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.
In last Monday's report, we pointed out a handful of bearish developments but restated our neutral outlook on the crypto market.
We noted that there was demand coming from spot, while futures were still in the process of selling.
This continues to be the key theme to monitor; selling spot no longer appears to be the primary way savvy and large investors are going to cash.
Rather, they're doing it through shorting calendar futures driving down Bitcoin's term structure.
Since then, we've seen Bitcoin lose our risk level of 41,000 and are positioned heavily in cash.
We're anticipating a longer period of sideways price action, and this is a tape conducive neither to trading nor to establishing aggressive long positions.
Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended February 18, 2022. This report is published biweekly and rotated with our Minor Leaguers column.
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.
We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names.
There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.
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.
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.
Here is an inside look at our weekly Crypto Strategy Session that we have every Friday.
Sometimes there are more trading opportunities than others. That really just depends on the market environment.
In today's video we talk about the Key levels for Bitcoin, how some of the strongest Alts are setting up, and how far the correlation has come between Bitcoin and the S&P500.
The theories about Bitcoin being an inflation hedge, the theories about Bitcoin being a hedge against the US Dollar and the theories about Bitcoin being its own uncorrelated asset all turned out to be wrong.
There's NO evidence in price that proves those are anything but fairy tales.
Maybe one day one of those may turn out to be true. But we need to focus on the reality of the now and the present.
What do the facts say about what's going on? Not the conspiracy theories. Just the facts.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Gold is the hot topic this week, now that it’s finally showing signs of life.
It’s impossible to deny gold’s near-term strength. But we think the setup probably needs more time to develop and work through all the overhead supply from the past few years.
Long story short, gold is still pretty messy if it's below the 2011 highs.
If and when the shiny metal makes a decisive resolution, there should be plenty of time to join in and ride the trend higher.
As for other areas within commodities, we continue to see a growing list of contracts reclaim key levels and print fresh highs.
Procyclical commodities like crude oil and gasoline might come to mind since they’re constantly in the news cycle.
But other areas, such as grains and even livestock, are also breaking to new multi-year highs.
Today, we’re going to highlight an agricultural commodity that often gets overlooked.
Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.
We’ve also sprinkled in some of the largest ADRs from countries that did not make the market cap cut.
These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.
It’s got all the big names and more--but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.
The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.
We take the largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.
Based on the market environment, we can also flip the scan on its head and filter for weakness.
Let’s dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.
