Below is the 7th ASC Mastermind Lab Course. These are special videos that will be made available throughout the duration of the 12-week course featuring conversations with professionals from across Wall Street discussing topics in their expertise. 

In our last Mastermind Lab, I spoke with Jason Perz about the relationship between bonds, commodities, and currencies. This time, I wanted to bring the conversation back to the stock market. Enter Todd Sohn, ETF & Technical Strategist at Strategas Securities.

Todd and I discussed the ETF market at length, how it's evolved in recent years, and its future. We also discussed a variety of different intermarket analysis techniques that incorporate ETFs.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Todd Sohn.

Shoutout to my boy Kenny Glick. He's the man. And I feel like I'm channeling him a bit today. I recently saw him talking about how he's getting into a trade in a name that has failed on him so many times in the past. Yet, when there's a favorable setup, he has to step up and take another swing -- even though he's seen this movie before.

I'm going to do something similar today in a crypto miner. I've been beaten time and time again with these things. But one of these times it's got to work! Why not today?

Please forgive my tirade at the beginning of this episode about my short $MTB trade. I had to defend my honor... 

But after that, me and Strazza get into the setup in MARA Holdings $MARA and how we arrived at what might seem to a lot of you (me too) a pretty high risk, but potentially huge reward trade:

For reference again, here's a one-year chart of $MARA:

Here's the Play:

I like entering a $MARA June 15/32 Risk Reversal for a small net credit. This means I'll be naked short the June 15 puts and long an equal amount of the June 32 calls. All in, I should earn a small net credit for putting the...

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. No new trades today.
2. Adjustment in ITB today.
3. Exited XRT at profit target.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

Bitcoin is moving this week and is already working on a breakout to new all-time highs.

Amazon reports earnings this Thursday, and is also attempting to break out above its prior cycle's peak to go on to new all-time highs.

Apple already broke out above its 2021 top, and has already been making new all-time highs for months. 

Apple's breakout and extension to new highs, in my opinion, is setting the stage for Amazon and Bitcoin to do the same.

Amazon and Apple both report their earnings this...

Despite bond yields and dollars screaming higher and reaching overbought conditions, stocks and precious metals rallied during what is historically the worst time of the year. 

During a bad seasonal period, junior gold and silver mining stocks had their best week since 2020, and silver printed fresh multi-year highs.

The bulls' ability to maintain control during a historically weak period speaks to the strength and resilience of this market.

Let's talk about the demand we're seeing for precious metals around the world and a few of our favorite trade ideas right now:

I'm continuing my recent theme of portfolio diversification today with another short position, this time in a stock that should be performing well heading into Halloween and holiday season -- but isn't.

In fact, the chart looks like its got a lot of room to fall if their upcoming earnings report disappoints.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended October 25, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation 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 simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers, there’...

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. New trade today in USO.
2. No adjustments are needed today.
3. Exited XME position.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

This is NOT a political post.

So if you're one of these sensitive types who is just too mentally weak to put your politics aside when making decisions about the market, then you're in the wrong place Karen. 

For those of you who can be adults and actually focus on data and facts, here are some thoughts that might help you put the next couple of weeks in perspective.

At this point, I think it's pretty clear that the market has fully priced in a second trump presidency.

Here's a look at the betting markets showing the red line (trump) moving very aggressively to the upper right of the chart, while the blue line (harris) has been moving to the lower right of the chart.

You'll hear the conspiracy theories that a few guys behind the scenes are manipulating these markets because they are in favor of trump.

That's one way to look at it. 

Peter Thiel, a well-known republican, is an investor in Polymarket.

So it's certainly possible that him and his buddies are moving markets and just throwing money away to help influence political outcomes.

Yes. That is possible...

But here's how I see it. 

...

We're beginning to emerge from the crypto bear market, and I can see a glimmer of light ahead.

The possibility of Bitcoin reaching 100,000 feels real.

I think now is the moment to prepare yourself.

The best 3 month period of the year begins this week.

We know this.

But to me, the bigger question is how stocks did during what is historically the worst time of the year?

Remember how September and October are supposed to be terrible for stocks?

Well they weren't.

In fact, stocks rallied during September and October. All the major U.S. indexes were up.

Now we enter the Best 3 months: November - January. 

Here's what that looks like:

So if stocks couldn't go down in price during the worst period of the year, how do you think stocks will do when they're actually supposed to go up?

Zooming out, here are the returns of the major indexes during "The Worst 6 Months" of the year.

All of them were up double digits, when historically they were supposed to fall...

For me, we don't like to position ourselves according to seasonal tendencies.

The real value, in my experience, is looking back after the fact to see if the market acknowledged or ignored seasonal trends.

When the market is resilient during the bad times, historically that bodes very well for the upcoming...

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.