In a recent report, the All Star Charts team highlighted some mixed signals and the lack of trend in many areas of the stock market right now. These are often frustrating situations for straight stocks players. Luckily for us options traders, we can craft strategies that best suit any market environment we may be in. For today's play, we're going to get a little creative, mixing a credit spread with a calendar spread to establish a unique risk profile in a name that we're cautiously bullish on.
We've been writing about the lack of trend in the Major Indices and highlighting some relative strength in places like Software and Insurance, but overall signals remain mixed.
This morning I set out to write another post about areas showing relative strength, hoping to find a clean theme that the most actionable stock setups fit within.
What I found can be boiled down to the length of two tweets.
"Going through the S&P 1500 I see a number of actionable names on the long side, but they don't all fit a theme. They're all from different areas of the market. Where there are themes I see a lot of extended names and unattractive entries."
and
"I can see that the path of least resistance is higher in a lot of names, but that doesn't mean that current levels offer an attractive entry."
Last week I sat down with Justine Underhill for Real Vision's "Trade Ideas" show to discuss a tactical trading opportunity in Palladium and a longer-term play in the Insurance industry.
These are themes I've shared with our Institutional Clients over the last few weeks. I hope you find some value in them.
In a recent blog post, All Star Charts highlighted a stock retesting a breakout from a very large base. This was the money quote:
First off, big bases take time to form because they are caused by steady institutional accumulation. Mom and pop investors aren’t the ones creating this trend, so I know that there’s underlying demand that will support prices if they do move lower.
Because prices have memory and the base has taken a significant period of time to build, there’s likely been more trading at each price level along the way. As a result of this institutional support, the rate of change to the downside is likely to be less severe versus a name that’s advanced quickly to the upside with less trading activity at each level, and thus less memory among market participants to defend these levels on the way down.
Secondly, our risk is extremely well-defined when trading these patterns. In the event that we are buying a base breakout (or pullback), we know exactly where we are wrong and can generally minimize our risk relative to potential reward.
Wednesday's Mystery Chart is one of my favorite charts, so thank you everyone for your feedback and participation.
I received a lot of answers, but most of you were buyers of this recent pullback, while others were waiting to see if prices reacted positively to support before jumping in. Not many of you were sellers.
Like a fly to honey, I'm always attracted to asymmetric opportunities that offer limited risk and the potential for unlimited gains. Trading options allows us to quite literally create these types of risk/reward opportunities every day. It's built into the very structure of your basic call or put option! And when we can spot a stock chart that offers us a little bit of an edge on the future direction of prices, it is time to take action.
Phil Pearlman has always been a good guy to talk to about a lot of different things. I know for a fact that a lot of your favorite fintwit personalities would agree with that.
Phil doesn't do a lot of media anymore like he once did, but I do get to catch up with him quite often and we publish our conversations as The Money Game Podcast. You can check out all of those episodes on Technical Analysis Radio and iTunes.
Today we're talking about what little Daisy Pearlman the puppy taught Phil about life:
Monday was our Members-Only Conference Call for both India and the US (see JC's video here) and the most overwhelming theme was that Equities are not trending, so what does that mean for us as market participants?
Twice a year the Nifty Indexes are reconstituted on March 31 and September 30, replacing stocks that don't fit the criteria with those that do. This past weekend we adjusted our chartbooks to reflect the changes that occurred at the end of the first quarter, so I wanted to write a quick post detailing some of the changes.
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. It can even be inverted or a custom index.
The point here is to not guess what it is, but instead think about what you would do right now.Buy,Sell, or Do Nothing?
We hear this term a lot: "Overhead Supply". But what does that mean exactly?
Well, I'll tell you what it means to me. When I look at today's stock market, I see stocks rallying throughout 2017 and running into resistance, or more selling than buying, in January of 2018. After some distribution, stocks rallied once again late into the 3rd quarter last year, only fail and sell off. That was a beautiful sell-off in stocks that many of us enjoyed very much.
Fast forward to 2019 and we've had a killer rally in stocks that has brought us back to where this overhead supply party first got started early last year. This is now the 3rd attempt and failure for stocks. And when I say stocks, I don't just mean the S&P500 or Dow Jones Industrial Average, I'm referring to stocks as an asset class.
