When Tony Greer left his seat on the Goldman Sachs commodity desk in early 2000, he thought he had the markets entirely figured out. He had a safety net from the firm’s IPO, a few massive tech-stock wins, and the swagger of a newly minted independent trader.
Then he walked straight into a “professional frying pan.”
He launched a day-trading firm precisely as the NASDAQ hit 5,000—right before the dot-com bubble burst, halving the index over the next six months. As Greer revealed on the latest episode of Y’all Street, that brutal lesson completely rewired his trading philosophy. He stopped trying to outsmart the market and started listening to it.
The Sector ETF Playbook
Today, as the founder of the independent research firm TG Macro, Greer eschews the romance of picking single-stock winners. Instead, he focuses entirely on macroeconomic trends using Sector ETFs.
“The reason I like sector ETFs is that they kind of trade on a narrative more, and you avoid single-stock blow-up risk,” Greer explained to host Tarek Saab.
In a single stock, one bad executive decision or a poor quarterly earnings report can result in an overnight 18% loss, forcing the trader to either double down on a loser or capitulate. Sector ETFs smooth out that binary risk, allowing Greer to maintain a highly concentrated “View Matrix” of just a handful of active trades. He watches the weekly and monthly leaderboards, identifies the sectors with momentum, and waits for a pullback to strike.
Trading What Is, Not What You Think
The downfall of the rookie investor is trading on ideology. Greer insists that personal opinions have no place on the trading desk.
“The young Tony Greer would read the Wall Street Journal and say, ‘Okay, the dollar is going to go higher, I’m going to buy dollars,'” Greer laughed. “I realized after losing enough money that I had total disregard for what the market was saying… You know what I think about markets? Nothing. I trade by what the market is actually doing.”
This means setting aside ego, utilizing trailing stops just below moving averages, and acknowledging that if a trade only gives you a 7% return before stalling out, you take the 7% and walk away.
“If you realize that not every trade has to be a freaking Picasso, and sometimes trades are just little 7% winners… the market gave you seven, so move on.”
Tony Greer
The “Great Rotation” into Hard Assets
Applying this strictly objective, price-action framework to the 2026 market, Greer sees a massive shift underway. The “800-pound gorilla” of Artificial Intelligence—which drove the tech market to dizzying heights—is beginning to look like an overbuilt infrastructure play with a murky revenue model, eerily reminiscent of the late 90s dot-com era.
As capital rotates out of tech, Greer’s charts are lighting up with a different narrative: natural resources.
“You’ve got natural resources that have gone bid. They’re breaking out,” Greer noted, pointing to gold miners, oil services, basic materials, and uranium. “It feels like a good year for natural resources, but I think it can continue. It feels like something that can be more lasting.”
For investors looking to survive the coming macroeconomic shifts, Greer’s advice is clear: stop predicting the future, start respecting the trendlines, and never fall in love with a ticker symbol.
Listen to the full podcast on trading and market cycles with Tony Greer on Episode 32 of Y’all Street.
