The forex and futures markets will provide bountiful ways to trade a weakening dollar.
Unfortunately, some of our initial attempts to capitalize on dollar weakness have fallen flat.
We’re not surprised – especially since market conditions remain challenging. But that won’t deter us from moving forward and finding the best trade setups.
As always, a viable trade comes down to two critical components: a well-defined risk level and a risk/reward profile heavily skewed in our favor.
And, of course, you know how much we like relative strength.
That brings us to a vehicle that challenges the definition of "currency."
Portfolio Update: Precious metals have been showing signs of life relative to base metals for some time. For example, the trend in the copper/gold ratio has favored gold 40 weeks in a row. Silver has also gotten in on the action and with it holding above a key level last week, we are adding it to our Tactical Opportunity portfolio this week.
The market’s focus is moving on from monthly inflation prints and toward the health & resiliency of the economy in light of the cumulative tightening by the Fed. Our macro health status report remains mixed, but is holding steady for now.
Alright, in all seriousness, there's been a fair amount of rumors surrounding Binance's solvency this week. This narrative originated from Binance's ambiguous proof-of-reserves and internal audits.
Following these questions, Binance saw a net outflow of $1.3B over the last few days, with many prominent trading firms withdrawing nine-figure amounts.
And Binance's public image has been under fire, with the company's official Twitter account leaking a private chat log featuring a crypto trader with over 280,000 followers.
It appears you are still confused in regard to the reason your account was put into withdrawal-only mode. @CoinMamba, here is a screenshot of your conversation with our CS agent. pic.twitter.com/Na2MagN6Dy
The infamous Santa Claus rally is just around the corner.
And contrary to popular belief, it doesn't start until the end of next week.
The official period for the Santa Claus rally includes the last 5 trading days of the year and the first two of the following year.
Based on the 2022/2023 holiday schedule, that means this year's Santa Claus Rally begins on Friday December 23th and goes through Wednesday January 4th.
These 7 days have historically had a ridiculous track record, averaging over a 1.3% return for the S&P500 and coming in positive almost 80% of the time.
Since 1950, all other 7-day periods throughout the year only average 0.24% returns and were positive less than 60% of the time.
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended December 9, 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.
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.
In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.
Running Out of Gas
After failing to hold a breakout to new all-time highs earlier this year, gasoline futures have fallen by roughly 50% in the past six months. Last week, both crude oil and gasoline continued their slide by taking out their 2018 highs. As long as energy futures are below these prior-cycle highs, we want to approach the entire sector with caution.
