Over the past half-decade or so, we've seen the US Dollar Index maintain a very high negative correlation with risk assets.
When stocks are doing well, the Dollar has normally been under pressure. And when stocks have struggled, as most of them have over the past year, the US Dollar has kept a bid.
Look how poorly the Dollar did when stocks ripped in 2020 off those pandemic lows. And then look at the strength in the Dollar over the last year as most stocks have struggled:
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...