What Icarus and Sisyphus Can Tell Us About Stocks
Two mythical figures can contextualize this week's tech sector rout (and recovery)
“Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight. For the greatest tragedy of them all is never to feel the burning light.” —Oscar Wilde
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” — Albert Camus
There’s a lot of rubble on Wall Street to pick through right now, as the tech sector’s air of invincibility is shattered by its own overinflated AI ambitions. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
To help make sense of it all, I’m dialing up my liberal arts degree once again.
Bear with me. I’ve thought a lot this week about Icarus and Sisyphus, two characters with iconic stories you’ve probably heard, but probably never in the context of the stock market. As selloffs stacked up this week, I wanted to find stock setups that perfectly encapsulate the stories and lessons learned from their mythology.
Full Send
Icarus, son of craftsman Daedalus, were both imprisoned by King Minos (think Minotaur). To escape, Daedalus crafted wings from molted feathers and wax, with one simple instruction; do not fly too close to the sun. That’s it. You have one job.
So what does our boy do? Flies too close to the sun and drowns. Womp womp.
The fall of Icarus deals with themes of hubris, arrogance, and recklessness. It represents a consequence of reckless ambition, and hoo boy, does that certainly line up with this last week.
In the search for Icarus on Wall Street, I wanted to find stocks that scored record highs already this year.
Senior Quantitative Analyst Rocky White compiled the Icarito List, stocks that scored all-time highs in 2026 but are now at least 10% off those highs. The below list is sorted by market cap and cut off at $10 billion.
Beyond chip and tech hardware, no sector has flown closer to the sun these last few weeks than miners. NEM, AEM, KGC, AGI, WPM represent gold. AG and PAAS suffered with silver. Even SCCO for copper didn’t want to feel left out.
All fallen soldiers. All with RSI’s working off an overbought condition. But, even after the dust settled Friday, all held their 50-day moving average.
That’s hardly a flameout worthy of our guy Icarus, so I moved to Finviz for stocks 40% off their 52-week highs. 105 names came up, but nobody that netted highs in 2026. I slid the scale even higher to 70% off 52-week highs. The list shrunk to 18. We were getting somewhere!
But again, most of these names were stocks already considered to be a mess that were falling from euphoric highs of the summer. Names like Duolingo (DUOL), Fiserv (FISV), Bitmine (BMNR), Figma, Circle, and Bitcoin maven Strategy (MSTR). These stocks have suffered well-documented, persistent slides, not sudden precipitous drops from glory.
So, I went back to my first list and gathered the 30% or more drawdowns that scored highs earlier in 2026; Kratos (KTOS), Hecla Mining (HL), Applied Digital (APLD), and Rocket Lab (RKLB). Red Cat (RCAT) is on there if you take out my $10 billion market cap holder.
All five are above their 50-day moving average! So the worst, sharpest pullbacks we’ve seen in the last month are still holding technical support.
Could it be that my quest to find Wall Street’s Icarus was futile? Was the real Icarus just the tables we made along the way?
Maybe my mindset was so skewered by the transition from St. Martin sun to Cincinnati snow, but I thought there’d be more carnage out there, with some serious technical breaches!
Corrections and rotations are always scary, I don’t want to diminish that; we should probably be in the room of the panic button. But this silly little exercise affirmed for me that we may not need our hand on the button juuust yet.
It’s also a reminder that very very rarely can you lose your shirt overnight. Most of the losses are slow burns that tempt you with a few rallies sprinkled in.
Keep Running Up That Hill
Then there’s Sisyphus, not to be confused with the other thing that sounds a lot like it. Sisyphus essentially snitched on Zeus. Zeus didn’t like that. King of the gods and all, he condemned Sisyphus to roll a giant boulder up a massive hill for eternity, only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top. Sisyphus is referenced endlessly in literary works, but one of the most famous was by French philosopher Albert Camus, who elevated the tale to one of heroism and admiration.
By highlighting the philosophy of the absurd, Camus commends Sisyphus for trudging on, accepting his fate, and remaining impervious to outside influence.
I can go on and on about the philosophical depth of this myth, but lets bring it back to stonks. Rolling a rock up a hill is repetitive, boring (just like the human condition), and taxing, but Sisyphus found meaning in it. Slow and steady winds the race.
A great list. But I wanted my own to find my champion. I took stocks either at a record high or 3% from an all-time peak, with an average true range under 5, to filter out the volatile bunch.
Here are your Sisyphi! These 24 stocks were the most successful names that got it done with the least amount of volatility. They keep pushing that boulder up the hill. If they ever fall, they’ll just work off their overbought status (note KO, JNJ are already there), test technical support, and resume the uptrend sooner rather than later.
But Sisyphus is also a cautionary tale, where futility reigns in a very existentialist way. Are there stocks that got the boulder all the way up the mountain and are back down starting from scratch again? I searched stocks 0-3% off their 52-week lows, with an ATR below 5. HIMS, FIS fit the bill, but are they really on their way back up the hill? They’re not worthy of the Sisyphus name.
One name really stands out: dum dummmmm (that’s the Netflix sound.)
Plutus, the Greek god of money, has been cruel to the stock since its June highs. Once trading at $135 in June, NFLX is 40% off those glory days. But $80 looks to be a solid starting point, and options are cheap amid a post-earnings volatility crush.
Want to know something crazy? Netflix popped up on my screener when I was messing around. It looked like a great poster boy for Sisyphus. Not 30 minutes later, we recommended NFLX as part of our Weekend Trader service.
Not gonna lie, it felt good to call this one.
Still awake? Philosophy class is over. Please don’t ChatGPT Sisyphus or Icarus for more info, read their Wikipedias like a real millennial.
The last thing I want to do is cross pollinate my metaphors. As it pertains to stocks, neither the Icarus or the Sisyphus of the world can’t live without each other. They’re the chaos of the Joker and the steady hand of Batman. Both are an essential part of the investing ecosystem. A true master of the market understands and appreciates both types of stocks, and what they bring to the table.
Keep on keepin on
Thank you Patrick, excellent recap commentary and analysis