From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Check out our latest Mystery Chart!
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?
Key Takeaway: Stocks have benefitted from an historic stretch of good news. Commodities suggest higher inflation may not be transitory. Global breadth trends turning higher.
With both Energy and Communication Services faltering in recent weeks, the sector leadership group has narrowed to Materials, Industrials, and Financials. Materials, which took over the top spot in the rankings this week, is the rare sector right now that has been a leader on both a short-term and long-term basis. Health Care and Real Estate (both of which made new highs last week) are climbing in the rankings and if recent strength persists could soon join the leadership group. Our industry group heat map shows continued leadership from mid-caps overall.
In our continued effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."
We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from this universe of stocks.
We've already had some great trades come out of this column and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.
Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.
Ultimately, to make the cut for our Minor Leagues list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.
Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.
After some recent events over the weekend, I thought this would be as good of a time as any to remind everyone, once again, what Technical Analysis actually is....
Technical Analysis is the study of the behavior of the market, and therefore its participants, as opposed to the goods and the services in which a particular market deals.
If you are recognizing that the trend for stocks is up, or maybe down, you are a Technician.
If you acknowledge, in any way, that the fed purchasing bonds impacts market prices, you are a Technician.
If you think volatility for stocks is low, or high, or that the Volatility Index $VIX is even a thing, you are analyzing a price derivative of the S&P500, and therefore, performing classic technical analysis.
Are you analyzing the behavior of the market and its participants, or the goods and services in which the market deals?
All of these above represent the former, and completely ignore the latter.
As we progress into Q1 of Fiscal Year 2021-2022, this playbook outlines our thoughts on every asset class and our plan to profit.
This playbook will cover our macro view, touching on Equities, Commodities, Currencies, and Rates, as well as outline our views on the major nifty indices and the sector/thematic indices.
We also cover individual stocks we want to be buying to take advantage of the themes discussed in the playbook.
Our Top 10 report was just published. In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.
The Growth Vs Value Cheat Code
We’ve pounded the table about that 1.70 level being the line in the sand for the relative trend in Growth vs Value. If we’re below there - which we believe we’re likely to remain, then we want to continue to be overweight Value and cyclicals. If the ratio decisively reclaims this level then we’ll have to rethink our entire thesis, along with that of a new Commodities Supercycle. But, that’s not the bet we’re making at all.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
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 context of the big picture 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.
As many of you know, we run A LOT of scans here at All Star Charts. In fact, I gave a presentation about them this past weekend at Chart Summit which you can rewatch here.
In this post, we're going to share a free trade idea from our Young Aristocrats list which is one of my absolute favorites of all the various bottoms-up scans I regularly run.
The rationale behind the list and corresponding monthly column is to catch strong stocks when they are still in the early stages of their dividend growth phase* in hopes that by doing so, we'll be buying some of the future Dividend Aristocrats...
This week we're looking at a long setup in the Metal sector. There are a handful of sectors that are outperforming the market as Nifty 50 continues to move sideways, and Metal has been a consistent name there.
