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.
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 also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.
We’ve had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.
For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.
That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.
To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.
ETH Kicks Off Crypto Rally
It was a busy weekend for cryptocurrencies, and Ethereum, in particular. The world’s second-largest crypto just resolved higher from a bearish continuation pattern right at a key polarity zone.
When patterns fail, it’s always great information. In this case, a downside resolution in the direction of the underlying trend was the higher probability outcome, but it didn't happen that way. Instead, buyers took control and forced an upside resolution. Another thing that makes this price action stand out is where it took place. Ethereum just dug in and reversed after a brief shakeout beneath the 2017 highs. As long as we're back above the prior-cycle peak of 1400, the bias is higher.
For evidence to improve we need to see sustained strength.
Fed confronted with deteriorating economy while still waging inflation fight.
When new lows have exceeded new highs for 34 weeks (and counting) and the Value Line Geometric Index (a proxy for the median US stock) is no higher now than it was five years ago, even small amounts of good news get celebrated. We saw some of that on Friday.
Check out this week's Momentum Report, our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector, and Industry Group level.
By analyzing the short-term data in these reports, we get a more tactical view of the current state of markets. This information then helps us put near-term developments into the big picture context and provides insights regarding the structural trends at play.
Let's jump right into it with some of the major takeaways from this week's report:
* ASC Plus Members can access the Momentum Report by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.
Feels like market conditions are improving a bit for the bulls, but we're still going to be picky here. One way we can improve our odds of success is to align our trades with relative strength.
Today's trade is in a sector that has seen both improving absolute price strength, and a widening relative strength gap compared to the broader stock market.
With the market providing extreme readings, these are conditions by which we can anticipate a mean-reversion rally higher. At the same time, trying to catch this move in a period of continual whipsaws will be difficult.
We think the better trade is to remain patient over the near term while dollar-cost averaging into long-term spot positions with a multi-year time frame.
Over the weekend, we've seen a sharp rally higher, driven by Ethereum $ETH.
