From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza

It's been about a month since small- and mid-caps resolved to the upside and made fresh highs.

As we all are aware, these were simply massive head-fakes. We're right back to where we started--stuck in the middle of the same range we've been in all year.

There was also plenty of evidence from our intermarket relationships and ratios to support these moves. Discretionary-versus-staples ratios broke to fresh highs. Copper versus gold. Stocks versus bonds. Inflation expectations. They all made new highs recently. But, just like most stocks on an absolute basis, many of these breakouts have since failed.

Of all these developments, it's hard to argue that any is more important than the stocks-versus-bonds ratio retracing back beneath its Q1 highs. With long rates making new lows and stocks selling off, let's talk about how we are approaching both of these asset classes right now.

Here's the S&P 500 $SPY relative to long-term Treasury bonds $TLT, zoomed out to the early 2000s.

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While volatility remains elevated, I remain on the hunt for appropriate vehicles to sell premium in.

We sold premium in IWM earlier this week. Today, I'm going to drill in a little deeper into sector ETFs that are displaying the highest relative implied volatilities. This search leads me to the finance sector.

This is the video recording of our December 3, 2021, All Star Charts Crypto Weekly Strategy Session.

If the world was coming to an end, would Homebuilders be breaking out of 6-month bases to new all-time highs?

I would argue no.

The Homies are one of those groups we look to for leadership in strong markets, not in weak ones.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

Breakouts and breadth expansion kicked off the month of November. 

But the market had other ideas... 

Instead of fresh legs higher, investors were dealt a handful of downside reversals and failed moves. Last week, we went from discussing breakouts and new highs for stocks... to throwbacks and retests of old ranges. This all happened in the matter of a few trading sessions.

A lot has changed in a short period. In times like these, it’s important to take a good look under the hood to see what market internals are suggesting.

As we reviewed our breadth chartbook today, we asked ourselves the following questions: 

Are we seeing a notable expansion in new lows? Is it enough that we should be worried?

Let’s take a look beneath the surface and see if we can find some answers!

First, let’s check in on the 21-day and 63-day lows for the S&P 500:

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They're baaaaack....

Did you see the spike in bearish individual investors?

We just got the most amount of bears in over a year:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza 

We held our December Monthly Strategy Session last night. Premium Members can click here to review the recording and the accompanying slides.

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 a valuable exercise, 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.

This is the video recording of the December 2nd Weekly Town Hall w/ Willie Delwiche

12/02/21 3:00 PM ET

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

There’s no shortage of headlines this week -- a potpourri of potentially market-moving developments. 

And boy, have markets moved! Of course, these market gyrations are probably not quite for the reasons the headline writers have proposed. But we can leave that discussion for another day...

Today, I want to talk about when to change course and when to sit tight. 

Let’s consider the recent comments from Fed Chair Powell on inflation and apply a lesson I learned when sailing on the waters of Lake Michigan.

In an asset class with so much insightful data, it's vital to have a toolkit of data providers, platforms, and software to navigate it all.

We use a handful of tools when analyzing the crypto markets, and we thought we'd share the ones that have been valuable to our process.

We have a new Options trade up this week.

We're selling an $IWM December 31 (weekly) Iron Condor. We’ll be short the 210 puts and 235 calls, while protecting the position $5 away in both direction with long 205 puts and 240 calls. This entire spread can be put on for about a $1.70 credit.

Check out our short video with the thought process behind these trades: