This idea came up in passing in our ASC+Plus weekly Townhall yesterday. The messy action in Copper looks a whole lot like the messy action in Berkshire Hathaway. After peaking in Q2 both have moved sideways. Copper has been more volatile than Berkshire, moving quickly to go nowhere. They are both up more than 20% for the year, but that has been true since late-April. It’s interesting that neither broke out to new highs in November and neither has (yet) broken down to new lows in December. When we get new highs or new lows from one or both of these bellwethers, we will definitely take notice. Until then it’s more sideways actions, with volatility in search of resolution.
Dividend Aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to long-term-minded shareholders.
As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.
Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we’re turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we’re curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for five to nine years.
We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are “stocks that pay you to make money.” Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.
There is always a silver lining to slippery stock markets like the one we experienced over the last couple of weeks: Stocks that are overdue for pullbacks get them -- and sometimes hard. Meanwhile, the stocks where there is strong institutional support and/or no real bearish case to take profits reveal themselves through relative strength.
The stocks that refuse to budge during broad market selloffs are the ones bulls need to pay attention to. Because by the time the markets signal "all clear!" (do they ever?) it's usually already too late to get in. You missed it. It ran without you.
With this in mind, one of the stocks in the recent 2-to-100 Club report caught my eye.
When we do our market analysis, we go through a ton of different indexes all over the world.
But specifically within the U.S. you have things like the S&P500, Russell2000, Nasdaq100 and of course the Dow Jones Industrial & Transportation Averages. These are just a few of the most popular ones.
You can go on and on with the Value Line Indexes, Wilshire 5000, NYSE Composite and the list goes on and on.
They all serve a purpose in our analysis and all represent the market in different ways, whether it be using market capitalization, broadness of measurements and even specific sector exposure.
But you know one that doesn't get the credit it deserves?
The percentage of new highs and other internal indicators spiked to historic extremes in 2020, indicating that we were in the early innings of a new bull cycle.
Sideways and choppy price behavior has been the theme this year. We haven’t come close to the high-water marks achieved by our breadth indicators last year, so, naturally, there are divergences.
Indeed, these breadth divergences are to be expected. Market internals tend to peak early in a cycle. What bulls don't want to see is a meaningful downside expansion in breadth.
During the recent selling pressure, we experienced some of the highest readings in new lows since the COVID crash.
It’s that time of year again -- a time when our inboxes are overflowing with reflections on the year that was and speculations on the year that will be.
We used to wait until the year ended before recapping its events and previewing what lies ahead. But these annual outlooks have been showing up earlier and earlier in recent years. In fact, I think I saw my first 2022 outlook piece before the calendar flipped to December...
I read my fair share of outlook pieces and would not go so far as to say they are all useless. I prefer those that identify a few broad themes for consideration over those filled with detailed forecasts and a veneer of precision. After all, we should recognize the limits in the usefulness of even the best prediction pieces.
In the stock market, we have software, internet, homebuilders, and gold miners. The powers at be do their best to classify all the publicly listed companies into industry groups. This allows us to break them into various baskets and analyze them at the index level.
In crypto markets, there are tokens focused on decentralized finance, the metaverse, smart contracts, and more. But unlike the stock market, the crypto asset class is still in its infancy. As such, there is no industry standard for how to group these different tokens based on what they do.
In our analysis, we'll often discuss what some of these tokens do. We use some indexes that are offered from data providers, as well as create custom indexes of our own as we see fit.
The reason we do this is for information. Aggregating tokens into groups and analyzing them as a whole allows us to glean insights about the strength or weakness of different areas of the crypto market.
This week we've been clarifying our multi-time-frame view of the market.
The point is there isn't much edge in being involved in this messy action, which will likely involve a high concentration of whipsaws in the coming weeks while Bitcoin builds out a base following its liquidity crunch.
Indeed, sometimes the best trade is no trade at all.
We can either wait for Bitcoin to contract and buy the break with some level of conviction or just blindly BTFD like the El Salvador guy. I know what I'd rather be doing right now.
But, in keeping with our multi-time-frame approach, the long-term bull case still stands moving into 2022. And, for long-term spot holders, there doesn't seem much to be concerned about in this low time frame price action.
For now, we're avoiding what's likely to be a messy end to the year.
