In yesterday's Chart Summit, we presented our view on the major asset classes around the globe and noted what we need to see before getting bullish Equities again. (You can watch the full videos of all the presenters for free.)
Unfortunately, current conditions suggest continued volatility so we're looking for short setups to take advantage of it in the coming days/weeks.
Let's take a look at our broader thesis and what stocks and indexes we're shorting to express it in the market.
Today's Chart of the Day, High Yield Bonds (HYG) vs Short-Term Treasuries (IEI), is one of our favorite risk-appetite ratios.
Credit Market investors favor High Yield Bonds over Treasury Bonds during the "good times" - periods of strong economic growth, rising rates, etc. On the other hand, we know treasuries are a safe-have asset and outperform in environments where investors are uncertain and want a place to park their capital until the smoke clears.
Say what you will about stock market action since the equities bottom was put in on March 23rd, but either way you can't not be impressed.
Do we go higher from here?
I don't know the answer (hint: neither do you), but I do know that if we do, we're going to be continually led by the leaders in this bounce so far. And one of those leaders is the stock who's company everyone uses -- in some way -- whether you realize it or not: Google.
For those new to the 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?
Options premiums are still pretty elevated across the landscape and the default mode for me when looking for trades to put on is still to prefer selling premium to express any directional bets.
However, JC put some bullish metals ideas in my head last week that are starting to look interesting to me. And there's one in particular that warrants a shot with a debit spread -- where we can use the prevalence of still high options premiums to help us lower our cost of participation in a directional bet.
A question we're getting a lot these days is when the market ultimately does bottom, do we want to be buying the stocks that have been hit the most or the ones that have held up the best during the market's fall?
As with most things in markets and in life, the answer is it depends. In this post, we'll explain why.
Every weekend we publish simple performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with brief commentary on each.
As this is something we do internally on a daily basis, we believe sharing it with clients will add value and help them better understand our top-down approach. We use these tables to provide insight into both relative strength and market internals.
This week we want to highlight our US Equity Index and Factor tables, as they are both showing near-term reversions in some of the most robust long-term intermarket trends.