One thing I know about this time of the year is that whipsaws thrive.
We call it Whipsaw Hunting Season.
The lack of liquidity, and lack of interest due to other life priorities, creates over-extended and exaggerated moves that otherwise would not be allowed to occur under normal supply and demand conditions.
But since the b-squads are on the desks, you regularly get failed moves this time of the year that result in very fast moves in the opposite direction.
For some great examples see $GDX in December 2016 and check out $TLT in December 2013, among many others.
These were nasty failed moves that ripped the short sellers' faces off into the new year.
We see these sorts of moves born around this time every single season. It's perfectly normal market (human) behavior.
So as we go hunting this year, Tesla really stands out as a potentially great candidate.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended December 23, 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.
Check out this week's Momentum Report, our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector, and Industry Group level.
By analyzing the short-term data in these reports, we get a more tactical view of the current state of markets. This information then helps us put near-term developments into the big-picture context and provides insights regarding the structural trends at play.
Let's jump right into it with some of the major takeaways from this week's report:
* ASC Plus Members can access the Momentum Report by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.
In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.
Discretionary Takes a Dive
The Large Cap Consumer Discretionary SPDR (XLY) broke below its pre-Covid highs of around $132 last week. The recent price action in XLY is an excellent illustration of how the weakest stocks are performing. We're witnessing a growing list of bearish continuation patterns resolve lower in growth indices as renewed selling pressure grips the market.
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.
You go on the twitter and all you see are people complaining about what a bad year this is for stocks, how bad the stock market is, recessions, bear markets, the Fed, blah blah blah.
I don't understand. What's everyone so angry about?
Stocks continue to do well. In fact, the back half of this year has been one of the better ones that we've ever seen.
Look how well most sectors have done since the market bottomed in June:
