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.
Cyclicals Shine
In recent week’s we’ve witnessed a slew of former leadership groups -- mostly growth sectors, achieve our targets and begin to roll over. This might have been a more concerning development if we weren’t witnessing value and cyclical stocks pick up their slack so aggressively. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen energy stocks rebound and make a swift move off support as well as financials rally back to fresh all-time highs. More recently, we’re now seeing industrials and materials dig in and rally off their year-to-date lows. Once again, the bears had some charts looking vulnerable, and failed to make their move. Now it appears that bulls are back in the driver seat and value stocks are poised to take on some leadership. This theme is illustrated well by the strength in our equal-weight custom cyclical index, below.
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 their direction and make them a pretty penny.
Key Takeaway: Energy and Financials looking for friends. Bonds remain under pressure, with German yields rising toward the highest level since 2019. Breadth is no longer a relative laggard.
Energy and Financials switched spots this week but remain at the top of the relative strength rankings, with leadership evident across time frames and market cap levels. Over the past three months, no other sector is up more than 1%. The Financials sector is up 6% and Energy is up 8%.
Our industry group heat map shows notable strength in Energy and Banks. Health Care, Technology and Telecom groups are coming under pressure.
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.
We’ve already had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it late last year and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, “Under The Hood.”
We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…
For about a year now, we’ve focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B. That was fun, but we think it’s time we branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
Shame on me for using the word "Hope" in the headline for this post, but I cannot resist a good pun ;)
We've got a play here in an old school Aerospace & Defense company that is on the verge of making new all-time highs. And it just so happens it's approaching the magical $100 a share price point that often tends to act as a price magnet. We call this the hundred-dolla-roll!
Scouring our charts this morning, we couldn't help see that a lot of coins are getting tight out there.
With this volatility contraction, a big move could be on the cards, in either direction...
Big names like Cardano and Avalanche are wedged in contracting consolidation patterns. The resolution from these will likely set the stage for the coming weeks ahead.
And when we look to Bitcoin, prices have been in a very tight range, and this morning seems to be breaking higher.
Compressions like these tend to proceed quick and violent moves, just like the volatility contraction that we were writing about at the end of July before Bitcoin's monster rally off its lows.
This week we’re looking at a long setup in the Auto sector. We're seeing strength come through in the Auto segment and thought of taking a look at a stock that's ripe for a bullish move.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July last year 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.
One of the first things you learn in Technical Analysis is that markets are fractal.
That means that you'll find the same human behaviors (i.e. price patterns) whether you're looking at daily timeframes, weekly time frames or even intraday (e.g. 10-min or 30-min candles).
This is a concept that Brian Shannon has done an amazing job of highlighting throughout his career. Brian has been an inspiration to me since about 2005, which is pretty unbelievable to think about. Since then we've become friends and go skiing together and all that. It's pretty cool how life works sometimes.
Anyway, the idea behind "Multiple Timeframes", which is literally part of the title of Brian's book (go buy it), is to use this reality of "markets being fractal" to our advantage.
That can mean a lot of different things to different people.
For us, in what we do here at All Star Charts is, we start with Weekly and Monthly time horizons. That's where it all begins.
We've been discussing Covid for so long now, that it feels as though it's been going on forever. It carried out massive damage across different segments. But we are now seeing a resumption in trends that have been in place long enough to call them trends.
As we know, travel had been largely affected by the pandemic. Getting out of the house to buy groceries became the new travel plan! But not anymore!
We're now witnessing a strong and consistent pick-up in flight and hotel bookings which means that we can start taking a look at the shares that belong to these categories as well!
So let's do just that.
First up, let's take a look at the custom Leisure Index that we track at ASC.
As can be seen from the chart below, the custom Leisure Index is at a crucial level. Currently trading close to its 2019 highs, the index seems ready to break out soon. And why is it that we think so?
Because there are signals that are coming through from the constituents of the index that suggest so.
Presenting to you, dear readers, the Never Say Never series. Here we will discuss all those topics that a typical market participant thinks could never happen. I am a strong believer in faith and everything but I also know to never challenge the universe - in our case: the market.
I learned early on, that biases are a natural by-product of the human mind. Everyone has them, in some form or the other. But one ought to leave these biases right outside the door before entering the market. Because as soon as you believe that something could never happen, most often it does.
I had a client ask me incessantly what the next major support of a particular stock was, and after ten revisions, I said 0. "Your maximum risk is if the stock goes to 0". He stared at me, his mouth agape with incredulity.
Cut to today, where I cannot make that statement again. You see, Crude Oil traded below 0. And that changed the very idea most people believed in, me included.
So here we are today to discuss with you things in the market that may leave you astounded.
