I feel like this has been the lead for many blog posts recently, but the trend continues: options volatilities continue to remain elevated across the board with $VIX holding above 30, and this makes me want to continue favoring strategies that are net short options premium.

But with the trade today, we're going to leverage options premiums to help us finance a bullish bet on NASDAQ stocks.

It started out with JC and I wanting to simply sell premium, but when we looked into $QQQ options it became pretty clear that we could get paid handsomely if recent lows end up becoming a pivot to higher prices and we took some put premiums to buy out-of-the-money calls.

As a trader, it's your job to find an edge.

There's quite literally an infinite amount of strategies, systems, and indicators you can integrate into your process.

But, at the end of the day, mastering just a select few will likely generate alpha as opposed to creating inconsistency in your approach.

Think about it: If you go to the gym, you have a structured program. You don't go to the gym and aimlessly decide on random exercises. You have a rigid plan that you're going to build on top of the lifts you did the workout before.

Trading's the same.

You don't need to switch between every time frame, make every decision using a different indicator from the last, or follow someone else with different objectives from yourself into our trade.

You find repeatable setups where you can find your edge.

For instance, you may only trade in the aftermath of liquidity cascade events that take place a handful of times every year. Mastered well enough, a few well-calculated trades in similar conditions can make your entire year.

In day-to-day life, being a "Jack of all trades, master of none" might serve you well.

This is the video recording of our March 1st Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

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

Currency markets are reacting to the war that’s broken out in Europe.

In the past four trading sessions, the Russian ruble has dropped more than 1,000 pips against the US dollar.

And, with fear growing that these initial days of fighting will turn into a protracted conflict, weakness is striking the euro as well.  

Let’s take a look at the EUR/USD cross and outline the levels we’re monitoring in the coming weeks and months.

Here's a daily chart of the EUR/USD going back to the pandemic lows:

After completing a large distribution pattern last September, the EUR/USD pair has been consolidating for the past several months and trading in a range between 1.1483 and 1.1121.

Since November, the market has been grinding lower, and most cryptos find themselves in 50%-plus drawdowns.

There's no other way to put it: The altcoins have been bruised and battered.

It's at these stages of the market cycle that we analyze the names in the shallowest drawdowns.

When everything else is down the dumps, the few names that have bucked the selling pressure, and are even pressing against new highs are likely your next leaders when the broad selling subsides.

This is exactly what we've done.

We've filtered our universe of cryptos (all coins above $500M in market cap) by their drawdown from 52-week highs as well as their respective performance from Bitcoin's January lows and since war broke out between Ukraine and Russia.

The market has been a mess and off late the geopolitical turmoil has been playing havoc as well. Metals have shown strength over the past week and that has been our area of focus. This week's long trade comes from the Metals segment.

Let's take a look at the trade for this week!

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.

As investors we get the option.

You can either profit and help your family because of higher energy and commodities costs.

Or you can complain about it.

I've been through enough cycles at this point, that there will always be that group who just complains and complains.

But for those of you who are proactive, and took advantage of the trends in place, then there's really nothing to complain about.

To the contrary, these are great days! Some of the best days, in fact.

It's funny, because you have those people who bought into that scam of so called "passive" investing. It's ridiculous that some investors still fall for that old trap.

Just because you buy and hold major indexes doesn't make you a "passive" investor. You have to be really really really bad at math to believe that.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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.

With VIX closing the day today north of 30, I'm still on the hunt for premium selling opportunities.

So as always, I perused my list of the most liquid options ETFs and found an opportunity where premiums are elevated and the chart suggests some rangebound trading action is likely over the next few weeks.

The day got away from me so I didn't get a chance to put it on yet, but I've identified a delta neutral candidate that I'll be looking to enter in the early going tomorrow AM.