This one has to be the Chart of the Day.
We’re looking at the outperformance of Square vs Paypal. [Read more…]
Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
by JC
This one has to be the Chart of the Day.
We’re looking at the outperformance of Square vs Paypal. [Read more…]
by Ian Culley
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
It’s beginning to feel more and more like a risk-on environment out there.
Commodities are ripping higher. Stocks are digging in at critical levels. And defensive assets such as Treasury bonds and the Japanese yen are in freefall.
Despite the market volatility this year, investors continue to be rewarded for buying stocks over bonds. This has been the case for two years now, and there’s no evidence it will change anytime soon.
When we look to our risk indicators and risk appetite ratios, the majority are still stuck in a range. With the stocks versus bonds ratio resolving to fresh highs, we’re thinking the rest may soon follow.
But first and foremost, the price action from this classic intermarket relationship suggests that stocks are still the place to be.
Let’s take a look.
We don’t go bottom-fishing around here often. Fighting trends is not my idea of a good time.
But every so often we’ll come across a beaten-up name that has so decisively destroyed bulls that there is no fight left in them. And when all the hot money has capitulated and exited their positions, THEN it becomes a compelling idea.
One such name in the Marijuana space — yep, that utterly annihilated sector — has found support at a key former resistance level after a 90% pullback from all-time highs
Monday night we held our March Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and re-watch here.
In this post, we’ll summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.
Let’s get right into it!
by Ian Culley
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
The unwind is on in the aussie!
After accumulating a historic net-long position last fall, commercial hedgers are scrambling to cover. Over the past four weeks, the smart money has trimmed its long exposure to roughly half of what it was.
This is reflected in our most recent Commitment of Traders Heatmap, which you can view here.
When positioning flips at extremes – like we’re seeing now in the Australian dollar – we want to look for opportunities to ride the emerging trend. In other words, we want to bet in the direction that commercial hedgers are currently unwinding away from.
In the case of AUD, they recently had a historic net long position. As such, we’re looking for bullish technical characteristics to see if a long setup makes sense here.
It just so happens that things are really coming together for the aussie chart lately. We love when technicals and sentiment line up like this.
by JC
This is the video recording of the March 2022 Mid-month Conference Call.
by Ian Culley
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza
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.
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.
Then we flip through our list of stocks flashing unusual activity and pick the best setups using many of the same technical filters we do for our other scans.
And, just like that, we’ll follow the money flow and fatten our own pockets along with some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.
by Ian Culley
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.
Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column, where we’ll cover all the action for the week ended March 18, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated 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.
Watch this video for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.
Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers, there’s a lot of overlap.