Welcomeback to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ending January 25, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.
In this column, we 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.
Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers… there is a lot of overlap.
At All Star Charts we follow a top-down research approach whereby we track all the asset classes and global markets in order to arrive at our view. In our weekly analysis, we carried out the same process and saw a pattern worth mentioning.
It's late-January. We've rung in the New Year. Christmas decorations are put away. We're settling into the late winter slog of cold & snow.
In my reading on this morning (a cold & snowy one in Milwaukee), I came across the following passage:
"You see, Rodya, to make a career in the world , it's enough, in my opinion, if you always observe the season; don't ask for asparagus in January, and you'll have a few more bills in your purse; the same goes for this purchase. The season now is summer, so I made a summer purchase. . ."
It's from "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky. Since it's a Russian novel, explaining exactly who is talking, who is being spoken to, and the overall context would take too much time. But I'm quite sure that we can look at what is being said on its own and glean some wisdom.
This week we're looking at one long setup and one short setup. The sectors we've identified are Consumer Durables for a bullish trade and Financial Services for a bearish trade.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July 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.
The latest E-Trade StreetWise survey, which is put out quarterly, revealed most investors (66%) believe the market is in bubble territory, and another 25% think it’s approaching one.
Check my math, but that's over 90% of investors thinking we're in or near a bubble.
A bubble!
Everything needs to be a bubble.
You see why we can't have nice things?
I mean, what ever happened to a series of higher lows and higher highs defining an uptrend?
Too simple?
Not intellectual enough for you?
Fine. Let's get into facts.
The Dow Jones Industrial Avg and Dow Jones Transportation Avg did nothing for almost 3 years, and just broke out in the 4th quarter last year. Is this a bubble? Or just the beginning of a new uptrend?
When we take a step back, this all jives with what we're seeing in other asset classes as investors are rushing into risk assets as they position themselves more offensively.
This development really began last March as the market was bottoming from its swift Q1 selloff. Although the relative trend really accelerated in early September as Mid, Small, and Micro-Caps began to drastically outperform their Large-Cap peers.
Let's take a look at how this cap-rotation has impacted some of the secular leaders at a sector and industry level.
Nifty 50 has gone ahead and given us a signal of caution after a relentless rally. While we have seen days of a pause in short-term momentum in the past, this time around there's a slight difference.
Let's take a look at the daily chart to see what we've got here.
Software names have been leading the charge in this bull market. And if stocks are setting up for another extension of this bull run, I expect a lot of the leading stocks will come from the software space.
The market has been gaining from strength to strength and if anything, we see greater participation across the globe as this rally matures into what looks like a long-term bull market.
One phrase we hear pretty often during such bull markets is the "Risk-on environment". So what is a Risk-on environment and what are the indicators that allude to such a set-up?
