There were no S&P 500 earnings reactions on Friday, but the materials sector continues to stand out to us. Here's a name that we like.
Olympic Steel $ZEUS is a classic under-the-radar materials name that is often overlooked until market forces compel investors to pay attention.
The company operates as a metals service center, supplying and processing carbon steel, stainless steel, aluminum, and specialty metals for a wide range of industrial end markets.
It’s not a headline-grabbing growth story, but it is deeply tied to real economic activity, manufacturing demand, and the broader industrial cycle, which makes price action in a name like this especially informative when it starts to move.
That’s precisely what happened last quarter.
When Olympic Steel reported earnings in late October, the fundamentals finally caught up to the setup.
The company delivered results the market wasn’t positioned for, and the stock surged more than 23% in a single session. That marked its best earnings reaction since 2015, and it wasn’t a one-off anomaly either.
Historically, when this stock sees outsized upside reactions to earnings, it tends to signal a meaningful shift in investor expectations rather than just short-term noise.
What’s important here is that the market didn’t just react; it repriced the stock.
That kind of reaction indicates investors are reassessing the business's trajectory, not just celebrating a beat.
Strong earnings reactions like this, especially after long periods of underperformance, often act as the ignition point for new trends.
We're seeing a new trend in the technicals.
Olympic Steel is breaking out to new 52-week highs as it climbs out of a textbook bearish-to-bullish reversal pattern.
This is precisely what early-stage primary uptrends look like: strong earnings confirmation followed by decisive price expansion into fresh highs.
In other words, the technicals aren’t happening in isolation.
The fundamentals lit the match, the earnings reaction confirmed the story, and the price is now doing the heavy lifting.
For a $550 million steel stock that’s just starting to attract attention again, that combination is hard to ignore.
Happy Monday!
-The Beat Team
P.S. This weekend, we brought together a lineup of the smartest technicians we know for Chart Summit 2026.
If you missed the LIVE event, make sure you get access to the complete livestreams, as well as each presentation and accompanying chart deck.
