From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Commodities are hot.

Even the most ardent tech investors can’t avert their gaze from Gold’s eye-catching new highs. 

If you find yourself unprepared, don’t be alarmed. We have a plan…

Buy base breakouts.

Check out coffee futures ripping above a shelf of former highs:

We often joke that catching base breakouts like this gets us out of bed in the morning. (It’s the best part of waking up.)   

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Airbnb and Uber.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Click here to check it out.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our April Monthly Strategy Session earlier this week. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

In today's Daily Digest, we'll review:

1. New position in XLB (Materials).
2. No adjustments are needed today.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.

Let's dig in!

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes via a Form 4 filing by ilWaddi Cayman Holdings.

The firm reported a purchase of 40,000 shares, equivalent to $202,800, in AlTi Global $ATI.

How I learned it more than a couple of decades ago was that there were 3 asset classes: Stocks, Bonds AND Commodities.

But a funny thing happened throughout the 2010s. Commodities did so poorly, particularly when you compare their performance to Stocks and Bonds, that investors completely forgot that Commodities were an asset class.

Many newer investors never even knew in the first place.

But yes folks, there are 3 asset classes. And that 3rd one that everyone conveniently forgot about is the one that is dominating returns this cycle.

Here is a ratio of Commodities to Bonds in a strong uptrend as everyone keeps telling me that interest rates are falling.

It's actually the exact opposite. Interest rates keep going up, as Commodities rip higher and bonds keep falling apart.

You're going to tell me this isn't an uptrend?

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Commodities are hot.

Even the most ardent tech investors can’t avert their gaze from Gold’s eye-catching new highs. 

If you find yourself unprepared, don’t be alarmed. We have a plan…

Buy base breakouts.

Check out coffee futures ripping above a shelf of former highs:

We often joke that catching base breakouts like this gets us out of bed in the morning. (It’s the best part of waking up.)   

Everything started to change in February.

We were right here talking about it.

You saw the major shift in March for sure. It was obvious to everyone.

But the cracks actually started to show up in early February.

In fact, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq100 are still at the same levels they were in early February.

The Russell2000 and S&P600 Small-cap Indexes are both still below their December highs.

Apple just hit the lowest levels since October, making this one of the best bearish positions we put on this year, outside of the $LULU trade.

Both of these have worked out very well.

And I think there are more of these epic downtrends coming.

 We've built a proprietary scan that notifies us whenever a cryptocurrency exceeds a certain market-cap threshold for the first time. When there's an up and coming cryptocurrency, we're the first one to know about it.

This scan flags breakthrough cryptocurrencies, allowing us to capitalize on lucrative opportunities before they become mainstream.

Every week, we create a Power Rankings table that lists the market-cap rank of the top 20 cryptocurrencies. This allows us to see the winners and losers as they climb the market-cap ladder.

When I was reviewing my open positions this morning, I couldn’t help but have the feeling that all good runs must eventually come to an end. Everything goes through cycles.

As I was doing post-mortems on winning trades that recently closed, and updating stops on winning trends I’m continuing to ride, a feeling of foreboding hit me that this run feels “too good to be true.”

This isn’t necessarily true, but it has felt like any long trade I’ve put on recently was destined to be a winner. If I’m not careful, I can easily cross the chasm into blind overconfidence. That’s where most trouble starts. Certainly for me, anyway.

In the near future, I’ll probably be looking for less aggressively bullish bets. And the ones I choose will likely require longer timeframes to play out. Meanwhile, I’m beginning to favor some delta-neutral credit spreads wherever I can find favorable setups.

I touch upon this and much more in this week’s Options Jam Session: