I'll spare you the suspense -- we're getting long Marathon Petroleum $MPC here.
The title of today's post is not a trite pun. We are indeed positioning for a bullish move, but it may take a little bit to develop the way we want it to.
Thankfully, the beauty of options trading is that we can craft a strategy that takes advantage of a slow-developing play. So let's get right to it.
We've been talking about how the major strength in the current market has been coming through in IT. But what we also noticed is that while Nifty Pharma wasn't looking pretty on an absolute basis, the relative strength is pointing in a different direction.
Pharma has been gaining our attention for the past few weeks. This post will see if broad participation is back in Pharma or just a few value weightage stocks are gaining higher.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
As 2022 approaches, the latest evidence from currency markets suggest the US Dollar Index $DXY could be stalling out.
Whether it resolves higher from the current continuation pattern is a key question with broad market implications. While dollar strength has been a headwind during the second half of 2021, we think it cools off coming into 2022.
In our view, there's a good chance a weaker dollar will actually help put a bid in risk assets in the near future. This hasn’t been the case in a while, so let’s discuss what’s changed to make us feel this way.
Notice the short-term weakness in our US dollar trend summary table:
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January's Strategy Session will be held on Tuesday, January 4th at 7 PM IST. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all of our past conference calls.
Today we're introducing a new series of posts that we will include in our general analysis.
We're calling this the BASH Series. What does this mean and what do we do?
We look at stocks in the market that are experiencing extreme moves, and we share our views. So we will tell you what we'd do: Buy, Avoid, Sell, or Hold. And that's how we arrive at BASH (you have to make acronyms that make a word. Just sticks better, so bear with it. Haha!)
Today we're here to discuss RBL Bank Bank. So let's do just that.
Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended December 24, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly 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.
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.
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 “Santa Claus Rally” For Stocks
The last 5 trading days of the year and the first two of the new year represent a historically strong period for the market. This seasonal trend is referred to as the “Santa Claus Rally” and occurs during one of the best 7-day periods based on data all the way back to 1950. The market is off to a good start as today is the first day of this period and the S&P is already back to all-time highs for the first time since November. The main support level we have been watching in recent weeks is those September highs around 4,500. Buyers dug in and successfully defended this zone twice this month, and now they are trying to make a sustained breakout back to fresh record highs. If we hold above the November and December highs ~4,700 we’re likely to see a fresh leg higher for the broader market, and particularly US large caps.
These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.
This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Monday January 3rd @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.
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.
