From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In our continued effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from this universe of stocks.

We've already had some great trades come out of this column and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.

The idea is to catch the strongest names while they're still small and have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climb up the ranks...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaway: Even with bottlenecks & distortions, economic recovery & cyclical rally remain intact. Tactical risks have risen as the market digests gains of last year. Watch bond yields & global participation for evidence that the rally is ready to resume.

Cyclical value sectors remain the leaders in our relative strength rankings and small-cap groups continue to dominate the upper-tier of our industry group rankings. But there is evidence beneath the surface of shifting trends. Rather than seeing a reversion back to growth leadership in our sector rankings, we are seeing defensive areas of the market start to heat up. Consumer Staples, Utilities & Real Estate have the best relative strength on a short-term basis. At the industry group level, small-cap groups are deteriorating while large-cap groups are improving.       

The latest 2-to-100 Club Report is out with a handful of actionable names to participate in.

These aren't trades where we expect a face-ripping rally to imminently commence. But we do think there are underlying trends that can propel these names higher over the next 3-6 months.

With that in mind, I've got a trade in November options on deck to play one of my favorites from this report.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Check out our latest Mystery Chart!

What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention, and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.

This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it’s an absolute price chart, other times it’s on a relative basis.

It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!

The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize it objectively.

While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…

So let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

This week we're looking at a long setup in the Chemical sector. Certain stocks from this sector are grabbing our attention and we're looking at one of those!

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.

In the wake of this week's events, I thought I would take a moment to remind everyone that nothing should surprise you.

The longer you're in this game, the more things you see. The newer you are at this, the easier it is to not know some of the history of markets.

And that's okay. You don't have to know everything the moment you start.

That's what the experience is for.

But I will let you all in on a little secret, regardless of how long you've been around:

From the desk of Steve Strazza & Grant Hawkridge

Don't miss this weeks Momentum Report; our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector and Industry Group level. As a reminder, we analyze this shorter-term data within the context of the structural trends at play.

We're looking for trends.

That's why Technical Analysis works. Because stock market returns are not normally distributed. We have the data. It's not a secret.

Stocks trend. They go up for a while, they go down for a while and sometimes they can go sideways for a while.

Interest rates, commodities and currencies all act the same way. That's just how markets behave.

You can choose to pretend that it's not that way.

But we have the math that proves that it is.

So that's why we do this. That's why we rip through thousands of charts every week to identify which ways things are going.

All things.

Here's one of the biggest charts that continues to point to any choppy environment just being part of a bigger uptrend for stocks and risk assets:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley

Similar to last week, many areas of the Commodity space continue to chop sideways below overhead supply.

Healthy digestion of recent gains makes total sense given the explosive moves since last summer and in many cases is much needed.

Given that sideways price action is the main theme across Commodities at the moment, one particular consolidation stood out this past week.

And that consolidation is in the Corn market.

Corn futures have ripped off of their March-2020 lows, taking out key multi-year highs along the way.

Earlier this year it broke above a key Fibonacci level and its 2014 highs, and is now taking a breather in the form of a potential 8-week Flag or Pennant formation. These types of consolidations often resolve in the direction of the underlying...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large, and ultimately to mega-cap status (over $200B).

Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.

But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, and Salesforce, to a myriad of others… all would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table you will notice...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The rally in the stock market over the past year has been buoyed by many things and its shows. The year-over-year change in the S&P 500 reached its highest level ever this week as the index moved past the anniversary of its COVID lows. One of the sources of support in recent months has been economic data that have been consistently better than expected. Stocks have tended to do well when economic data surprises to the upside and they tend to struggle when the surprises have been to the downside. While the Economic Surprise Index is still positive, it has come under pressure in March. First, expectations for the recovery are being revised higher, but more immediately, there were a number of data misses in recent weeks. For example, housing market activity for February was weaker than expected (we touched on this in this week’s Perspectives piece). Economic optimism is generally welcome and tends to be self-fulfilling, but if expectations move too far ahead of reality, stocks can find themselves on a rocky path.

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