Simplicity is the Art
By Sean Sharpe x.com/BornInvestor Stocks in Play - Guest AoT Author
"When I explain my second setup, people laugh. They call it YOLO, gambling, a sure way to ruin. I buy a runaway momentum stock right at the close and sell it at the open the next day. It's called the Overnight Hold. I learned it from TraderStewie in 2020. I didn't trade it for five years, but I always had it in the back of my mind. In September 2025 I studied it in depth and finally felt I had the experience and understanding to follow its simplicity. One year and 61 trades later, I have a 1,150% return on the strategy."
In 2020 I discovered the stock market. I was a growth investor one day and a trader the next. I traded options and joined several services. It was a bubble, and no matter what I did, I made money. I couldn't even read a chart. The market was paying me not to learn.
I was a member of Art of Trading (AoT) for a few months during the 2020/21 period. At the time I thought I didn't take a lot away from it, but it turns out I did. Two things stuck, though I didn't know it yet: Stewie's Power Earnings Gaps and the core simplicity of his trading.
In 2022 the market retired me as a growth investor (lol), but my interest in trading was renewed. I began to learn. I read books, studied master traders, and even as most people from the Twitter gang of 2020 disappeared, I kept slogging away. I tried lots of strategies and had several cycles of boom and bust along the way. One thing I kept coming back to
was Power Gaps.
I eventually figured out that I couldn't be a technical-only trader. It just didn't suit me.
I needed the story. That comes from my personality. I like reading and understanding. I listen to a lot of podcasts about companies and sectors, and I think that themes and market narratives are very powerful. When stocks are in a theme, they all move. When a major
catalyst hits a stock and surprises the market, whether that's strong earnings or a biotech catalyst, that is powerful.
This part of my personality is a strength for me, the same way that, for others, not needing to know a single thing about a stock is a strength for them. Matching your personality to your setup is critical in trading, and it's often overlooked. It's about your time frame too. I'm in Ireland. The US market opens at 2:30 in the afternoon and closes at 9 at night, and I have a
family and kids. Can I day trade? Not really. Then why try?
Eventually, with a lot of study, I really defined my core trading strategy. I buy stocks with positive, market-surprising news that are gapping up on strong relative volume out of good bases and chart patterns. This can be biotech, earnings or press releases. Sometimes the catalysts are truly game-changing and sometimes they're hot air. I don't discriminate. Some
of the best movers in the stock market are pure fugazi. I buy on day one of the gaps, and I also buy what I call delayed reactions, which are closer to how Stewie trades Power Earnings Gaps: the stock consolidates after the gap, sideways or in an orderly pullback, before continuing higher. I tend to focus on the ones that move within eight days of the gap up.
I'm always working on it, but I can't emphasize enough how every time I failed, I came back to this core idea of stocks gapping up. Stocks in Play, Power Earnings Gaps and Episodic Pivots (Pradeep Bonde). They're all the same family. There is nothing new in the markets.
One of my biggest takeaways from AoT was simplicity. No options, no complicated Elliott Wave, no fancy macro thesis. Repeatable, pattern based setups and consistent stock selection.
I'm not a particularly technical person. I'm allergic to complicated indicators and strategies. But what I have learned with all of this is that you can usually understand the best catalysts from the first headline, and you can spot the best potential gapper at first glance of the chart. If you have to dig deeper or draw complicated lines, you're usually wrong.
The Overnight Hold
In 2025 I finally felt ready to add a second setup to my arsenal. I had dabbled in Stewie's Overnight Hold setup back in 2020, but back then I didn't have the power to sit out. I had no market awareness. I couldn't read a chart!
In October 2025 I started my own version of the Overnight Hold. It's very similar to Stewie's, almost identical, but with hard rules: the stock must close in the 90th percentile of the day's range (the top 10%), on high RVOL. A runaway train. Here is my scan, adapted from one Stewie shared.
The edge for this strategy is sitting out. In 12 months I've taken 61 trades. Several of them have been bad trades, but for the most part I've traded the strategy well and really sat out the bad periods. All in on every trade. No margin. My finding is that the scariest ones are usually the best. I generally follow Stewie's rule of waiting for the open to sell, though as the
account has grown this has become more difficult for me psychologically.
I have achieved a 1,150% return in 12 months.
The Weekly Hold
Thanks to a recent quiet spell in the market, I finally got around to doing a deep dive on the AoT Top Pick of the Week strategy. I went through every single trade posted, graded each one and created my own set of additional rules that suit my personality.
One of the most attractive things about this Weekly Hold strategy, as I'm calling it for myself, is that it's very scalable. Most trades are in larger-cap, liquid leader stocks. It's very much a theme-following strategy and fits very well with the regular work I do each week on my core trading. I'm opting for the all-in approach on each trade. My finding again is that sitting out is the ultimate edge in this setup. When reviewing, I tried to do as little hindsight trading as possible.
Here are the simple rules I came up with:
The market comes first
Trade only when QQQ's 10 EMA is above its 20 EMA. This is the most
important rule.
Reversals: only buy SOXL, TQQQ etc. at major market oversold or reversal
moments.
If QQQ gaps down on entry day, pass.
In a weak tape, pass on gap-down entries and on stocks pulling back below
their 10 and 20 EMAs.
In an overbought market, no entries on day 3 or later of a swing.
What to trade
Long only.
In-theme stocks only: energy in 2022, AI and memory in 2024–25.
The stock must show relative strength. Avoid weakness.
ADR of at least 2.5%.
If the stock has a single-stock leveraged ETF (NVDL for NVDA, for example),
trade that instead.
No biotechs, no inverse ETFs, no volatility ETFs.
Getting in
No chasing: no late or day-2 entries after a breakout bar, and nothing
extended.
Don't enter a gap larger than 2%. Set a limit order and wait for a pullback.
Getting out
Max stop loss 15%.
Sell the Friday close.
Never hold through earnings.
Compound the account.
These rules would have cut out several strong winners from Stewie's trades, but, more importantly, they would have cut out the biggest losers. They remove about four in ten trades but change the returns from excellent to stratospheric. With the same picks and the same
compounding, $10,000 becomes $245.6K without my market filter and $827.7K with it.
Past performance is obviously not indicative of future returns, but to methe Top Pick of the Week looks like something I will be adding to my repertoire.
The traders I've learned the most from are @TraderZ (an AoT member I speak to daily), @TraderStewie (even though I was only a member for a short time) and @PradeepBonde (who taught me how to learn and think in setups). What they all have in common is that they preach simplicity.
I actually laughed when I saw Stewie's Top Pick setup. Buy the Monday open, sell the Friday close... It's too simple.
But Simplicity is the Art.
Footnote: My Weekly Hold has been live since October 11th 2026.
Sean Sharpe trades catalyst-driven gaps and writes Stocks in Play (stocksinplay.net).
Nothing in this post is financial advice.
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