From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Dynamic Portfolio Update: With new highs outpacing new lows every day so far this year, our net new high A/D line has turned higher and moved our "Fear or Strength" tactical model into its bullish zone. We are following the model and increasing risk exposure in the Tactical Opportunity portfolio.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The Investors Intelligence measure of advisory services sentiment shows Bulls rising to their highest level in over a year. Bears have not (yet) undercut their summer lows and the Bull-Bear spread is still just below its August peak.    

Why It Matters: We need bulls to have a bull market. This flies in the face of a desire to only see sentiment from a contrarian perspective. The way I learned it, it pays to go with the crowd until it  reverses at an extreme. After the persistent and excessive pessimism of 2022 (which was certainly present in word if not deed), the best prospects for a sustained rally at this juncture is for investors to shift their attitudes and embrace stocks. A failure for investors to turn more optimistic at this juncture could hasten a longer-term positioning re-balance. We have gotten hints of that in recent weeks as ETF flows show investors eschewing US equities in favor of international equities and fixed income ETFs.  

In this week’s Sentiment Report we...

I'm about to show you what a healthy chart off the bear market lows looks like. One of the beautiful things about this chart is it's not heavily reliant on any one company.

This is a sector ETF for a corner of the stock market we believe should continue to do well for the foreseeable future. There will be winners and losers within the sector, and we don't know which ones will ultimately be the leaders, so why not just trade 'em all?

Additionally, trading the sector ETF significantly lessens any earnings-related or product announcement or FDA-approval-driven gap risk.

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

This is a question I've been getting a lot.

"JC, how could you say we're already in the 8th Month of a new bull market???"

The things people call me over email or on twitter are not something I would repeat in front of my mother, or daughter, and certainly not in front of any of you guys.

But I'm a big boy. I spent a lot of time on trading floors, dugouts and locker rooms. I've heard way worse.

It is interesting, however, to observe the feedback I get from just some basic arithmetic.

This isn't like some random opinion I have about the economy, or Fed policy or earnings. This is just 3rd grade math.

Are more stocks going up? Are more stocks making new highs? Or are more stocks going down and making new lows?

Since June, the answer has been up and certainly not...

We did it.

We've flipped the book long.

With Bitcoin $BTC and Ethereum $ETH reclaiming their prior-cycle highs, we even went as far as arguing that this recent move represents a structural regime shift for the asset class.

In our view, both the short and intermediate-term trends have now definitively shifted higher.

This comes within the context of a slew of risk-on developments in traditional markets.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We're hovering around the $SPX 4,000 level, and we consolidated nicely yesterday.

Time will tell if this market needs a rest or we continue higher sooner versus later.

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville filed his first Periodic Transaction Report of the year.

Sen. Tuberville disclosed the purchase of Barrick Gold Corporation $GOLD for an amount between $15,000 and $50,000.

This week we're looking at stock from Technology Products and Services sector.

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.

This is the video recording of the January 2023 Mid-month Conference Call.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market consolidated most of the day.

$SPY tested its 200-day moving average a few times down at 396.90 and managed to hold.