It's nearly that time when we get a fresh batch of monthly candlesticks.
We only perform this exercise once the candlesticks are completed. But, sometimes, you want to cheat and peep a few days early.
What's great about monthly candlesticks is that it takes us a mere half hour to get through them all, which is only six hours a year.
We can't emphasize enough the level of value-add for such a brief amount of time.
It forces us to take a step back, and it gives us no choice but to identify the direction of the primary trends. We use them to put shorter-term trends into context, which is especially important in this choppy price action.
So, no matter your time frame, identifying primary trends and then working from there is a huge advantage over a blind bottom-up approach.
In the current state of the crypto markets, the overwhelming majority of names are in greater than 80% drawdowns.
Generally speaking, more stocks are going up than going down in bull markets.
And sure, there are a lot of different ways to quantify it, but this is really the gist of it: Are more stocks going up or are more of them going down?
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've had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.
For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.
That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.
To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
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.
They Can’t Break the Banks
Unlike most industry groups, community banks never completed a top, as price has remained above the pivot lows from last year. Additionally, momentum has not reached oversold conditions during the current bear cycle. If this range remains intact, the world isn't coming to an end any time soon.
The new low list peaked in May and the new high list bottomed in July. Despite this, we’ve had more new lows than new highs in 44 of the past 46 weeks.
The Details: More than 4400 stocks (48% of the total on the NYSE + NASDAQ) made new lows in May. That was the most since March 2020. The new low list has ebbed and flowed since then but has not surpassed that peak. The 116 stocks (just 1% of NYSE + NASDAQ total) that made new highs in the first week of July was the fewest since April 2020. Last week 357 stocks (4%) made new highs and 1645 (18%) made new lows.
I dunno why, but thinking about train tracks and rail stocks got me thinking of Blue Steel. There is absolutely no connection between today's trade and the pose made famous by the Zoolander film. But, you're welcome.
