From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

This All Star Charts +Plus Monthly Playbook breaks down the investment universe into a series of largely binary decisions and tactical calls. Paired with our Weight of the Evidence Dashboard, this piece is designed to help active asset allocators follow trends, pursue opportunities, and manage risk.

In Focus for May: The first four months of 2022 have been a trying time for many investors. But while stocks have experienced their worst start a year since before the S&P index was expanded from 90 stocks to 500 stocks, the decline in the index has actually been a relatively normal correction. It’s premature to suggest that the lows are in, but the 13% decline in the S&P 500 from its peak is in line with the median experience of the last 9 times (dating back to the late 90’s) that the S&P 500 experienced a decline of 10% - 20% (less than 10% isn’t considered a correction, declines of more than 20% usually get characterized as bear markets).

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From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The largest insider transaction on today’s list is a Form 4 filing by Simon Groom, who reported an additional $43 million purchase in the broadcasting company iHeartMedia $IHRT.

The chief financial officer at General Motors $GM, Paul Jacobson, revealed a purchase of roughly $1,357,650 worth of his own company's stock in a Form 4.

CFO activity always catches our attention as not many employees know and understand a company’s financial condition better.

There have been few trading opportunities in this messy tape beyond rare exceptions over short time frames.

With crypto markets shackled to weak equities, it's been a challenge to find favorable opportunities in Bitcoin $BTC and the individual altcoins.

But, in yesterday's note, we entertained the possibility of near-term upside following the pricing in of the upcoming Federal Open Market Committee meeting and the US dollar hitting resistance.

Given the favorable risk-versus-reward at current levels, we like taking a tactical long, looking to play the trading range Bitcoin finds itself in.

For this trade, we're solely leaning on Bitcoin to execute, as most alts are messy and in the process of breaking down. Those are both characteristics we want to avoid when searching for new longs.

Further, Bitcoin has outpaced its counterparts recently, as seen through Bitcoin dominance.

The market is messy and continues to remain so. There are only a select few names that are displaying the strength with consistency. In a messy market, that's the best area to focus on.

Read on to know more.

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.

Key Takeaway:

• 2022 gives investors no place to hide.
• Stocks do well when rates rise slowly - an aggressive Fed is a headwind for investors.
• Hard to argue that a bear market has run its course when more stocks are making new lows than new highs.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended April 29, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with our Minor Leaguers column.

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.

Watch this video for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large...

The risks and key themes we discussed in our last crypto report remain unchanged.

Price action has been chopping in the high 30,000s, and there's little to update.

We're closely monitoring the tight trading correlations to traditional finance. Despite strong spot flows, this remains the most pressing driver of price action to date.

With few actionable opportunities, we're sitting back and weighing the probabilities of a number of scenarios.

The largest insider transaction on today’s list is a Form 4 filing by George Simeon, director of Nkarta Inc $NKTX, who reported a $10 million purchase.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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 the stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny.

Then we flip through our list of stocks flashing unusual...