One sector that I feel a bit underexposed to right now is real estate -- particularly REITs. And when a dominant player in New York City's commercial real estate sector pops up in our scans with a beautiful chart, it feels to me like this one might be set to surprise a lot of people.
The greenback doesn’t know which way to go, as FX markets offer traders little in the way of breakouts.
Instead of reviewing the chopfest, playing devil’s advocate, and weighing the lack of evidence for a near-term directional bias, let’s turn to a trending market for insight into the dollar.
Spoiler alert: It’s shiny, yellow, and trading at new all-time highs.
Yes, I’m referring to Gold.
Gold and the US dollar hold a classic intermarket relationship — an overt negative correlation.
As I reviewed the charts this weekend, another pattern emerged between the two.
I decided to offset Gold ahead of the dollar by roughly two to four years. After adjusting the charts, I landed on setting Gold forward by 130 weeks (approximately two-and-a-half years).
In Monday’s letter, we walked through how we’re monitoring Bitcoin’s downside risks in the face of an incredibly strong tape. Even though this environment is unequivocally rewarding buyers, it’s always prudent to manage our risks as traders and investors. There is still a probability that Bitcoin consolidates it’s gains near the former all-time highs achieved in 2021; but at the same time, we need to let money flow dictate our execution, not opinions.
So in keeping true to this theme, today’s letter will cover a number of new trade ideas we’re monitoring.
Every once in a while, I’ll put on what I call “all or nothing” trades.
What this means in practice is that I’ll put on a defined risk options trade knowing full well that the trade is either going to net a profit, or it’s going to be a zero – a full loss of invested capital. There’s no in-between.
Usually, this happens because I love a setup, but the price level on the chart that would invalidate my thesis is pretty far away. If we get there, it’s more than likely that whatever premium I paid to enter the trade will have nearly evaporated. There will be nothing left to sell, even if I want to.
Two trades with March expiration options have concluded for me this week that demonstrate the yin and yang of these types of trades.
On Feb. 14, I put on a bearish bet in Hormel Foods $HRL. I bought the March 25 puts for 15 cents. This trade was put on at a time when I was looking to add some bearish exposure to my portfolio to help balance out the heavy long exposure I had in other positions.
We've had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.
For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.
That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.
To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list now, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
