Things are whippy out there. And volatility is elevated to levels we haven't seen in quite a while. This is no time to be a hero. This is the time to focus on edges and putting them to your advantage.

I know it's sexy to be a buyer of calls if you want to be the hero bottom caller. Similarly, it's equally sexy to be a holder of long puts into a market crash. But this is not the time to be initiating new long calls or puts positions. The premiums you'd pay are so high right now that you could totally nail the direction, but you'd be swimming upstream against an eventual mean-version in volatility pricing.

But this does not mean we pick up our ball and go home. We options traders have options!

In this environment, we're looking for plays where we are net sellers of premium. With premiums this juicy, it would be irresponsible to do anything else.

Yes Bank is in the news again and following an 83% intraday move to the downside, market participants are wondering what's next?

In this post, we'll outline why this week's move is business as usual for the stock, what we'd do with it now, and why the best trade in Yes Bank may be to avoid it altogether.

The current market environment remains choppy, so we want to revisit a sector that's showing relative strength, Pharma.

In November we pointed to the improving prospects of the Nifty Pharma Index and its components, following up with additional trades in January.

Today, we want to revisit the sector to see what's changed and what stocks we want to be buying and selling.

First, let's start with the Nifty Pharma vs Nifty 500 ratio chart that continues to turn higher after meeting our downside objective late last year. This continues to suggest further outperformance from the Nifty Pharma sector relative to the broader market.

Click on chart to enlarge view. 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Thanks to the handful of you for playing and entertaining this week’s Mystery Chart.

My apologies if this one was a bit of a layup, but that was the point. You were all buyers and so are we. Since we're all in agreement let’s dive right in and talk about why we’re bullish on this chart but more importantly, why it matters.

Two weeks ago we wrote about the underlying weakness of the Nifty IT Sector, but today we're highlighting a stock in the space that continues to show relative strength in the face of a weak market.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

If you're reading this it's probably because you've read our Table of the Week where we identified roughly 100 of the strongest stocks in the S&P 500. After digging into the charts of all these stocks, we came up with a handful of setups that we believe are currently offering the best reward/risk. Here they are, in no particular order.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We want to be buying stocks that are in the strongest uptrends. One way we identify them is by looking at momentum which we use the 14-day RSI for. The strongest uptrends do not get oversold, or fall to RSI levels below 30. In fact, the strongest uptrends often stay above the 40-50 level and constantly print overbought readings above 70.

The S&P 500 registered an extreme oversold reading below 20 during the violent correction that began in late February. Here's a look.

The boys were out with a bullish piece on China stocks, citing oversold conditions. As JC said: "If the world isn’t ending after all, this could be an interesting place to look for huge winners."

So I've got my eye on a big name that has held up pretty well, all things considered.

Sunday we wrote a post reiterating our long-term view that the path of least resistance in the Rupee remains lower.

With that said, we were a bit cautious about buying the potential breakouts in USD/INR and JPY/INR until we got confirmation, but we've seen some solid follow-through over the last two days.

This post will outline how to approach getting involved in the trade if you're not already.

Today we wrote a post updating our market view, which is that we expect further chop but are looking to put cash to work slowly on the long side. In that post we outlined what we'd need to see to get aggressively long, so please check it out.

This post is going to outline several stocks that are presenting attractive reward/risk scenarios at current levels, so if you need long exposure this is where we want to be.

In this post, we're going to recap our views from the last two months, discuss our current market view, and outline what conditions need to present themselves for us to be aggressively buying stocks.

First, let's recap our posts from the last few months that outlined why we were taking a more defensive approach towards stocks.

Are you noticing the relative strength in Emerging Markets? That is NOT something we would expect to see if the world was actually coming to an end.

I can't stress this enough, stay away from the glorified gossip columns. They know less than nothing. You know who knows? The market. So that's where we'll get our data.

Think about it like this, there are more people and firms with more money and better intelligence than any of these governments, communist or otherwise. Are you actually going to trust the propaganda being put out in the "news"?

Or do you trust the people putting actual money behind the information they're spending a fortune to get? When we want to know what's really going on, we turn to the markets. The rest is pure junk.

For now, we're in an environment where we want to be buying stocks. We want to be incredibly disciplined with our risk levels, probably more than usual, but buying stocks nonetheless.