VIX is near its highest level of the year and this is being reflected in options premiums nearly across the board.

It's also earnings season, so we want to be careful not to get caught in any potential earnings-driven landmines.

With this in mind, I've got a big cap name that has already reported earnings, is trading in a range, and is still exhibiting elevated options premiums -- the perfect recipe for a delta neutral options trade.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Remember when anything priced in yen was trending higher?

It wasn’t too long ago that if you were looking for an uptrend, all you had to do was throw the yen in the denominator, and voila.

Just last month, the dollar hit a new 34-year high against the yen—levels not seen since the 1980s.

But the tables are turning in favor of the Japanese currency.  

While most central banks are either cutting interest rates or considering future rate cuts, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) is hiking—a policy shift that puts a bid beneath the yen…

A couple of months ago, I highlighted buying yen futures above .6500.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve adjusted the entry-level to the former 2022 and 2023 lows at approximately .6625:

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. No new position today.
2. Adjustment to XLC position.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.

Let’s dig in!

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend Aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to long-term-minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That's why we're turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we're curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for five to nine years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are "stocks that pay you to make money." Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

In this scan, we look to identify the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega-cap status (over $200B).

Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.

But the scan doesn't just end there.

We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

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

Let’s dig in!

What do you call a blend of systematic and discretionary trading?

Systionary trading?

Discretionatic trading?

I think I’m leaning towards the latter.

Early in my trading career, I started up a small commodity futures hedge fund and prided myself on being fully systematic.

An algorithm derived the signals, I entered each trade manually, and I honored each signal religiously. To my credit, I stuck with it, no matter what. And I was rewarded for doing so, earning my investors 58% net returns on their money (net of my 2/20 performance fees) in just 18 months.

So, it was ingrained in me early on that systematic trading was good for me. It kept my emotions out of the decision-making process.

I’ve been chasing the systematic dragon in index options trading ever since.

This is where it all starts folks.

The story starts and ends with the Bond Market.

You may not like it. I know I certainly don't. But that's the world we've always lived in. And it's the world I would expect us to be in for a long long time.

The bond market is $130 Trillion. That's compared to a mere $50 Trillion US Stock Market. The total Global stock market is slightly over $100 Trillion, for perspective.

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. No new positions today.
2. Rolling QQQ to September.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.

Let’s dig in!

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Thursday August 1st @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Thursday evening:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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.

Nowadays, to make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.