From the Desk of Ian Culley @Ianculley

Bonds have stopped falling across the board!

That doesn’t mean it’s time to go all in. Tactically, it’s difficult to get behind this week’s near-term strength. 

Right now, we’re looking at just a few days of bullish price action. And where do we define our risk?

We have to know where we’re right and where we're wrong before we get involved in any investment. 

Thankfully, high-yield bonds answer this all-important question.

Check out the daily chart of the High-Yield Bond ETF $HYG:

Unlike most bonds, HYG has formed a small reversal formation.

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!

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, to 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.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The dollar is dropping!

It’s finally time to bet on some sustained downside action, and the euro is my vehicle of choice.

I laid out the conditions that would flip my outlook on the euro earlier this month. Three weeks later, the pieces have fallen into place for a bullish position.

Let’s take a look.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

This is one of our favorite bottom-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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

We've had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.

For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.

That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.

We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.

To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

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.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

It’s easy to lose sight of how impressive energy has been this year. 

We get it. Sideways action is boring.

But while the rest of the market has been selling off, energy has shown incredible resilience, digesting gains in a continuation pattern since early summer.

After an explosive rally for energy stocks off the 2020 lows, it’s normal to experience an extended period of corrective action. In fact, it’s healthy. 

Now get this...

Many of these stocks haven’t even broken out yet!

We know it sounds crazy, especially when some of these industry groups have more than tripled during the trailing 24 months.

But the charts don’t lie. They’re telling us some of these trends might just be getting started. Let’s take a look.

We can break down oil and gas companies into three main categories: upstream, midstream, and downstream. 

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Airbnb, Uber, and Paypal.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that which you can check out here.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as "a market of stocks."

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions. But there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club.

We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports.

Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to the Short Report.

This is the video recording of the October 2022 Mid-month Conference Call.

We discussed:

• The DJ Industrial Avg at the Pre-Covid Highs
• Fewer Stocks are making New Lows
• Small-caps, Mid-caps & Micro-caps diverging positively
• Sentiment is at a historic bearish extreme
• Credit Spreads tightening the past 4 months
• Negative Correlation Between US Dollar & Stocks intact
• Consumer Discretionary outpacing Staples
• Sector Level trends are improving
• Energy making new 52-week highs relative to Stocks
• Shorting these REITs and Software Stocks
• Industrials & Regional Banks making new 52wk relative highs
• More Bullish Options Activity in Occidental Petroleum
• Coal Stocks Setting Up For Breakouts
• Industrial Stocks ready to bounce
• Financials holding Support
• Copper/Gold ratio not confirming new highs in Yields
• 5 & 10/yr Breakevens peaked quarters ago
• Emerging Markets down near critical levels
• Seasonally the best time to buy stocks
• List of my favorite stocks to buy

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I don’t care what your favorite TikTok financial guru says: Trading isn’t easy.

The market has made this point again and again this year.

The market has also driven home another essential truth: Trends persist.

I talk about this approach quite a bit because I’m a trend-follower. It’s my favorite Dow Theory Tenet, and it's the foundation of my approach to the markets.

Trend-following might sound simple. But it’s far from effortless. Like any worthwhile philosophy, real-world applications can sometimes be a struggle. 

In fact, no other market has tested my trend-following resolve quite like this year’s unstoppable dollar. And I’m still looking for opportunities to get long…

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ending October 14, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with The Minor Leaguers.

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.