To be fair, most markets are trading within their respective year-to-date ranges (except the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, of course).
But if we turn to emerging market currencies, we don’t see any sign of hesitation…
Check out our EM Commodity Currency Index (equally weighting the Mexican peso, the Brazilian real, the Chilean peso, and the South African rand) posting new 52-week highs after violating a long-term downtrend line at the beginning of the year:
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended June 9, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with The Minor Leaguers.
What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.
Under the Hood is a value-add for investors of all kinds, as we can express our views through a variety of different types of stocks.
We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names.
From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts
This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow.
In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish, but not both.
We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients.
Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.
We've been talking a lot lately about the number of stocks setting up to play "catch-up" to this bull market that is only just now starting to get the attention it deserves, in spite of it being nearly 8 months old now, by our measures.
Today's trade is in another one of these setups that continue to work for us ($CAT and $IWM are great, recent examples).
I believe a generational rally for gold has already begun. But my structural outlook hinges on the former 2011 peak.
Gold must hold above that former high, marking the end of the previous secular bull run.
It’s held this level so far.
But if gold has any chance of printing new all-time highs as it has versus most major global currencies, it needs a little help from its friends…
I’m talking about the rest of the precious metals space – silver, platinum, and palladium.
Silver is hanging tough as it attempts to reclaim last month’s pivot lows. But this is a lonely bullish data point – one I imagine gold bugs wish they could attribute to palladium.
Check out the Aberdeen Physical Palladium ETF $PALL:
