From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The increased selling pressure across grain markets might not be on your radar. 

But pay close attention: The soybean complex, corn, and wheat are edging toward their respective year-to-date lows as demand wanes. 

Even if you don’t trade these ag contracts, fresh multi-month lows – especially in wheat – carry broad implications for equities and cyclical assets. (Hint: It has to do with crude oil.) 

That’s why I’m on high alert for a potential breakdown in Chicago wheat…

Wheat has been in a strong downtrend since its March 2022 peak, entering a bearish momentum regime last summer.

Notice it's currently carving out a potential multi-month reversal pattern below a significant polarity zone.

But the bulls have their work cut out for them, as the bearish momentum profile suggests sellers are still in control of the market. 

When I take a closer look, I see a...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Today was monthly options expiration, and it was slim pickings.

Fridays are always hard to trade, as you can see below: not much movement.

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 Moderna, Square, and Snap.

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. Click here to check it out.

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:

Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month. 

Then...

Finally, a setup I love that has earnings out of the way! There's light at the end of the tunnel. And no surprise I find this setup in a strong sector that wants to lead the market higher.

We're going to leverage some cheap options to position for a breakout to 52-week highs in this big cap name.

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Cormorant Asset Management.

Cormorant revealed an additional purchase of $58 million in Ambrx Biopharma $AMAM.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

What a week, though we've been pretty much range-bound.

Yesterday we started to dip in the late afternoon.

I’m in the process of creating a formal “business plan” for one of my trading strategies.

In 2002, I went through an arduous experience of creating an operating agreement, disclosure documents, and strategy explainers to attract investors as I built a small commodities hedge fund from scratch. Ignorance was bliss.

It was a chore, but a worthwhile investment in my time and energy because I ultimately won the business and started the fund. Success!

Now I’m entertaining the idea of managing OPM (other people’s money) again, and I’m reminded of the rewards of this process.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Wild action again today...

We were down in the morning, then we rallied for a bit till about 2:00 p.m. ET, then we had a complete fade into the close.