We really hate to sound like a broken record, but we want to be downright obnoxious in hammering this down.

There's no edge in pushing longs right now, seriously.

You can try all you want. But all you're doing is asking to get whipsawed and chopped up.

Scroll down to download this week's chart deck.

It's a tale as old as time, traders pushing their opinions onto the market and not adapting their approach for different environments.

Trend-following strategies worked great in 2020 and after the summer bottom last year.

But now? Not so much.

Forget about headlines, opinions, or gossip. It's all noise.

Money is the only thing that moves markets. Follow money flow.

And what's the tape saying?

Downtrends and ranges everywhere. That's the tale for not just crypto, but macro too.

This is ugly isn't it?

Below all that support from last year near 350, and I can't see the argument for a long position:

This is a mess at best. A downtrend at worst.

We don’t typically track small transactions by members of Congress, those in the $1,000-to-$15,000 range.

But a recent move by Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a Republican from Georgia, is worth noting.

Nickel is making an explosive move as we speak and it is important to address it as soon as we can.

Commodities are picking up pace everywhere, across the globe and this move has been in the pipes for a while.

So what are the levels that we're tracking on this commodity? Check it out below.

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 March 4, 2022. This report is published biweekly 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...

Not many people know this, but I used to be a gold bug way back in the day.

Mid-2000s and into the financial crisis and beyond?

I was Mr. Gold Bug.

Any good technician was. That's how price told us to behave.

But then a funny thing happened. A combination of price and common sense proved that being a gold bug was no longer a good idea. That was about a decade ago.

And you know how humans are. Many of those angry little buggers stuck around and held other people's bags this entire time, while stocks and other risk assets have ripped making everyone rich, except for gold bugs.

It's funny how life works.

Because I think we might be back.

It's hard not to be in the Rocks > Stocks club these days.

Here's a good chart...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our March Monthly Strategy Session last Tuesday. Premium Members can click here to review the video recording and download the slide deck.

Non-members can see some highlights from the call by reading this post each month.

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends.

This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaways:

• Market experiencing most persistent weakness since Financial Crisis.
• Path forward is about finding new opportunities rather than repairing past paradigms.
• Energy & Latin America benefitting from Commodity strength.

We are in the midst of the longest stretch of consecutive days of more new lows (NYSE+NASDAQ) than new highs since the financial crisis. While there have been more intense peak-to-trough drawdowns in the popular averages over the past decade and a half (late-2018 and early-2020 come to mind), it is the persistence of the weakness in the current experience that is noteworthy. Whether looked at from a market perspective or a macro perspective, the longer the disruption, the harder it is to just bounce back...

Metals have been gaining more strength with every passing day and have certainly been outperforming the market at present. We have a long setup from the Metals sector this time around as well.

Let's take a look at the trade for this 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.

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...

Over the last few months, we've continued to hammer the point that the market is a mess and trading should be kept to a minimum.

We've taken shots at small long trades in a few altcoins during this time, only for us to ultimately get chopped up days after putting the positions on.

This is information.

Crypto as an asset class is range-bound at best, and unless you're incorporating a staking/yield/options strategy, the vast majority of crypto traders have been better off positioned in stables on the sidelines.

The macro environment continues to be heavily driven by geopolitical volatility and the situation in Eastern Europe.

Parabolic commodity prices are beginning to take their toll on the broad market indexes, which Bitcoin and crypto have been correlated with in recent months and quarters.

Moreover, whales and savvy traders are still in the process of selling.