What was once peanuts, the total market cap of this asset class achieved the $2T milestone at its peak earlier this year.
It's hard to believe, but there are literally several thousands of individual coins and tokens, and the list keeps growing every day.
Not only can we express our opinions in the coins themselves, but there's an expanding list of pure-play stocks, ETFs, and funds being offered to investors, too.
So today, we'll dive into some of these offerings, what sets them apart, and ultimately, how we're approaching these vehicles in the coming weeks and months.
As many of you know, something we’ve been working on internally is using various 'bottoms-up' tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!
One way we’re doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large - and ultimately mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
Some markets have been choppy for longer than others. Most of the Nasdaq has been a chop fest since February, and so have Emerging Markets. Now since about May a lot more of the cyclical and developed markets have taken a hit.
You can see that in the Equally-weighted S&P500 Index:
Breadth downgraded to neutral as trends in the US and globally weaken
Absence of breadth thrust regime weighs on a market struggling for direction
Reducing equity exposure in Cyclical and Tactical Opportunity portfolios
The divergences between what has been seen in the popular averages and what is happening beneath the surface have become significant enough that we have moved breadth to neutral in our weight of the evidence framework. This leaves the scales tilted away from opportunity and toward risk.
The most recent breadth thrust regime expired in early June and since then the percentage of global markets trading above their 50-day averages has fallen from the upper 80’s to now just 20%. One-third of the markets are not even above their 200-day averages. US industry group trends have also faltered. The percentage trading above their 10-week averages is breaking down while the percentage making new 13-week lows is breaking out.
In the recent All Star Charts monthly conference call, one of the themes that were repeated often was that stocks are in a "hot mess." In other words, many sectors are a bit stuck in the mud, offering very few signals or hints on the next direction. And when stocks aren't offering us many clues, the likely conclusion is that we'll go sideways for a while. It might be choppy, but the net result will be a whole big bowl of nothing.
With that in mind, it pays to look for opportunities to take advantage of stocks or ETFs that have somewhat elevated implied volatilities (meaning options are richly priced) and put on delta neutral credit spreads. We already did this earlier this week, and we're going to continue with another similar trade in a wildly different ETF.
The strongest of assets will not only do well on an absolute basis, but they also tend to outperform their alternatives. In the case of Bitcoin, not only are we pressing against new absolute lows, but we're seeing lower lows relative to other non-crypto-related assets.
Relative strength is one of our primary tools as technicians.
The easiest way to go about doing this analysis is through relative ratio price charts.
Simply put, it's a measure of a security's performance relative to another. For this example, that's displayed as being long Bitcoin in the numerator, and short an equivalent amount of US Dollars in the denominator.
When the ratio is rising, the numerator is outperforming the denominator. And when the ratio is falling, the numerator is underperforming the denominator.
Not only does this type of analysis allow us to evaluate the risk appetite of investors, but it also ensures we're always positioned in the right areas.
What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention, and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.
This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it’s an absolute price chart, other times it’s on a relative basis.
It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!
The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize the price behavior objectively.
While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…
So, let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Earlier in the week, we held our July Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.
In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.
Key takeaway: A diminishing appetite for risk combined with deteriorating breadth creates a backdrop conducive to equity indexes catching down to the weakness that has been on display beneath the surface. While bulls remain elevated overall, that could change very quickly as the stage is set for a complete sentiment unwind. Optimism has already begun to edge lower, with AAII bulls dropping to their lowest level since October. Any major signs of adversity could rock the optimistic outlook of a market that has gone relatively unchallenged for the last year.
Sentiment Report Chart of the Week: Risk Off Resolution
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
What started out as a tactical bounce in the US Dollar could be turning into a full-fledged reversal of the primary trend.
Defensive assets such as US Treasury bonds and the Japanese yen are catching a bid. On the other hand, risk assets continue to struggle at overhead supply. Many are experiencing significant selling pressure at these logical levels.
With each passing day, the choppy environment that’s been in place since early February is becoming increasingly messy.
This is a perfect environment for the US dollar to thrive as more and more investors are hiding out in safe-haven assets and waiting for the smoke to clear.
