From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley

Rates continue to move higher around the world as central banks do their best to combat inflation. 

As investors, our best course of action is to position ourselves in those areas that benefit most from rising rates.

Commodities and cyclical stocks immediately come to mind. But there are also specific currencies that tend to excel in rising rate environments.

Today, we'll discuss a handful of emerging-market currencies with heavy commodity exposure. 

We’ve been waiting on these currencies to catch higher and confirm the price action in commodities since last year… and it looks like it’s finally happening.

Let’s dive in.

First up is an overlay chart of the US 10-year yield and our equal-weight basket of EM commodity currencies:

As you can see, these currencies trend in the same direction as interest...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaways:

• 2022 poses an asset allocation challenge
• Commodities catching up, but a long way from being caught up
• Dynamic exposure allows trend following in a portfolio context

The first quarter still has two days of life left in it, though for many investors its end cannot come soon enough. The S&P 500 made a new high on the first day of the year, but has been underwater ever since. Bonds have been in the red all year, suffering their worst decline in decades. Commodities (and the minority of investors that have exposure there) enjoyed their best quarter in decades. 

Each of these asset classes has its own story and dominant theme from Q1. For stocks, it’s the longest stretch of more new lows than new highs since the financial crisis. For bonds, it’s that yields around the world are moving to their highest levels in years (US & German yields get a lot of attention...

Wait for your perfect pitch.

We say it all the time.

There are no called strikes on Wall Street. In other words, we’re not penalized for not swinging, like you are in baseball.

We have the ability to be patient, to a certain extent at least, depending on your mandate. But most of us don’t have mandates! Even one of the best hitters of all time struggled when he swung at bad pitches.

In this video from our Charting School, we compare Ted Williams’ batting average when he swung at good pitches versus when he swung at bad ones.

Why do we bring this up?

Well, what's the last few months been for crypto traders?

Tumbleweeds...

If you've been watching the tape and actively trading these markets in this messy tape, your probabilities of success have more than likely diminished. It's why we've discussed so few trades apart from a few standouts in this period.

We've been waiting for our perfect pitch.

But with the Bitcoin macro bear coming to an end, is this the time to start swinging?

We think so.

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The largest insider buy on today's list is a Form 4 filing by William Clay Ford Jr., the executive chair of Ford Motor $F, who reported a purchase of roughly $4.5 million.

Coliseum Capital Partners continues to build its position in GMS Inc $GMS, as it just filed its second Form 4 in the last week.

In today's video I sit down with Anne Harris, Client Success Manager at Magnifi.

So what is Magnifi?

How should we get started and begin using the platform?

Anne answers all of my questions and more in this short video about Magnifi, my favorite new investing search engine.

You can sign up for a Free Magnifi account using this link

Energy has made new all-time highs and today we have a long setup from the same sector.

A big name has joined the races and we're here to discuss just that.

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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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 $1B 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.

The way we did this is simple…

To make the cut for our revised Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1B and $4B.

And it doesn’t have to be a Russell component–it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

After our price and liquidity filters are applied, we sort by proximity to new highs in order...

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...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaways:

• March rally takes some sting off of a challenging Q1.
• Short-term strength not yet reflected in longer-term trends.
• More new lows than new highs in the US, but Emerging Market new high list expands.

Stocks continued to bounce off of their March lows last week. It’s not quite lipstick on a pig but this move does take some of the sting off of what has been a weak Q1 for equities. All eleven sectors in the S&P 500 are now in positive territory for March, but only three (Energy, Utilities and Financials) have YTD gains and two of those, just barely so. Four sectors, accounting for more than 50% of the market cap of the S&P 500, are still down 8% or more heading into the final week of the quarter.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Top 10 Charts Report was just published.

In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.

Is There Enough in the Tank?

Pretty much everything in the world of energy has been on fire for the last quarter. Crude oil and energy stocks have been the stand-out performers this year as both have enjoyed a swift leg higher since early January. Despite the impressive price action, both are at logical levels to do some consolidating. Crude Oil and the Energy Sector SPDR (XLE) are challenging critical levels of overhead supply at former highs. Both of these areas have acted as resistance in the past, so it would not be unusual for sellers to show up once again. While the primary trends are still very much intact for energy stocks and futures, a breather here and some digestion of the recent gains would be constructive. The next key piece of information should come in the form of how that digestion looks. Do we correct through price, or time?

...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

Macro Universe:

• Our macro universe was green this week as 57% of our list closed higher with a median return of 0.42%.
• The US 10-Year Yield $TNX was this week's big winner, tacking on 36bps and closing just shy of 2.5%.
• The biggest loser was Lumber $LB, with a weekly loss of -14.96%.
• There was a 13% gain in the percentage of assets on our list within 5% of their 52-week highs – currently at 34%.
• 45% of our macro list made fresh 4...