The market has spoken.

You might have your conspiracy theories about market manipulation or inflation or whatever story they're telling these days.

But it's only the price that pays. We just want to sell things at higher prices than where we buy them.

And you're going to have a hard time finding a worse investment over the past year than Precious Metals.

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 August 6, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off 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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Top 10 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.

A Big Hurdle For International Equities

These are some of the most important charts in the world right now in our view. If the global stock market is going to have the juice for another real leg higher, then we need to see the rest of the world participate. US Large-Cap Growth stocks have carried the baton and pushed the S&P to new heights, while many major diversified world indexes have consolidated. In fact, many of these countries and indexes have gone absolutely nowhere since February (they look just like small-caps).

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 context of the big picture 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:

Today we're going to take a look at a long setup in the Chemicals space.

Let's take a look at this name.

The strength coming out of crypto in recent weeks has been impressive, and for the first time in many months, we can say that the bulls are in the driving seat.

The median change for all coins above $1B in market-cap in just the last 20 days, since Bitcoin bottomed, is a whopping 53%! In this same period, nearly 100,000 Bitcoin have been withdrawn from exchanges, and many more hundreds of millions of dollars committed to short positions were liquidated as the accumulation for these digital assets has ramped up.

Even the crypto stocks are showing strength.

Long story short, the cryptocurrency landscape looks the best it has in a long while, and we're subsequently looking for more names to express this bullish thesis of ours.

"JC, Technical Analysis is just a Self-fulfilling Prophecy"

Where do I even start...

I just can't with this one.

A statement that technical analysis is self-fulfilling is suggesting that there are events in the free market that are caused directly or indirectly by the preceding prediction or expectation that it was going to occur by a group of market technicians.

Seriously?

Is Bill Gates sticking chips in our arms too?

Is the Earth Flat?

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.

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

The talk around town this week is the potential "double bottom" in US Interest Rates. 

You can see that here along with the higher low in the highly correlated Regional Bank stocks:

Is the resiliency in Copper pointing to higher rates?

You can see Copper relative to Gold here and how closely the ratio moves with rates:

I only live about an hour from New York City, but it was my first time back since March 2020. It felt good.

Manhattan had been my home for over a decade before I moved to California in 2015. I've been back on the East coast now for about a year and a half, but haven't been able to enjoy NYC for obvious reasons.

It was good being back. The sushi there is on another level. You don't get that sort of thing in the suburbs.

Anyway, I dropped by to see my friends at Ritholtz Wealth Management to talk all things markets, technical analysis, finding the strongest stocks and how the Heat & Knicks did in the offseason.

You can check out the complete podcast episode here, or watch some of the highlights in the video below:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Breakouts continue to emerge left and right within the commodity space as participation expands to more and more subgroups. 

One of the areas that’s had our attention lately is Livestock. Last month, we highlighted lean hogs. 

And while they’ve since fallen back below our risk level, we’re now seeing cattle futures attempt to break higher from a similar base.

Let’s dive in and outline some long setups in these livestock futures as they’re offering a favorable risk/reward at current levels...

First up is a weekly continuation chart of Feeder Cattle futures: