With everyone so certain about the upcoming recession, even Cardi B, why don't we take a step back and look at what the actual prices of stocks are doing.

You can see here that the Dow Jones Industrials and Dow Jones Transports have done absolutely nothing for over a year.

For perspective, stocks first peaked in January of 2018, then went nowhere for 3 years, and finally broke out:

We go where the strength is.

And until new information presents itself to get us looking elsewhere, the strongest names, best bases, and most impressive relative strength continue to be found in the energy space. Who am I to fight the facts?

Today's trade is in an Oil & Gas company that has been in an unrelenting uptrend since mid-2020 that is showing no signs of reversing.

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

Crypto markets appear to be stabilizing in the aftermath of the Terra $LUNA crash, with Bitcoin $BTC slowly progressing to the low 30,000s. Many altcoins are pressing down on critical support levels.

As we'll cover in tomorrow's note, many are well-defined for long-taking opportunities if the conditions arise.

But looks can often be deceiving.

We're still placing a high weighting that near-term price action will involve a high concentration of whipsaws. This appears to be a "fade the breakouts" type of environment.

This is all taking place within the context of Bitcoin resting on macro support of around 30,000.

All in all, we have a neutral bias for the weeks ahead. But, zooming out, this would be a logical area to see Bitcoin and the others bounce over longer time frames.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our June Monthly Strategy Session last Thursday night. Premium Members can click here to access the recording and the chartbook.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends.

This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

Last week, Carl Icahn filed a 13D revealing an ownership position of 5,089,703 shares in the natural gas services company Southwest Gas Holdings $SWX.

Icahn first purchased the stock in the second half of 2021. After a recent acquisition of an additional 2 million shares, Icahn’s total interest is 7.6%.

The troubles don't stop coming for investors who were deceived into believing that gold was a hedge against inflation.

Gold is at the same price it was 2 years ago.

Heck, Gold is still at the same price it was 11 years ago.

Meanwhile, Silver is down 40% from that same point.

Inflation hedge?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Look how gold and silver are doing relative to actual inflation hedges:

A lot of the worst investors I know and people who I regularly like to bet against are preparing for a recession.

Are you?

I've always been in the camp that recessions are the economic implications of changes in asset prices.

And that's because, well, it's just fact. Price leads. The "economy" follows....

So for me, I'd rather just focus on price then. Why would I waste time on the lagging data when we can spend our time on the forward looking data?

And so here we are.

What's it going to take for stock prices (outside of energy) to stop falling?

I think it's more of what we've seen over the past few weeks: A weaker Dollar.

We're looking at new 7-year highs for the Energy Sector Index Fund.

How many stocks and ETFs in America do you think are doing that?

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.

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.

It's Monthly Charts time!

It's that time of the month when we zoom out and look at the bigger picture (seems like a good time to do that, don't you think?) The market has been trying to make sense of the trend, so let's try and do that as well, shall we?