes passive investing as a mindless robot. So he shorts the specific companies he likes least, the cyclical ones tied to the real economy rather than to finance or artificial intelligence, and offsets them with a long position in the S&P 500 sized for volatility. He said he ran the idea past Hugh Hendry, who told him in unprintable terms that it was stupid. He also said he is up on every one of those positions over the last six months, with the shorts up considerably more than the index hedge.
The guest's verdict was that the obvious trade is sometimes just correct. He compared it to Nvidia's earnings in late 2022 or 2023, after which buying artificial intelligence was the obvious trade and worked anyway "And there's nothing wrong with joining a trend that's right and the technicals are confirming it."
What settled it for him was not the logic but the price. "Like price action and the chart is the ultimate reality." The question, he said, is whether the position is working
He offered two rules of thumb he says hold for most discretionary traders: the best trades go the trader's way from the very beginning, and the best trades do not look back
The only real verdict on any strategy, he said, is the profit and loss over three, five or ten years. Anything can happen over the short run, including getting away with something colossally dumb
On hedging he was blunt: he does not do it. "A hedge is almost never the perfect offset because the only perfect offset tends to be just closing the position, right?" "You lose on the position, you lose on the hedge." He said every trader recognizes the pattern and he cannot explain why it holds If he is not confident in a position he reduces the size or closes it, rather than building a structure around it
He allowed that a stop is a form of protection, but distinguished it from a hedge: a stop can close the bet, while a hedge leaves him with exposure he did not want. His illustration was shorting Nvidia against a long in the Nasdaq, which does nothing for him if Nvidia beats and the rest of the market falls
10. Never add to a loser
Adding to a losing position breaks every rule he has just described. "So when you're adding into a loser, by definition, you're fighting the trend."
The insight underneath it is that the same price is not the same trade. He can buy at 50 on the way down or at 50 on the way up. "The key difference is the probabilities are different because the trend is no longer down." He said this is where expected value actually lives for him, and that most people get stubborn, marry a view and get smoked fighting the price
Gammon translated expected value for the audience through blackjack, and the explainer is his own. When more face cards remain in the deck the count favors the player, who raises the bet, and ideally places no bet at all until it does. Buying at 50 on the way down might carry a 40% chance of a profit; buying the same price on the way up might carry 75%, because the deck has changed
The same idea was put on the show in one line credited to Hugh Hendry: "I just want to buy things when they're going up I don't want to buy things when they're going down" The qualification attached to it on air was that this only holds while sentiment is not already at a bullish extreme
11. Buying the Dick's gap
Gammon brought a live trade to the interview. Dick's Sporting Goods had fallen about 30% in one day on earnings, with the company pointing at soft consumer demand and at difficulties with Foot Locker, while its own same-store sales were up something like 4.9%. He said a hedge fund friend calls this shape a glitch trade: an enormous gap down on epic volume.
The gap and the volume get his attention, and then the reason for them makes him careful. "So whenever there's fresh news, I'm far more cautious to take the other side of the trade." Earnings are a genuine change in the information about a company, he said, and a lot of well-resourced people have already modeled it. The stock did not fall from 180 to 130 for no reason
What he waits for is the same turn as everywhere else in the interview. Massive volume capitulation, an acceleration in price, ideally intraday, and then a break of trend measured by the prior bar's high
His worked entry: the stock closed at the lows on the day of the earnings, turned the next day, and on the third day broke the previous day's high. He said he would buy that break, at a high of about 130 the previous session, with the stop underneath: "The lows of the prior day and of that move were 120." He labeled it explicitly as an educational example rather than advice The thesis behind it is that everyone who was going to give up on the earnings number had already sold
Gammon said he had bought at around 125 on the volume, gone to lunch, and afterward decided the better expression was options: he sold a put at 120 and bought one at 115 to cap the downside
His verdict turned on what kind of company it was. He said he analyzes how boring a business is: "And so the more boring something is and the more stable something generally is, the more willing I am to buy into some of those panics." The counter-example he gave is a small biotech company with one drug in the pipeline and no other assets, where a fall can keep going His own best trade ever, he said, was buying the Nikkei index when it panicked more than 20% over a couple of days in August 2024
He closed the review with a warning that cuts against the whole exercise. Most people should not day-trade at all, and those who do have to trade the things making outsized moves: "You can't just trade the most boring stocks every single day because it's just too efficient."
12. Distortions, not calls
Gammon relayed a line from a retired trader friend in his mid-60s who has been trading for 40 years, whom the other former hedge fund managers he knows regard as the best they have met: "I don't really look for predictions." What he looks for instead is distortions — "I look for distortions."
Gammon's own framing for the audience is that the long-term prediction and the entry are different jobs. Keep the view that gold, oil, copper or uranium goes up over years; add to the position when a distortion appears
The guest agreed and went further about his own limits. "I have no ability to predict anything." He said he would not bet on his own views, and that having a view is fine as long as the trade waits for narrative, sentiment and price to line up
Bonus Insights
Gammon said the reason he booked the interview is that his audience — Austrian-school, gold, silver, Bitcoin, commodities — talks about none of this, and that even a buy-and-hold investor needs to know when to add
The line Gammon named as his favorite from the original Market Wizards is Jim Rogers on sentiment, which he paraphrased as selling hysteria and buying panic Gammon's recollection of the rest of Rogers' method: "And then he said his strategy is just wait till a big pile of money is sitting in the corner and then just go pick it up."
The guest was careful about the limits of the technique twice over, saying he is not in the prediction game and calling himself "your average dumb day trader" whose advantage is a refusal to become invested in being an expert
He has been putting serious work into his own YouTube channel for about a year, and uses the same handle across every platform
His bottom line is that a macro view earns nothing on its own, and only becomes a trade when the story has gone to an extreme and the chart has already turned.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Dick's Sporting Goods and Foot Locker (The live trade the second half of the interview is built on: a roughly 30% one-day fall on earnings, blamed on soft consumer demand and on trouble with Foot Locker, against same-store sales Gammon put up about 4.9%)
Bitcoin and Ethereum (His example of a range breakout with sentiment on the other side — Ethereum consolidating against resistance at $2,000 after everyone had given up, and Bitcoin at 120K as the euphoric mirror image)
Tesla (The panic he says was safer to buy than the top: the stock at about 200 after 450, with cars being burned in the streets)
Nvidia (Two roles — the earnings report that started the artificial-intelligence trade, and his example of a hedge that does nothing, shorting it against a long in the Nasdaq)
S&P 500 (The index he says he buys blindly every month without timing it, and the index Gammon holds long to offset the individual companies he is short)
Berkshire Hathaway (His shorthand for the kind of business stable enough to buy into a crash, against a one-drug biotech company as the opposite)
Nikkei 225 (Twice: his best trade ever, buying the August 2024 panic of more than 20%, and Gammon's example of a market that ground lower for 15 years after 1990)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Market Wizards: The Next Generation – Jack D. Schwager and George F. Coyle (The book the guest is profiled in, and the reason for the booking; Gammon also quoted the Jim Rogers interview from the original Market Wizards)
TheOneLanceB (The guest's own YouTube channel, which he has been working on seriously for about a year and which carries the trade walkthroughs Gammon references)
Qullamaggie – Kristjan Kullamagi (The Swedish momentum trader named as running a whole strategy on 20- and 30-day moving averages)
Howard Marks' books on market cycles (Credited as the writing behind why trends and fundamentals move in cycles rather than in straight lines)
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