From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Crude Oil has been the Lone Ranger within the energy complex since early June, relentlessly pushing to new highs while other energy-related commodities have been stuck below overhead supply.
But that’s all changing this week as Heating Oil and Gasoline just broke above key resistance levels to new multi-year highs.
The recent strength from Energy also comes as Base Metals continue to cool off and correct. Copper, Tin, and Aluminum are all rangebound below logical levels of resistance after explosive moves off their 2020 lows. This is yet further evidence of the bifurcated market environment we're in right now. All we can do is focus on finding opportunities in areas that are trending... So, let's talk more about Energy.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
There’s no question the landscape in the currency market has dramatically changed with the US Dollar reasserting its dominance in recent weeks.
You can read more about this in our weekly currency post, but here’s an excerpt with the long and short of it:
King dollar is definitely back in the driver’s seat from a tactical viewpoint as we’ve seen a significant shift in favor of USD over the near term. But even the intermediate and long-term trends for most major FX pairs have flipped in the direction of the Dollar over the past month or so.
Considering this broad-based strength, it’s clear that bulls are back in control of the Dollar… at least from a near-term perspective.
So, earlier in the week we analyzed the US Dollar Index $DXY and outlined some critical levels to watch over the short run.
Something we’ve been working on internally is using various 'bottoms-up' tools and scans to complement our top-down approach.
One way we’re doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large - and ultimately mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
And the market quickly answered with a resounding, YES!
We’ve highlighted several currency pairs challenging crucial levels of support and resistance. Last week, we saw the USD take control at those key levels.
Both the EUR/USD and GBP/USD turned away from critical areas of former support turned resistance. The USD/CAD moved sharply higher from a major area of support. The AUD/USD broke back below a key retracement level after consolidating for the first half of the year. And the NZD/USD retreated from an area of overwhelming overhead supply.
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.
We've already had some great trades come out of this Smallcap-focused column since we launched it late last year and began 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. After applying price and liquidity filters, we simply sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus on the best players.
It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. You can read more about the reasoning behind this post here.
We're just interested in aggregating all of the charts we put together throughout the week and organizing them all into one, easy to flip through deck.
One thing that stood out to me this week was this table of new highs and new lows. It's a great way to visualize what's going on underneath the surface:
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Whether you trade commodities or not, it’s been impossible to ignore the recent sell-off in Lumber, as prices have collapsed almost 30% in just the last month.
Well, let’s just say we got a lot more than that! Sometimes markets correct or consolidate through time, and sometimes they correct through price.
And Lumber is most definitely correcting through price!
But Lumber is not the only procyclical commodity to enter a corrective phase. More recently, DR. Copper has begun to digest its recent gains through price as well.
These corrections have already done some damage to the primary uptrends at play as both of these economically sensitive commodities have recently violated critical support levels.
It's now a year later, and we're still seeing them... In fact, the S&P 500 recently registered its highest percentage of new 52-week highs in history - absolutely crushing the historic reading we saw in Q4 of last year.
So, why is this important?
These extreme readings are as bullish as it gets and are a very common characteristic of the early innings of a fresh bull market. It's as simple as that, right?
These are the registration details for our live monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.
This month’s Conference Call will be held on Tuesday June 22nd at 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.
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.
And at present, markets are a total mess and full of mixed messages as most major stock market indexes continue to churn sideways in consolidation patterns, while many risk-on commodities are in corrective phases.