Key Takeaway: New high lists are expanding, yet investors are turning more cautious. Weight of the evidence favors focusing on opportunity over risk. Commodity market strength encouraging development for economy and investors. Rotation to cyclical leadership has just begun.
Strazza put out a post this weekend about scanning for strength in selloffs. Give it a read. Here's the Cliff's Notes: the recent selloff in tech has been an excellent opportunity for new leadership to reveal itself.
One of the names we like makes computer hardware and we're getting a nice little pullback today to lean in to a trade here.
As most of you know, we're big on our scans here at All Star Charts. And believe it or not, selloffs are actually some of the best times to scan for strength.
While our parameters will vary based on the market backdrop, there are two main things we almost alwaysfocus on when scanning for strong stocks in anyenvironment.
First and foremost, we're always looking for leadership. As many of you know, I'm a big advocate of fishing in the right places. Whether it's secret spots on the gulf stream or areas of markets showing strength, it's the same strategy... We want to position ourselves for the best catch.
We also want to limit our risk in case we're wrong. For us, this is as simple as betting only on those setups with clearly defined risk/rewards that are skewed heavily in our favor.
In other words, if we're right, we book hefty profits. On the other hand, if we're wrong, we'll know quickly and be out with minimal damage, and onto the next opportunity.
Don't miss this weeks Momentum Report; our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector and Industry Group level. As a reminder, we analyze this shorter-term data within the context of the structural trends at play.
In our continued effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."
We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from this universe of stocks.
We've already had some great trades come out of this column and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.
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 done.
This week we're looking at a long setup in the IT sector. Yes, this sector might just be back into rotation! We're also taking a look at an updated target in the Industrial Manufacturing sector.
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.
Small-Caps have been outperforming the large-cap indexes by a mile so far this year.
Since January 1st, the S&P Small-Cap 600 is up roughly 25%, compared with just a 5% gain for the S&P 500, and 0% for the Nasdaq 100.
This leadership is showing no signs of slowing, as they once again led the market back to fresh all-time highs this week after a brief and shallow reset.
Not only has the momentum behind this move been astounding, but the S&P Small-Cap 600 just experienced another significant breadth thrust, this time in its percentage of new 52-week highs.
Let's take a quick look at these developments and what they mean for the group going forward.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
Markets never operate in a static manner. Instead, markets are dynamic and remain in a natural and constant state of flux.
In knowing this, we must always remain flexible and aware of the changing conditions and developments taking place around us. We pride ourselves on our ability to evolve and adapt to these changes in market structure and are never dogmatic in our approach.
For the last decade, US large-cap growth has been where the alpha is, and derivatives of this theme like large over small, stocks over commodities, and US over international have been very powerful relative trends. We know this well because we've been leaning on them for a long time...
Treasury yields have resumed their upward ascent and the 10-year T-Note yield appears poised to move toward 2.0%. I saw a study this week from Joe Kalish of NDR that suggested such a move would put further downward pressure on the NASDAQ 100 (to the tune of a 20% peak-to-trough decline). Joe’s analysis tends to be pretty astute, so it’s something to think about even if you don’t come to the same conclusion. Another thing to keep an eye on: if these new highs in Treasury yields are going to be sustained, the yields around the world are likely going to echo the move in the US. Right now, yields in both Germany and Japan are shy of their late-February peaks (0.17% for the JGB and -0.26% for the Bund).