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

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

In recent months, we've argued in favor of a defensive approach.

Last week, we made our strategy rather clear with the following dialogue:

With the market providing extreme readings, these are conditions by which we can anticipate a mean-reversion rally higher. At the same time, trying to catch this move in a period of continual whipsaws will be difficult.

We think the better trade is to remain patient over the near term while dollar-cost averaging into long-term spot positions with a multi-year time frame.

Over the weekend, we've seen a sharp rally higher, driven by Ethereum $ETH.

Director David S. Taylor of Delta Air Lines $DAL revealed a purchase of 10,000 shares in the airline company, valued at just under $300,000.

Meritage Group LP filed a 13G revealing an ownership stake of 5.70% in the cloud-based business management platform Coupa Software $COUP.

Do you see what happens when the US Dollar is falling?

Stocks and Crypto go up.

This IS the catalyst.

Do you want to know what will get stocks and crypto back into bull markets?

It's not the fed, it's not the president, it certainly isn't a former president, it isn't a war or any kind of "news" event.

It's the US Dollar. Period.

Over the weekend we saw the price of Ethereum jump to new 30 day highs.

Looking a little deeper, you'll find that both Binance and Avalanche also hit new 30 day highs.

Some of you trade cryptos and others don't. But that's not really my point here.

As you've heard me say a million times by now, these crypto assets are just growth stocks (probably software stocks if you want to be more specific).

And the correlations prove it. They've never been higher, in fact.

In bull markets you'll see a lot more stocks making new highs than new lows.

In the current market environment we're used to seeing the opposite.

Here's an update on how that's going. For those of you keeping track at home, we're now going on 34 consecutive weeks of more stocks making new lows than new highs:

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

If you've been following along over the years, you've heard me mention plenty of times that breadth thrusts tend to cluster together early on in market uptrends.

Well, a funny thing happened yesterday - we had our first 9-to-1 up volume day on the NYSE since May.

To quote Willie, "Stringing 2 of these together without an intervening 9-to-1 down day would be a very positive development".

Here's what that looks like:

From the desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Sellers are in the driver's seat when it comes to commodities these days.

Besides natural gas and livestock contracts, few commodities present buying opportunities that we like. In reality, most have either broken down or are on the verge of breaking down. 

As the latest bout of selling pressure shows little signs of easing, we’re likely to experience more damage in the coming days and weeks.

Copper, one of the most economically sensitive and widely followed commodities in the world, is a great example of recent weakness. It can’t stop falling.

Given the downside volatility raw materials have experienced since the start of the summer, many trends are stretched. We don’t want to be too bearish here. We want to let the dust settle.

With that said, it’s hard not to imagine where the bears will strike next.

And when we scroll through our charts, it looks like they have crude oil in their sights.

Let’s take a look.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that which you can check out here.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

Click table to enlarge view

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The S&P 500 index is 20% off its early 2022 high, but remains nearly 14% above its pre-COVID peak. The median stock in the index, however, is now trading just below its pre-COVID high. The last several years have been an experience of tremendous volatility with no upside progress for the median stock. The numbers are even more startling among mid-caps and small-caps. Both the mid-cap S&P 400 and small-cap S&P 600 are nearly 10% above their pre-COVID peaks, but the median mid-cap stock is 10% below its pre-COVID high and the median small-cap stock is 20% below its pre-COVID high. This brings us to commodities. The median commodity is 30% below its high, but remains 20% above its pre-COVID peak. Whether it’s stocks or commodities (or bonds for that matter) there is plenty of volatility in the current environment. The volatility in commodities is in the context of an underlying up-trend. With the median stock in the S&P 500 returning to its pre-COVID high (and the Value Line Geometric Index where it was in 2018), it’s been an unrewarding roller coaster ride for stocks. 

That's a blog post title I never thought I'd write. LOL.

Even more strange, the trade we're putting on today is in a public company with an unusual name I've never heard of before!

Weird times, indeed.

Steve Strazza and I looked at it a bit on Tuesday during our "Flow Show" on twitter and I was less than enthusiastic at the time. But as the trade has marinated around my brain a little bit since then, it has grown on me.