On today's episode I sit down with Financial Advisor Stephen Weitzel. Stephen and I have known each other for many years. We're both big fans of Technical Analysis, good food and college football. So this was a lot of fun!
Stephen walks us through his journey of first becoming a Financial Advisor, how helpful Technical Analysis has been for his practice and the journey towards $1 Billion in assets.
I've had a front row seat to Stephen's growth, both as a business owner and as a Technician. It's been really cool to see and I'm going to keep rooting for him and his team.
I always like to get different perspectives on the podcast, and I think this conversation is a great compliment to a lot of the other episodes we've done over the years.
With equity market trends in the US deteriorating, we have reduced domestic equity exposure in our Cyclical and Tactical Portfolios. We are adding equity exposure where we are seeing strength overseas and remembering that asset allocation decisions don't just come down to stocks vs bonds, but include commodities and cash as well.
This month marks the one year anniversary of the top in stocks.
And more specifically, I mean the top in the internals of the U.S. Stock Market. Remember, that's the best things were, and it's been a painful deterioration ever since, particularly for most U.S. Index Fund investors, growth investors and most individual U.S. stock pickers.
The new highs list these days is loaded up with ADRs, Metals stocks, Staples and Energy. Most of the other stocks have been struggling. Not all of them are down, but many are sideways at best.
This chart really tells the story of what's been going on. We discussed it on Tuesday night's call:
Key Takeaway: Optimism wanes, and pessimism builds as the II bull-bear spread narrowed last week to just 1.2%, down more than 4% from the previous week. That brings the spread to its smallest difference since early April 2020. But it’s not until bears outnumber the bulls that we reach levels associated with significant market bottoms. Nevertheless, a surge in pessimism could become reality with active equity managers continuing to reduce exposure, consensus bulls dropping, and major equity indexes testing their respective January lows. Whether sentiment has completely unwound or is still in the process of unwinding is yet to be determined.
Sentiment Report Chart of the Week: Unwound or Unwinding
At All Star Charts Crypto, we've emphasized the value of on-chain data that allows us to peer inside the blockchain to find reliable and actionable signals.
It seems almost every day in this blossoming asset class, there's a new dataset, indicator, or some other avenue to analyze price action with incredibly high resolution.
Alongside the on-chain data that's supplemented our traditional analysis, we're taking an increasing interest in incorporating order flow into our work.
We're beginning to find it provides considerable value in fine-tuning our approach, making for better executions, and helping skew the probabilities of success in our favor.
We'll walk through one of the many ways we use order flow in this post. Today we'll be discussing volume, or more specifically, volume delta.
Markets continue to be "messy" and it's tricky looking for positions to take aggressive stances in. And with VIX hovering at or near the 30 level for the better part of the past week and a half, the option trader in me continues to look for opportunities to sell premium.
A smarter man than me once told me: "If something is working, find ways to do MORE of it!"
Well, selling premium on balance has been working pretty well since January, so...
Chatting with the team this morning, one pocket of strength we identified that has been holding up relatively well in this slop is the banking sector. And while there weren't any individual names we were willing to bet the farm on, the financials sector ETF $XLF caught our attention as a good possible candidate for a delta neutral credit spread.
