From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Bulls on the Investors Intelligence survey continued to climb while bears fell for the fifth week in a row. The bull-bear spread has now decisively cleared its August high as investors move to embrace the stock market rally.    

Whoa baby. This might be a fun one. Or not. Either way, we'll likely find out pretty quickly.

Chinese stocks continue to offer up interesting opportunities. And today's trade is no exception. And to play it, we're going to do it in a fairly aggressive manner, but with a tight risk management stop.

Let's get right to it.

The next new position in our Paid-to-Play portfolio is:

Crypto markets can be daunting for those who come from traditional backgrounds.

There are entirely new market mechanisms, trading hours, different exchanges, and distinct ways to analyze the market, let alone the decentralized nature of how these markets operate.

It's no wonder that people find this asset class complicated.

Adding to the already heightened perplexity of these markets is how they're driven and how investors benchmark their performance.

Hear me out.

The most significant insider buy on today's list is a Form 4 filed by Super Micro Computer $SMCI Director Shiu Leung Chan.

Chan reported a $256,440 purchase of SMCI.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market finished strong yesterday, and we just might need a little breather before the next move.

This week we're looking into Capital Goods sector stocks.

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 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.

It starts with credit.

Bottom line.

This isn't crypto where all these shitcoins can go to zero and it won't matter to anyone who matters.

These aren't marijuana stocks that are irrelevant to global asset allocation.

This is the bond market.

This is the biggest and baddest of them all.

We're talking about almost a $120 Trillion asset class.

It's just math: if there is real systemic risk in the equities market, you're going to see it in credit.

There's no way around it.

And so how are credit spreads doing?

As tight as they have been since last summer, and getting tighter:

It's the weekly currency edition of What the FICC?

Yesterday, the US dollar index $DXY booked its largest three-day gain since it peaked in late September. So will today's bounce turn into tomorrow's rally?

I don't know. But you want to monitor these two levels for insight.

Check it out!

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The macro factors are all bearish and the market factors are all bullish. It is true that after a bottom market conditions will tend to improve ahead of macro conditions. But it is also true (and we had ample evidence of this last year) that market conditions are subject to false starts. In those situations embracing unsustainable strength can penalize investors. This a trust but verify environment in which indicators of sustained trend have more weighting than one-off signals of opportunity. With the weight of the evidence balanced between risk and opportunity, this may be a time to move toward benchmark exposure,  while focusing on areas of relative leadership and absolute strength.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market was in wait-and-see mode with Fed Chair Jerome Powell speaking today.

After he spoke, there was a lot of whip.