On Thursday August 23rd I will be putting on a presentation at the Toronto CFA Society at 4:15PM. This is a free event where I will be discussing the current market environment, walking through strategy and talking about how we find individual investing ideas. We will also save time for Q&A at the end because I really enjoy the back and forth. We'll find a local bar afterwards and continue the conversation.
This event is free for everyone but I'm told that space is limited so lock in your seat right away! Here are the registration details:
Life isn't just about Tesla gossip and Apple at a trillion. There is plenty of "less sexy" market behavior to be paying attention to right now that should have serious implications for the overall market. While boring to some, we have a huge amount of respect for Berkshire Hathaway stock. The breakout we got this week is likely to be the beginning of a 25% move higher which should take this one close to a $700B market cap and we want to be buying!
The Agribusiness sector might not often be thought of as sexy, but it is threatening to break out above 2008 highs (as measured by the Agribusiness ETF $MOO) and individual names are starting to look pretty compelling. As such, we're on the hunt for asymmetric reward-to-risk opportunities and we've identified one using a little creative leverage.
This entire year we've been talking about under-performance in the mid-cap and small-cap segments of the market. To take advantage of that we've wanted to be shorting, or at least avoiding longs in, the weakest names in sectors like Public Sector Banks, Infrastructure, Metals, Media, Realty, etc. Last month many of our downside price targets were hit from a tactical perspective and we took a more neutral approach, waiting for better entries on the short side. Now that we've seen a multi-week bounce off the lows in the mid and small-cap indexes, we're going to revisit the space for the best reward/risk setups on the short side.
There's been a lot of talk about equity market breadth both in the US and globally, but one thing I've not seen mentioned throughout the debate is Dow Theory. While there are five tenets of Dow Theory, today I want to focus on the aspect regarding confirmation among the three averages: The Dow Jones Industrial Average, The Dow Jones Transportation Average, and The Dow Jones Utility Average, by assessing their primary trends.
Sponsored by Investor’s Business Daily - Todd Sohn does amazing work on a daily basis. We're constantly communicating and sharing ideas with one another. I can tell you for a fact, there are few people in this world who look through as many charts as Todd. Our process is similar so I have really been looking forward to this conversation. We covered a lot of topics in this episode including U.S. Stocks and the sector rotation we've been seeing underneath the surface. Sentiment is a big part of their work over at Strategas and I find it really interesting how he incorporates analyst ratings to find ideas in the market. This is a good one!
I love this game. It's us against the world to try and make a buck in this market. Every day brings new opportunities and story lines. The hard part is distinguishing between what matters and what is just noise. We're hard wired to need to gossip and tell stories. It's who we are going back to the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago. In fact, it would be unnatural for us not to participate.
Many of us get our gossip from the market. That's one reason why we all get along and share ideas with one another throughout the trading day. I see some women, for example, watching Bravo and the gossip shows on E and stuff like that. We all get our gossip in different ways. While there seems be little harm done by watching the kardashians or vanderpumps, by following some narratives in the stock market, there is actually a lot of money at risk. So for those of us who get our gossip fix from market story lines, it's especially hard to differentiate reality from fairy tales.
Sector rotation in this market continues and the Agribusiness and Chemical Industries within the Materials Sector look to be heating up. While their performance on a relative basis is lackluster, on an absolute basis there are several setups offering reward/risk scenarios skewed in our favor.
First let's take a structural look at the Agribusiness ETF $MOO, which contains exposure to Chemical stocks as there is no ETF dedicated to that industry. Prices got back to their '08 highs earlier in the year and have been consolidating since. A breakout above 66 would signal the beginning of a new long-term uptrend that targets 94.25.
Earlier this year I discussed what I look for when picking a bottom in a stock using Twitter as an example.Today I want to look at The Container Store because it's exhibiting similar characteristics that suggest the stock has begun a new long-term uptrend.
We're witnessing yet another breakout attempt in the commodities market, and this time it's Cotton. This post is going to take a look at the setup, how it may develop, and how we can take advantage of it.
Every so often we hear the narrative that under-performance from China's stock market is a canary in the coal mine for US Equities, and the recent tariff tantrums have brought this discussion front and center. Today I want to look at this relationship to see if it has any merit or if it's just a smart sounding soundbite that you can use around the office water cooler.
