With strength starting to stand out in more and more sectors, we have a few good setups that we like for long trades here.

In chatting with our Head Technical Analyst Steve Strazza today, he pushed me in the direction of today's trade by highlighting the fact that if this one moves, its likely to move much faster and stronger than a couple of the other ideas I was interested in.

And the options in this stock are set up in a way that we can play this idea with a simple long calls trade. I like that. So let's dig in.

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

The largest insider transaction on today’s list was reported in a Form 4 filing by Vertiv Holdings $VTR Director Joseph Deangelo.

Deangelo disclosed a purchase of VTR worth roughly $1 million.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We've seen a big gap up in the futures this morning, and we're right at resistance at $SPX 3,800. The next level above is 3,804 to 3,811.

$SPY resistance is at 379.60. Support is at 376.35, then 374.20.

The only way anyone gets paid around here is to sell things at higher prices than where we buy them.

And not necessarily in that order.

Do you have a better way?

I've been doing this for 20 years and I have never seen any other way to profit.

You might enjoy pretending to know "why" a stock or group of stocks may be moving. But the market doesn't pay you to pretend to know why.

The market only pays us when we sell things at higher prices than where we buy them.

And this is all so funny to me, because I constantly see so many people focusing all their attention on everything BUT price.

That never made any sense to me.

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Metals have been one of the weakest areas of the market this year.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the materials sector, commodity space, base and industrial metals, or gold. These assets have carried nothing but downside risk.

But mix in a little dollar weakness, and we see an impressive display of strength. Metals are finally looking like they have something to prove.

Yes, it’s only one day of action. But it’s a day worth noting…

Check out the breakout in copper futures, posting its largest single-day return since 2009:

This is a big development for commodities and risk assets in general.

Copper has found support at its prior cycle peak and is now resolving higher from a three-month consolidation. One of the most-watched leading economic indicators is signaling all is well.

Based on Dr. Copper's bullish breakout, we would expect metal and mining stocks to join the party. ...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Click here to check out the International Hall of Famers.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the...

From the Desk of Willie Delwiche.

Rules Need Application To Be Useful

Market legend Marty Zweig was known for his investing rules. The first among them addressed the importance of staying in harmony with the underlying trend in the market. Good rules are great guides - we ignore them to our own peril. 

Why It Matters: Rules need to be more than trite and convenient sayings. But given that we each have our own temperament and time frames, our individual applications will likely vary. For me, recognizing that the trend is my friend and not fighting the tape means respecting the direction of the long-term trend in the S&P 500 and the advance/decline line based on net new highs for the NYSE + NASDAQ. All of the net gains for the S&P 500 over the past two decades have come when at least one of those is rising. Right now, as has been the case almost continuously since February, they are both falling. That is not a tape I want to fight.   

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We saw a lot of movement in the indices today.

The $SPX hit resistance near the 50-day moving average around 3,800 and reversed lower but then rallied into the close. 

We can't argue with price.

And price continues to tell us the Energy bull market still has legs.

Today's trade is a case in point where trading action today announced a declaration that an old-school oil services name wants to continue climbing higher.

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today: