From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

This is one of our favorite bottoms-up scans: Follow The Flow. In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish… but NOT both.

We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients. Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades. What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind… and they’re doing so for one reason only: Because they think the stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest "Minor Leaguers" report.

We've already had some great trades come out of this small cap-focused column since we launched it late last year and started rotating it with our flagship bottoms-up scan, "Under The Hood."

To make the cut for our Minor Leagues list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters. Then, we simply sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus on the best players only.

There are stocks going up and there are stocks that are not going up.

What you're not really seeing is many stocks going down.

That's probably the best way to describe this market.

We've outlined our long positions, particularly those that have been showing relative strength and positive momentum. Those areas are working.

But most stocks are not.

You can see the difference in the Value Line indexes, when we compare them to the S&P500. Think of these more of the "Median" stock:

You can see the same thing in other areas we look for confirmation of risk appetite. Both the Aussie/Yen and the High Beta / Low Volatility ratios are not confirming the new highs in S&Ps:

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Thursday July 6th @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Tuesday evening:

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

June is officially in the books!

Now, it’s time to dig into a fresh batch of monthly candles…

As everyone prepares to celebrate over the long weekend, we’re pouring over our monthly charts to reconnect with the primary trend.

And we witnessed some key developments in the commodity markets in June that are hard to ignore:

• Lumber was down almost 45%
• Copper was down 8%
• Natural Gas was up 24%
• Crude Oil was up 10%

Tumbling lumber futures and copper’s failure to hold above its former 2011 highs raised caution for risk assets.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When running through some scans this morning, we came across a stock that's been on our radar from the Under the Hood universe.

You can read our most recent report here. It was just published Monday.

This is a quick follow-up to discuss a hot stock from a leading industry group... And of course, it's presently offering us a skewed risk/reward. At the end of the day, that's all we're really looking for!

On the surface, this company is just an old LED light and radio-frequency device maker...

But, that's not the whole story.

They actually manufacture and sell some of the most important inputs and materials for a variety of burgeoning growth industries.

While a seemingly favorable fundamental story is always nice to have as a potential catalyst, it is never enough. For us, it's all about price.

Speaking of which, let's dive in and see what the charts are telling us.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

We’ve been pounding the table about the broad-based strength from the US Dollar since earlier this month. Due to the momentum of its recent move, we believe this rally could have legs beyond just the near-term... But we'll address that when the time comes.

For now, we're positioned to take advantage of this swift rebound from the Dollar through a handful of USD crosses currently offering favorable risk/rewards. 

Though the Dollar gave some of this month's gains back last week, our short-term outlook remains higher. As I write this, many G-10 currencies like the Euro, Pound, Aussie, and Canadian Dollar are all rolling over relative to USD. 

We’ll be revisiting this theme plenty as it plays out over the coming weeks to months.

But in the meantime let’s focus on a currency pair that’s bucking the trend, the US Dollar-Brazilian Real $USD/$BRL.

Here’s a weekly bar chart of USD/BRL:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

Welcome to our latest RPP Report, where we publish return tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

We consider this our weekly state of the union address as we break down and reiterate both our tactical and structural outlook on various asset classes and discuss the most important themes and developments currently playing out in markets all around the world.

We've been pretty obnoxious about our position that markets are a total mess these days. But it is what it is, and we can only play the hand we're dealt. 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

This is one of our favorite bottoms-up scans: Follow The Flow. In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity -- either bullish or bearish... but NOT both.

We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients. Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades. What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind... and they're doing so for one reason only: Because they think the stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood” column for the week ended June 27, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off with our "Minor Leaguers" column.

What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names. There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: A list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

One thing that stood out to me this week was the relentless amount of mixed intermarket signals.

On one hand, we have Lumber Futures getting completely destroyed. When I've ignored Lumber in the past, it's been a mistake.

This is probably something we shouldn't ignore:

On the other hand, if things were about to get worse for the Stock market, then why are Consumer Staples and Utilities both making new relative lows?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

As markets remain mixed we continue to see lackluster action from some US indexes even as some others make new highs.

Large-Caps recently charged back to fresh all-time highs, but the Small- and Mid-caps are still facing some serious overhead supply.

As always, we’re snooping around our market internals chartbook to see what’s really happening underneath the surface in these areas, and whether internals agree with the price action in these smaller market-cap indexes. And even more importantly, if they support, or disagree with the new highs in Large-Caps.

We'll also answer the question: "Just how bad is the recent deterioration in breadth in some of the weaker indexes?"

We have been getting fewer new highs for a while now, but after such extreme initiation thrusts this isn’t too unordinary, and nothing to cause huge concern.