Something we’ve been working on internally is using various 'bottoms-up' tools and scans to complement our top-down approach.
One way we’re doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large - and ultimately mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
Investors are optimistic, but momentum isn’t confirming price strength
While indexes rally, breadth trends are stumbling
Big rebound in earnings is already priced in
The NASDAQ Composite rallied to a new all-time high this week. The S&P 500 fell just shy of a record close of its own. While sentiment indicators suggest that investors are celebrating these new highs, a closer look shows that index-level price strength is not being confirmed by momentum. In fact just the opposite is happening, with weekly momentum trends continuing to move lower.
The Value Line Geometric Index has moved from new high to below its 10-week average in the space of a week. Momentum has peaked and is moving lower.
In every major asset class, there are typically a handful of indices to help drive our decisions from the top-down.
Whether we're looking at the US Dollar Index, the CRB, the Nasdaq, or any other variety of ETFs, these help form the basis for identifying leaders, laggards, and assessing the overall market.
The same applies to Crypto.
The only problem is, there's a painful lack of diversified indices to look at in the first place; S&P Dow Jones indices launched a Mega-Cap Crypto index in May, which only tracks Ethereum and Bitcoin, and MSCI is currently eyeing launching indexes of their own.
The Outperformers is our newest scan that pinpoints the very best stocks in the market. It’s the fastest, easiest way to find quality names that are primed for major moves.
The goal is that as the market rally progresses, the sector rotation within the market will reflect in this scan. So while our Top/Down Analysis helps us with the broader view of the market, this Bottom/Up scan makes sure that we catch the slightest change in sentiment.
Key takeaway: Last week’s volatility unwound some near-term complacency, but there is still plenty of evidence of optimism in the system. Active managers increased their equity exposure and equity ETFs continue to attract inflows at a staggering pace (though certain sectors are starting to see outflows). A more challenging breadth backdrop poses a challenge, but with economic data continuing to surprise to the upside and earnings expectations being revised higher, excessive optimism may be slow to unwind. While risks are elevated from a sentiment perspective, they are not yet being manifested in terms of price.
Sentiment Report Chart of the Week: Large Tech Outflows
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge.
Check out our latest Mystery Chart!
What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention, and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.
This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it’s an absolute price chart, other times it’s on a relative basis.
It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!
The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize the price behavior objectively.
While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…
So, let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?
There is a special purity in the crypto markets that is absolutely fascinating to technicians like us.
It's a supply and demand game to the ultimate extreme. There are no fundamentals. There are no earnings. It's just fear and greed, no government intervention, just humans being humans.
It's pretty awesome.
I've noticed sentiment is getting pretty extreme down here and the risk vs reward opportunity here is to the upside.
30,000 has been an important level in Bitcoin going back to the prior up cycle. This was our first target after completing that multi-year base:
And the market quickly answered with a resounding, YES!
We’ve highlighted several currency pairs challenging crucial levels of support and resistance. Last week, we saw the USD take control at those key levels.
Both the EUR/USD and GBP/USD turned away from critical areas of former support turned resistance. The USD/CAD moved sharply higher from a major area of support. The AUD/USD broke back below a key retracement level after consolidating for the first half of the year. And the NZD/USD retreated from an area of overwhelming overhead supply.
Responses were mixed but skewed in the bearish direction.
The point of our exercise was to question whether buyers would have the power to push prices back above our risk level… or if sellers would follow-through and validate the pattern breakdown.
If the former was to be true, we’d have a “bull-hook” formation on our hands. Some might call it a “bear-trap”. Either way, it’s bullish.
But that’s not what has happened at all. Since our mystery post, sellers have taken control as prices continued to collapse lower.
We’re now looking at a decisive violation of our risk level. Let’s dive in to see what’s really going on and discuss why this chart is so important!
This is one of our favorite bottoms-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.
