From Washington’s Wallet to Wall Street Wins: Why KRMN Could Be the Next Triple-Digit Trade

Small-cap breakout stocks 2025 - From Washington’s Wallet to Wall Street Wins: Why KRMN Could Be the Next Triple-Digit Trade

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There’s an old Wall Street saying: “Don’t fight the Fed.”

What it means is simple. When the Federal Reserve is cutting rates and flooding the system with liquidity, you want to be long. When they’re hiking rates and tightening, you don’t want to be the one standing in front of that freight train. The Fed is too big of a player — they tilt the entire game board.

But in 2025, it hasn’t just been the Fed moving markets. Other government bodies have been throwing throwing their weight around in big ways — through legislation, contracts, investments and policy shifts that have re-priced entire sectors almost overnight.

And if this year has taught us anything, it’s that taking aim on these federally-fueled catalysts and position alongside them can be incredibly lucrative.

What has separated us at Masters in Trading is that we’ve learned to spot these moves coming before they hit the front page of Barron’s, CNBC, or Bloomberg.

And if you’ve been trading alongside us this year, you’ve seen how powerful that can be.

MP Materials — When the Pentagon Put a Miner on the Map

Rare earth minerals normally don’t make for flashy headlines, but they’re the backbone of modern technology. Without them you can’t build electric vehicle batteries, you can’t produce the magnets that run wind turbines, and you certainly can’t keep the chip supply chain humming.

The problem is that for decades the United States has been almost entirely dependent on other countries — namely China — to supply these critical materials. That’s a vulnerability the Pentagon simply couldn’t tolerate any longer.

That’s why the headlines out of China and the U.S. last year — rare earth shortages, threats of supply cuts, pandemic-era style disruptions — had my antennae up. When the world’s two largest economies start sparring over materials this essential, traders need to be paying attention. I knew if Washington was serious about securing domestic supply, MP was going to be in the middle of the conversation.

And sure enough, the Pentagon stepped up and wrote a check. That single move flipped the narrative on MP overnight. MP closed one day at $30 and opened the next morning at $50. Wall Street suddenly woke up to the strategic importance of rare earths, but we were ready and waiting.

The payoff was massive — a 534% gainer. James, one of our Masters in Trading All-Access members, woke up to $140,000 in profits from his MP calls. Don booked $55,000.  In total, just a handful of traders in our Discord pulled down a quarter-million dollars overnight. Many others locked in 500%+ returns. It was the single biggest win of the year — and for a lot of folks, the biggest win of their trading lives.

We had a clear thesis — that Washington would have to secure domestic rare earth supply — and a carefully selected target positioned in the one U.S. company perfectly set up to benefit when the check finally cleared.

Of course, these aren’t once-in-a-lifetime setups. They’re repeatable patterns. You just have to know where to look. This is exactly how I teach traders how to think inside my Masters in Trading Options Challenge. If you want to learn how to identify trades like this one — the Options Challenge is where you’ll see step-by-step how pros spot, size, and manage these kinds of opportunities.

Lyft’s Big, Beautiful Catalyst Hidden in the Fine Print

Markets love a good headline. But sometimes the real market movers are buried in the fine print.

That’s what happened with the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — a thousand-page monster that made news for the flashy stuff like tax brackets and energy credits. What almost nobody noticed was a quiet provision that flipped how U.S. companies expense their R&D.

From 2022 through 2024, companies were forced to amortize R&D over five years. It punished innovation and dragged down reported income. But starting in 2025, that rule was reversed — and not just going forward. Companies could go back to 2022, 2023, and 2024 and expense those costs up front. That meant an immediate boost to GAAP earnings and free cash flow, along with a one-time catch-up that analysts hadn’t modeled.

That’s where Lyft came in. Wall Street had written it off as Uber’s little brother, but Lyft spends around $375 million a year on U.S. R&D. Under the old rules, that spend was dead weight. Under the new rules, it became instant fuel for earnings.

Thirty days before the Street woke up, I wrote an essay to our Masters in Trading community pointing this out. Lyft was my top name on the list. We bought in on July 30th when shares were around $13. By late August, the stock had rallied to $17 — right into its expected move range. That’s when we started locking in some profits.

Why take some off the table? Because 76% of the time a stock closes inside its expected move. That’s discipline. That’s how we manage risk. We don’t get greedy, we get paid.

And the results across our community were incredible. Ernie posted a 158% winner. James made $36,000, a 110% return. Linda banked 150%. Michael pulled 148%. Navi scored 200%. John closed 164% for $3,200 in profit. All on the same trade.

The best part? Lyft hasn’t even fully priced in the catalyst yet. They haven’t highlighted it on an earnings call. Institutions haven’t rerated the stock. But the writing is on the wall. By the end of the year, I believe Lyft trades comfortably above $20.

Once again, this wasn’t about catching a meme move or speculating on a chart breakout. It was about doing the homework, finding the story no one else is watching, and getting positioned before the analysts start chirping.

QXO — The Builder Roll-Up No One Was Watching

So far we have two very different trades — one driven by a $400 million Pentagon contract, the other by a buried accounting change in an omnibus bill — both proving the same point: when you line up with government-driven catalysts, you put yourself in position to reel in outsized gains… and we’re not done yet.

Next we turn our sights toward Brad Jacobs. For the uninitiated, Jacobs is a a serial entrepreneur with a habit of turning boring industries into multi-billion-dollar empires. He did it with Waste Management. He did it with XPO Logistics. And when he launched QXO to roll up the building-supply industry, most of Wall Street shrugged.

But that’s exactly why I loved it. Boring and fragmented is Jacobs’ playground. Backed by deep-pocketed partners — including Affinity and the Kushner family — QXO started raising capital and making acquisitions.

We were there from the start. Our first entries came in around $15. By early summer we’d already ridden multiple spikes to double and triple our option money. We took 180% gains, reset, and did it again.

Now Barron’s is finally catching on. This past weekend, they splashed QXO across a weekend spread and suddenly everyone wanted to talk about it. But by then, we had already rung the register multiple times.

Kratos — The Pentagon’s Hot New Wingman

If MP Materials and QXO proved how powerful it can be to trade alongside government-driven catalysts, Kratos has been the name that showed us how far that theme can run once the market finally catches on.

We’ve had our eye on Kratos Defense (KTOS) for more than a year back when the stock was trading under $20. Then in December 2024, I highlighted why I picked drones as one of my top sectors for 2025. The Pentagon was pouring billions into unmanned systems, NATO allies were boosting their defense budgets, and everyone could see from Ukraine to the Pacific that drones had become the face of modern warfare.

Among the companies in that space, Kratos stood out. While competitors chased high-priced defense contracts, Kratos focused on affordability and scale. Its Valkyrie drone — an autonomous combat aircraft designed to fly alongside piloted jets — became the poster child for that strategy. A low-cost “loyal wingman” that the Air Force could deploy without risking a pilot, and at a fraction of the cost of a traditional fighter.

That’s exactly the kind of platform the Pentagon can’t ignore. And it’s exactly the kind of situation we love at Masters in Trading.

Fast forward to Labor Day Weekend, and KTOS has been nothing short of a breakout star. While most of Wall Street was slow to pick it up, our community had been tracking it for months. We watched it grind higher through December, consolidate, and then rip into the new year. By the spring, KTOS was one of the strongest defense names on the board — a stock that kept trading right up to its expected move, giving disciplined traders clean entries and exits all year long.

Common Ground

Look at these stories side by side.

With MP Materials, the Pentagon flipped the switch. With Lyft, it was a hidden accounting change. With QXO, it was a billionaire rolling up an industry with political capital behind him. With Kratos, it was the drone war playing out in real time with government contracts stoking demand.

Different names, different sectors, same principle: government money bends markets.

And as you’ve seen, the traders who position early — before the analysts, before the media, before the Street wakes up — are the ones harvesting triple-digit returns when everyone else finally catches on.

If you want to keep going down this rabbit hole, my colleague at InvestorPlace, Louis Navellier, is tracking a different angle on the same theme. He believes a looming $7 Trillion Trump Shock on September 30th could set off one of the most explosive — and narrow — bull markets in history. Louis has a handful of A-rated stocks are positioned to capture that flood of institutional money, and he’s set to reveal all of the details during his upcoming Lock & Load event. Follow this link if you want to see where Washington’s next wave of money could land.

Why KRMN Could Be Next

All of this brings me to the next name I want you focused on: KRMN.

Karman is a small-cap defense contractor that builds the stuff that makes missiles fly and rockets launch. Through their Karman Space & Defense arm, they design, test, and manufacture mission-critical hardware — things like payload protection, aerodynamic systems, and propulsion. Basically, if it’s going up into space or screaming through the sky at mach speeds, KRMN probably has a hand in it.

Karman’s growth tells us one thing loud and clear: this company is built to scale — earnings up more than 230% year-on-year. They supply components for over 100 active missile and space programs, making them mission-critical to giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Defense spending isn’t shrinking anytime soon. The U.S. budget is expanding, NATO is boosting commitments, and Washington is pushing hard on reshoring critical supply chains. Put those three together and you’ve got a policy environment that practically guarantees steady contract flow for years to come.

Here’s what really excites me: KRMN’s market cap is still under $5 billion. That means we’re in before the herd. But there’s more.

Since April, we’ve watched a massive divergence grow between the Nasdaq 100 and the Russell 2000. Big tech has been ripping while small caps have lagged. That kind of divergence is a coiled spring, and when it releases, it’s small caps that get the explosive move.

Layer in the Federal Reserve hinting at lowering rates, and that’s rocket fuel. Small caps are more sensitive to borrowing costs than the megacaps. When rates fall, balance sheets open up, capital gets cheaper, and these companies get room to expand. That’s why I think we’re about to see a serious rotation out of stretched Nasdaq names into undervalued small caps. And KRMN is sitting right in the sweet spot to benefit.

When I look at KRMN, I see the same ingredients we’ve profited from in MP, Lyft, QXO, and Kratos. A powerful policy tailwind. Deep government ties. A market that’s still sleeping on the story. That’s the exact recipe that’s given us our biggest winners. And I believe KRMN is next in line.

Remember, the creative trader wins,

Jonathan Rose,

Founder, Masters in Trading


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2025/08/from-washingtons-wallet-to-wall-street-wins-why-krmn-could-be-the-next-triple-digit-trade/.

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