The Miracle That Shrunk My “Circle of Concern” By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily In This Digest: Exactly one month ago, to this very hour, I was at the hospital… My wife was in labor with our first child… a labor that was going much quicker than we anticipated. We realized it was “go time” and packed up the car around 7:30 a.m. Then, just a few short hours later, we welcomed our daughter, Vera, into our lives. In that moment, in the chaos of doctors, nurses, my exhausted wife, and my daughter’s first breaths… My world shrunk. If you’re a parent, maybe you already know what I mean when I say that. But it’s hard to describe just how small my “circle of concern” got that day. My job involves staying on top of what’s going on in markets, politics, monetary policy, trade, technology, and a whole lot of other vitally important things. That’s what I do, and I love doing it. The world’s an interesting place, getting more interesting all the time, and sharing with you what I think about it brings me great joy and fulfillment. But if you’ll afford me a moment… I must express how quickly all that stuff disappeared when I held my daughter for the first time. Suddenly, all that mattered was Vera’s next meal, her next diaper change, and the next few hours of shuteye my wife and I could sneak in. My circle of concern has since widened back out. And to be sure, I’ve kept an eye on things while I was gone. We’ll talk about some of those things today. | Recommended Link | | | | Elon Musk’s upcoming Optimus robot could turn him into the world’s first trillionaire… While simultaneously turning everyday investors into millionaires. Morgan Stanley has already gone on record to say that Optimus could be part of a $30 trillion opportunity… And one Silicon Valley insider has uncovered a way for Americans to potentially profit from Optimus BEFORE it gets rolled out. Click here to get all the info. |  | | But I also want to talk about shrinking your circle of concern… If you’re reading this, you’re more than likely a fellow newsletter junkie. And if there’s one thing us newsletter junkies can stand together on and confidently proclaim, it’s that we’re awash in endless great and sometimes not-so-great investment ideas. Not only those that come from what we read – but from the knock-on ideas we develop ourselves from our own research. This can lead to what I’ll affectionately call “portfolio bloat.” You hear so many great ideas you want to act on, over time you might wind up with dozens – or, God forbid, hundreds – of stock positions. It gets to be so many, it’s impossible to stay on top of all of them. Your capital spreads thinner than butter on the toast of a guy with high cholesterol. (Ask me how I know.) In other words, your investment “circle of concern” becomes too wide. It’s happened to all of us to some extent. But the solution is simple and even topical: Throw out the bathwater and keep the babies. It’s worth pruning your portfolio every so often. Dump your losers and your water-treaders, and add to your winners. Now that the broad market is recovering quite nicely over the last month, with the S&P 500 now up about 19% from the Liberation Day lows, it’s a good time to do just that. One great and easy tool that helps is the Navellier Portfolio Grader. This tool is the brainchild of Louis Navellier, whose thoughts you’ve been hearing lately on the winners and losers from “Trump 2.0,” and it uses his proprietary and time-tested stock rating system to assign a simple letter grade to thousands of stocks. If you subscribe to any of Louis’ work and any of our memberships, you can sync your portfolio with the tool and have it grade your own portfolio by taking the average grade of all stocks. My portfolio, for example, gets a B. Not bad at all, but there’s certainly room for improvement. I took a closer look this week and found that a few of my D-graded positions are trading at a much better price now than they were a few weeks back. So, my plan this week is to prune those positions and sock away some cash for a future buying opportunity in my A-graded stocks. I also put together a quick list of some of the most searched tickers on TradeSmith, and looked up what each stock graded on Louis’ total grade, as well as his Fundamental Grade and Quantitative Grade: 
Amazon’s C grade may surprise you. I own this one, so let’s both take a closer look at what makes up the grade. On the Fundamental side, the factors bringing Amazon down to a B are its Earnings Momentum, Cash Flow, and Analyst Earnings Revisions. Each of these factors, like all the others, are quantitatively tracked and graded by Louis’ system: 
