We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
Large-Caps recently charged back to fresh all-time highs, but the Small- and Mid-caps are still facing some serious overhead supply.
As always, we’re snooping around our market internals chartbook to see what’s really happening underneath the surface in these areas, and whether internals agree with the price action in these smaller market-cap indexes. And even more importantly, if they support, or disagree with the new highs in Large-Caps.
We'll also answer the question: "Just how bad is the recent deterioration in breadth in some of the weaker indexes?"
We have been getting fewer new highs for a while now, but after such extreme initiation thrusts this isn’t too unordinary, and nothing to cause huge concern.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Crude Oil has been the Lone Ranger within the energy complex since early June, relentlessly pushing to new highs while other energy-related commodities have been stuck below overhead supply.
But that’s all changing this week as Heating Oil and Gasoline just broke above key resistance levels to new multi-year highs.
The recent strength from Energy also comes as Base Metals continue to cool off and correct. Copper, Tin, and Aluminum are all rangebound below logical levels of resistance after explosive moves off their 2020 lows. This is yet further evidence of the bifurcated market environment we're in right now. All we can do is focus on finding opportunities in areas that are trending... So, let's talk more about Energy.
The weight of the evidence is neutral and we’ve been discussing how it has been and remains a messy environment for stocks. We can see this in our Risk On/Risk Off Ratio which has been consolidating for several months. What caught our attention recently is how closely this ratio has moved with Emerging Markets. When looking for evidence of whether the market is poised to break out (which some indexes suggest it is), break down (which some breadth divergences suggest is a possibility), or continue to move frustratingly sideways (which seems to be a minority view at this point), we would start with this chart. If the Risk On/Risk Off Ratio and Emerging Markets are making new highs, the cyclical is probably ready to resume. If they are moving lower, a deeper correction for stocks could be in store. While they continue to move sideways, it probably remains a “less is more” kind of market.
Every so often I like to put on some delta neutral credit spreads to balance out the portfolio a bit. It's all about diversifying the books so that I'm not solely reliant on direction or volatility. We've got positions on currently that will benefit from big moves in either direction, but what if the market just grinds sideways for a bit?
This is where some delta neutral credit spreads can help out.
And my preference is to initiate these trades in liquid ETFs that are exhibiting relatively high implied volatilities.
This week I popped into Yahoo Finance to chat with their Technical Analyst Jared Bilkre.
We discussed the potential bottom in Bitcoin earlier this week. If Bitcoin is above 30,000 then a long position makes sense. But if it doesn't, I think there's probably good support at zero. Who knows how low it can go from there. But I won't be in it, so it's not my problem.
With the Nasdaq100 Equally-weighted Index flirting with a breakout near 110 and the ARKK ETF near 130, these are the critical levels we're watching.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, Dow Jones Transportation Average, Russell2000 Small-caps and Russell Micro-cap Indexes are all below overhead supply.
Messy for longer has been the pain trade and I think European Banks could be a big tell for the next direction of markets. We're watching that $20 level on $EUFN.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Earlier in the week, we held our June Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.
In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting 5 of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
There’s no question the landscape in the currency market has dramatically changed with the US Dollar reasserting its dominance in recent weeks.
You can read more about this in our weekly currency post, but here’s an excerpt with the long and short of it:
King dollar is definitely back in the driver’s seat from a tactical viewpoint as we’ve seen a significant shift in favor of USD over the near term. But even the intermediate and long-term trends for most major FX pairs have flipped in the direction of the Dollar over the past month or so.
Considering this broad-based strength, it’s clear that bulls are back in control of the Dollar… at least from a near-term perspective.
So, earlier in the week we analyzed the US Dollar Index $DXY and outlined some critical levels to watch over the short run.
Now, we’re going to take it a step further and highlight a handful of tactical trade ideas in USD crosses as vehicles to express our bullish thesis.
There's nothing more gratifying than watching our youngsters graduate to the next level, cheering on athletes who advance through the ranks, or enjoying the ride of our investments moving from "small cap" to "large cap" during our hold.
The 2 to 200 Club report that the All Star Charts team produces attempts to give us the heads up on the next companies that are likely to make the step up to the next level. You can read our latest report here.
One of the names that caught my attention is one involved in data analytics utilizing Artificial Intelligence to drive performance.