Join Sean and JC on Tuesday December 28th at 4:30 PM EST for our Options Holiday Party Livestream!
Don’t miss this quick video below where Sean previews the event.
Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
by Peter
Join Sean and JC on Tuesday December 28th at 4:30 PM EST for our Options Holiday Party Livestream!
Don’t miss this quick video below where Sean previews the event.
by Ian Culley
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
Major world currencies continue to struggle against the US dollar.
Both the euro and British pound have been coiling near 52-week lows against the dollar. We’re also seeing weakness spread among commodity-centric currencies, as the Canadian dollar hit new 52-week lows this week, and the Australian dollar accomplished the same earlier in the month. As for the safe-haven Japanese yen, USD/JPY hit its highest level since 2017 at the end of November.
The bottom line is that we continue to see broad strength from the greenback.
Meanwhile, the US Dollar Index $DXY continues to consolidate within a tight continuation pattern.
As we wait for a resolution either higher or lower, we can look to these individual forex pairs for an indication of which direction we’re likely headed.
Let’s revisit the potential failed breakdown from the Australian dollar earlier in the month and the recent action in the Canadian dollar for clues.
by JC
It’s not a secret around here that market breadth started to deteriorate in February.
If you recall, that’s when everyone had a SPAC.
The IPO index peaked, ARK Funds, Biotech, the new highs list, etc all stopped going up.
But more recently, market breadth is getting all the attention. Everyone is a breadth expert now, you notice?
I’m even getting software developers asking me about my breadth analysis wishlist so they can build it for me. Which I love and I certainly appreciate, but just goes to show you another sign of the times.
The way I see it, if you’re trying to get defensive NOW because of breadth deterioration, I think you might be looking at it completely wrong. [Read more…]
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza
This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow. In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish… but NOT both.
We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients. Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.
We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.
What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind… and they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think the stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny.
Then we flip through our list of stocks flashing unusual activity and pick the best setups using many of the same technical filters we do for our other scans. And just like that, we’ll follow the money flow and fatten our own pockets along with some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.
We’ve already had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it late last year and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.
We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…
For about a year now, we’ve focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B. That was fun, but it’s time we branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
The way we’re doing this is simple…
To make the cut for our new Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B. And it doesn’t have to be a Russell component–it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.
The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus on the best players. But instead of all-time highs, we’re sorting by 52-week highs these days as we don’t want to discriminate against energy or other cyclical stocks.
The goal is still to catch the strongest names while they’re small and have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climb the ranks to the big leagues, the returns could be huge. We’re looking at up to 10x moves just to break into large-cap land!
Let’s dive into this week’s report and see what’s happening in some of the hottest stocks in the Minor Leagues.
by Ian Culley
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
We study a wide variety of sentiment data as we incorporate many different indicators into our day-to-day analysis.
In its simplest form, sentiment tells us how certain market participants or investors feel about the market.
Are investors feeling bullish and increasing their exposure to risk?
Or, are investors feeling fearful and positioning defensively?
More often than not, these are contrarian indicators that work best when at extremes.
One of our favorite sets of sentiment data comes from a weekly report published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It is called the Commitment Of Traders, or COT report, and it simply outlines how various participants are positioned in futures markets.
We get lots of questions regarding how we analyze the COT report, so let’s talk about two of the main ways we find value in this information.
by JC
It’s Saturday Morning Chartoons time.
This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge
Outside of the large-cap averages in the US, most stocks have been stuck in sideways trends for much of 2021. We’ve seen breakouts fail in both directions over the past two months, as sloppy price action continues to govern the broader market.
As we discussed in our last intermarket post, this range-bound action has not just been the case for stocks on an absolute basis. We’re seeing the same thing from commodities, cryptocurrencies, and even our risk-appetite ratios. Risk assets have simply been a mess.
Let’s take a look at one of our favorite risk-appetite ratios, as there’s been an important development in the discretionary versus staples relationship.