From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
New Mystery Chart!
For those new to this exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!
We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.
You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?
Last Friday I sat down with Aaron Task of Seeking Alpha for a fun chat about today's market environment. Aaron and I have known each other for years from his days as the Digital Editor of Fortune as well as Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Finance. We also have a lot of friends in common.
It's always interesting talking to someone from the media about how little media I consume. In addition to the benefits of following price, and ignoring the "news", we discuss the current sector and market cap rotation we're seeing, the next direction for Bitcoin and Crypto Currencies, as well some other important tools and strategies that we're incorporating right now.
It's always fun to catch up with Aaron. He just serves me alley-oops.
It's not a secret that Chinese Tech stocks have been breaking out all over the place to new all-time highs. We've been on this for a while. I remember specifically in the depths of the market crash in March last year, Chinese Technology was actually breaking out to new multi-year highs relative to the S&P500. This was happening during the worst part of the crash!
I remember thinking, "What the heck???"
And so they've been ripping ever since. But the market had already tipped its hand.
The difference today is that we're now seeing signs of structural outperformance. It's now Chinese Technology leading the way here bigger picture, no longer U.S. Tech.
Here's the Chinese Tech Index Fund $CQQQ breaking out of a mulit-month base to new all-time highs. You'll also notice how it's breaking out relative to the U.S. $QQQ representing the Nasdaq100 Index:
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
As we mentioned last week, the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly lies in favor of the bulls.
We're seeing rotation supporting this move higher in equities; a sustained bid for SMIDs and Micro-Caps while Large-Cap indexes slowly work higher is all very constructive for the early innings of bull markets.
This environment is also providing bulls with an increasingly wide selection of areas to allocate capital - from Industrials, Technology, and Cylicals, and now Financials.
In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger more Macro thesis, we couldn't be happier to roll out and share our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."
We'll also be writing a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist. This is the first edition.
Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.
In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.
Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July 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.
I've been waiting for Europe to break out since I was in high school. That was over 20 years ago. And people have the audacity to tell me that stocks are in a bubble.