The Quantitative Grade is a measure of the stock’s price momentum, and a well-guarded secret of Louis’ system. While we can’t share the specific details that make up this grade, a simple look at Amazon’s stock price – down about 7% this year and lagging the market – helps us understand the neutral grade. The guidance on C stocks is either to hold the stock if you own it, or wait for improved conditions before you buy. But B- and A-rated stocks are Buys and Strong Buys, respectively. And we can see a few of those in the list above. D stocks are Sells, and F stocks are Strong Sells. Currently, there are 18 stocks in the S&P 500 rated F. Here are the top 5 by market cap: 
If you own any of these names, it may be time to prune them from your portfolio and tighten things up. As for where to allocate that capital, you can look to your winning names that hold strong characteristics like what we showed you above. And you could also look here… If you’ve been following along here in TradeSmith Daily, then you know Louis is about to give a presentation today at 1 p.m. Eastern all about a topic that’s been pervasive in 2025: the new Trump administration’s rewiring of the global economic world order. According to Louis, President Donald Trump is planning a series of new “Liberation Day”-style moves that could totally upend the way we view taxes, domestic energy, and technology. Upon these three pillars will rest a new regime of market leaders, and explosive returns could be in store for the top brass of Louis’ stock grading system. Going into today’s presentation, you should know that the average return for all of Louis’ recommendations over just the last five years has been 23.51%. That’s what you’d get if you’d taken each of Louis’ trades from start to finish. And, assuming a starting position of $7,500 in each stock, you’d be sitting on cumulative gains of more than $600,000 in that span. Results like this come not just from focusing on the A- and B-rated stocks, but from staying on top of the major market trends that show Louis where to look in these groups. Click here for more info on today’s free event, where he’ll share the name and ticker of one of his top recommendations. Bitcoin’s new highs are no coincidence… Another major milestone of the past month was bitcoin rallying to new highs of about $110,000 last week. This comes after the King of Crypto crested the fabled $100,000 mark and struggled with holding it earlier this year. The more recent surge seemed to come from nowhere. Bitcoin has recovered along with the stock market, but it’s up way more for the year so far: 
The answer, to my mind anyway, lies in the “Big Beautiful Bill” currently on the Senate floor. This bill, a combination of extending the 2017 tax cuts and a whole host of spending increases, is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to raise the deficit by $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years. And that’s actually a pretty rosy assumption – it factors in a cost of servicing the debt at around 3.6%. Meanwhile the 30-year Treasury bond is yielding about 5%, indicating much higher debt service costs now that may continue to spiral upward. Of course, the Big Beautiful Bill will see some revisions that will hopefully get it to a place of at least mild fiscal responsibility. We can’t close the book on it yet. But for the time being, this legislation is a key reason bitcoin is moving. Investors are getting ahead of a future where the U.S. dollar continues to deteriorate under the weight of all these tens of trillions in debt and the growing risk premium on the U.S. more broadly. That explains why bitcoin and especially gold, up more than 25% this year, are working so well. But there’s something else happening in crypto that has my attention, and that’s the ETH/BTC chart. We talked a bit about ETH/BTC some weeks back, concluding that ETH was likely not a strong sell at those levels despite its extreme weakness against BTC. That’s turned out to be correct, with ETH up a solid 68% from when I wrote you. Today, it’s also making great headway against BTC, with the price currently breaking free of a downtrend it’s been stuck in since all the way back in June of last year. That’s also coinciding with a break back into the 2022-2025 trading range: 
ETH has clearly been an outperformer here, but it’s also just playing catch-up in the broader market strength. Still, this chart is one to watch. If we see ETH/BTC start to break free of that longer-term trading range, it could indicate that it and the rest of the altcoin market are ready to really shine. And as past market cycles have shown us, that’s where the biggest, quickest gains tend to come from. To your health and wealth, 
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily | 
