Markets have been rallying across the globe since April 2020, except for stocks that belong to the category of discretionary spending. With the pick up in travel activity breathing life into the entertainment space, there are certain ideas that pop from current setups.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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?

I think this is an important discussion. Which way are rates headed?

Remember, Interest Rates setting up for a collapse was one of the reasons we were so bearish equities in late January, and looking to own bonds instead.

The thought process in January was the following: If 10s are going to break their 2012 & 2016 lows, is that most likely happening in an environment where stocks are doing well? Or are rates collapsing most likely taking place in an environment where stocks are under pressure?

Our bet was the latter. We used rates as a leading indicator.

Today we're doing the same thing. But the data coming in is the exact opposite.

First of all, here are US rates going out last week at new 9-month highs:

Monday afternoon I popped on to BNN Bloomberg to have my regular chat with Catherine Murray. These are always fun because we focus on what actually happening in the market, versus all the gossip that revolves around it.

Remember, we're coming off my Just Buy Them Baby interview with Catherine from July. We got a lot of funny emails from people after that one. But as it turns out, just buying them worked out very well.

So where do we go from here?

Here's the interview in full: 

Emerging Markets remain in focus and today we're identifying why its trend relative to Developed Markets is likely to accelerate higher.

This is a follow-up to our last few Emerging-Market-focused posts --- August 12th, September 11th, and September 25th.

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 relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

In last week's report, we outlined how the market was in an incredibly healthy state of order. We've been seeing rotation into SMIDS and Micro-Caps, strong breadth, and a sustained bid for Growth, particularly down the market-cap scale.

This week, we're harping on a similar theme.

The weight of the evidence, particularly from an intermediate and long-term time horizon, looks excellent.

One thing you'll read between the lines in nearly everything we do here at All Star Options and allstarcharts.com: We stick with winners. We ride trends. We get long relative strength and we get short relative weakness. We don't overcomplicate things. We don't need to be the Hero who shorts a parabolic stock at its zenith, or buys the oversold stock at its generational bottom. Those trades make for sexy stories, but that graveyard is a mile wide and 50 feet deep.

With this in mind, here's an undeniable leader that is setting up again:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to our “Under The Hood” column for the week ending December 04, 2020.

What we do 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.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers… there is a lot of overlap.

The bottom line is there are a million ways to skin this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data makes us confident that we’re producing the best list each week and gives us more optionality in terms of finding the most favorable trade setups for our clients.

This week we're looking at a long setup in the Pharma 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.

When I was younger I would fight trends a lot. I was that guy regularly betting on mean reversions.

Then over time I realized just how stupid that was.

I was actually a permabear in early 2013. I admit it. It was a great lesson that will help me for the rest of my investing life.

We all have to learn somehow.

But that's the point. We need to learn eventually.

All Star Charts is known for its Top-Down analysis. In this process, we begin at the asset-class level to ascertain the best category of investment that matches our reward/risk ratio. This then trickles down to specific instruments of investment on the basis of relative strength and momentum.

Let’s take a look at this procedure in our weekly column, The Top/Down Take, and help you understand our analysis better.

Last time it was Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), but today the stock we're looking at is IndusInd Bank (INDUSINDBK) which has been tearing through the roof since November.