From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
We think it's time to buy Gold Miners again, specifically the VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF $GDX.
The yellow metal has not been a great place to deploy capital over the last 6 months as the environment has significantly favored stocks over rocks... and risk-assets over defensive ones in general.
Owning Gold or Gold Miners has been nothing more but opportunity cost. However, there is mounting evidence that suggests now might be the time to jump back into this trade.
First, Commodities have really been working as an asset class. We've been pointing this out for months now, from Industrial Metals and Ags to even petroleum-based commodities.
Although through the early innings of this Commodities resurgence, Gold and Gold Miners have taken a back seat as prices peaked all the way back in the summer of last year and have been trending lower since.
This All Star Charts PLUS Monthly Playbook breaks down the investment universe into a series of largely binary decisions and tactical calls. Paired with our Weight of the Evidence Dashboard, this piece is designed to help active asset allocators follow trends, pursue opportunities, and manage risk.
We've enjoyed a ton of success with our bottoms-up scans and the columns they've inspired over the past year.
We've already launched four columns around them since last summer, and we have more coming soon.
When we combine these scans with our traditional top-down approach, they make it almost impossible to miss profitable opportunities and key market themes.
Today, we're sharing one of our internal favorites with you. It's called "Fade The Street,"and we introduced it in a report last month which you can read here.
It was a big hit and there's been a lot of change since then, so we thought a follow-up was appropriate.
Our Fade The Street scan leverages buy/sell ratings and price target data from sell-side analysts to identify strong stocks with significant potential tailwinds that can propel prices higher in the future.
Key Takeaway: Market volatility has not interrupted rotation to new leadership. Long-term breadth remains robust, but shorter-term trends are in need of repair. Earnings and economic data continue to supply the market with positive surprises.
The Industrials sector made a big jump in our relative strength rankings this week, moving from 7th to 3rd among the large-cap sectors. Elsewhere, Consumer Discretionary continued to lose relative strength and Materials dropped out of the top five. Technology remains highly ranked (2nd overall) but on a short-term basis, it has been a market-laggard. If it cannot re-assert strength soon, its time in the leadership group could be winding down. Our industry group heat map shows overwhelming relative strength from small-cap groups (nine of the top ten & only one in the bottom ten) and widespread relative weakness in large-cap groups (none in the top ten and seven of the bottom ten). Deteriorating trends in the Technology groups...
In a further 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 the watchlist.
We've already had some great trades from this universe 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.
And what better time than now to launch a small-cap focused column!? We've seen very strong evidence of a structural rotation down the market cap scale, suggesting a new period of outperformance from small-caps in the coming...
Ok, it's only Spring Training. But baseball fans mark this week on their calendars as it signals there is light at the end of the winter tunnel.
And with regular season baseball games on the horizon, gamblers with an itch that needs to be scratched after football season ended will be chomping at the bit to get playing again.
No surprise then that the stock market -- which is forward looking -- is offering a setup in line with the coming spring.
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.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
Over the last few months, there's been a distinct rotation into Financials and other cyclical areas across equity markets not just in the US, but across the globe.
This topic is nothing new around here as it's been a big theme for us recently. Consider some of our calls from this month:
Intermarket analysis is always an area of focus over here at All Star Charts. Right now, there are a lot of changes taking hold beneath the surface in some key cross-asset relationships.
For the longest time, the alpha has been in the US... it's been in large-caps... and it's been in growth stocks. That's been the playbook. We know because we've been running it back for years now.
Although, we're seeing strong evidence that this is no longer the case...
One of the best things about our approach is that it allows us to be incredibly flexible and adjust our views as new data becomes available.
We pride ourselves on never being dogmatic. Speaking of which, despite how much we've leaned on secular leadership from growth and tech stocks in recent years, the data is suggesting we reposition ourselves in favor of Value (read more about it, here).