They are cracks more than crevices at this point, but the fissures are there. And they are becoming more widespread. Signs of financial (and economic) stress are on the rise. While generally still at historically low levels, they merit watchful attention as the Fed moves forward with an accelerated program of interest rate hikes.
Evidence of stress is emerging across the fixed income landscape: high yield spreads are rising, corporate bond yields have the most upside momentum since the financial crisis and mortgage rates are at their highest levels in over a decade.
We are already seeing the implications of this in the housing market. New single-family home sales have fallen 20% over the past year while homes for sale have surged 35%.
As stresses continue to build, we could see renewed interest in traditional safe haven assets (especially Treasury Bonds). Whether this period ends up being labeled a recession (formal or otherwise) is an open question. But the data increasingly point to a meaningful deterioration in economic conditions.
The largest insider transaction on today’s list is a Form 4 filing by Winder Investment, which reported an additional $1.8 million purchase in Sensient Technologies $SXT.
The firm now owns more than 6 million shares, representing a 12.4% ownership interest in the specialty chemicals stock.
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.
We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…
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.
The way we did this is simple…
To make the cut for our new 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.
A Record-Setting Slide
The S&P 500 just booked its seventh consecutive down week. This is only the fourth time in history that the index has registered so many consecutive losing weeks.
When we look back at the last three instances, the forward returns are mixed. The last time we experienced so many consecutive losing weeks was in the middle of the dot-com bubble crash in 2001. This was not a good time to buy stocks.
On the other hand, when this happened back in 1970 it coincided with a major bottom. As for the instance in 1980, the forward returns were excellent, but a multi-year bear market followed soon after.
While this stat doesn’t give us an actionable signal over any material timeframe, it does suggest that markets are due for a relief rally.
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.
As it stands, Bitcoin $BTC continues to hold above 30,000 following its brief false move. There are a number of levels we're monitoring over short time frames.
Correlations with legacy markets remain intact. But we're likely at an inflection point with respect to the co-movement between crypto and legacy.
