Fresh two-year highs for the Gold/SPX ratio stand out this week, as gold outperforms its alternatives. It doesn't get much more bullish than fresh absolute and relative highs.

With that as our backdrop, I had Jason Perz @JasonP138 of Against All Odds Research on the show to share his view of the precious metals space.

If you’ve tuned in to either of my “Expiring Daily” Twitter spaces talks over the past two Mondays, you’ve heard me talking about a trading strategy I’m currently in the process of iterating that involves daily expiring options in the S&P 500 options complex ($SPY and $SPX options, specifically).

A thoughtful listener sent me an email with a bunch of questions about it, and I thought my answers to him might be enlightening to some of you who may be tinkering with strategy construction, particularly with short-dated, high-gamma options.

As I told the emailer, I can answer questions as of my thinking RIGHT NOW. But please know this is a work-in-process, and I’m continually tweaking my entry/exit/adjustment parameters as I learn more.

Here was our conversation:

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market isn't mustering up the power to trend higher just yet.

I'd like $SPY to hold 392 and hopefully break above 400 in time.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Money flows to where it’s treated best.

That’s the foundational premise of relative strength studies. 

Remember, we always want to buy the strongest and sell the weakest. It sounds simple. But it’s impossible to overstate its importance.

One of the best ways to increase our probability of success is to buy assets that are trending higher on absolute terms while outperforming their alternatives.

Those are key ingredients of a strong uptrend. And it just so happens that gold checks both boxes…

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Money flows to where it’s treated best.

That’s the foundational premise of relative strength studies. 

Remember, we always want to buy the strongest and sell the weakest. It sounds simple. But it’s impossible to overstate its importance.

One of the best ways to increase our probability of success is to buy assets that are trending higher on absolute terms while outperforming their alternatives.

Those are key ingredients of a strong uptrend. And it just so happens that gold checks both boxes…

Here’s a chart of gold futures posting fresh two-year highs versus the S&P 500 index:

The next new position in our Paid-to-Play portfolio is:

The most significant insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filed by RA Capital Management.

The hedge fund revealed a purchase of roughly $13.4 million of Dice Therapeutics $DICE, increasing its ownership stake to 14.3%.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

In this market, we need to be on our toes.

In a bull market, I wouldn't have protection on.

But in this market, it's wise to do so.

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 Monday April 3rd @ 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 Monday evening:

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.

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 Kimmy Sokoloff

We saw a nice gap up this morning for the indices.

Then they came back down.