From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

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.

Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

Macro Universe:

• This week, our macro universe was negative, with 55% of our list closing lower with a median return of -0.11%.
• The 30-Year Yield $TYX was the winner, closing with an 8.32% gain.
• The biggest loser was the Volatility Index $VIX, with a weekly loss of -7.74%.
• There was no change in the percentage of assets on our list within 5% of their 52-week highs – currently at 2%.
• 15% of our macro list made fresh 4-week highs,...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Top 10 Charts Report was just published.

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 Kimmy Sokoloff

That was a very slow day.

Fortunately, we did have some decent winners inside the live trading room.

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.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.

What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.

And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think...

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:

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

From the Desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Merry Christmas!

I hope you enjoyed these last few days shutting off, spending time with your family, and eating good food.

Unlike most of the world, it's summer in New Zealand. Over here, we spend our Christmases in the hot sun, swimming, and enjoying the outdoors.

It's a great vibe.

But let's get a little crypto out of the way before our New Year's celebrations.

We'll keep this short, as there's simply nothing to update.

The most significant insider transaction on today’s list comes in a 13D from Deerfield Asset Management’s James Flynn.

Flynn increased his ownership stake in Terns Pharmaceuticals $TERN by 1%.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Futures are indicating higher this morning. I'll be watching to see how they hold up.

It's a short week, and probably a light week as far as trading volume.

We tend to think in US Dollars.

And this is for good reason, don't get me wrong.

The US Dollar is the world's dominant reserve currency.

But what if we treated Gold like another currency instead of a commodity?

It certainly acts more like a currency. Just look at the recent moves in Commodities, both up and down. Gold hasn't exactly followed along....

So if Gold wants to behave like a currency, maybe we should treat it like one.

Here's Gold priced in some very important currencies. In other words, this is what Gold looks like if you remove your US Dollar bias:

On Christmas or on any other day of the year, the goal is to sell things at higher prices than where we buy them.

And as great as Stocks have been performing, precious metals have done even better!

That relative strength is something we like to see in assets we own.

Now, when you zoom out in Gold, doesn't this time remind you of that time 20 years ago?