This is our ASC Research Q4 2021 Playbook.
- Stocks (International & U.S.)
- U.S. Sectors & Industries
- Market Breadth & Sentiment
- Commodities
- Currencies
- Intermarket Analysis
- Crypto Currencies
- New Trade Ideas
- Overall Strategy
Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
by JC
This is our ASC Research Q4 2021 Playbook.
With the current market environment giving us many mixed messages, what better time to dive in and see what’s happening underneath the surface?
by JC
A big concern for stocks this summer was that there weren’t any bears left.
Most of the silly permabears had given up and moved on to torture investors in other asset classes like Bitcoin or Gold.
Sentiment this summer was a headwind.
And now it’s the opposite. Sentiment is a tailwind for stocks.
Take a look at the sentiment from Financial Advisors and Individual investors. Just a few months back, we saw the most amount of bulls since January 2018, just before stocks all over the world plummeted.
All it took was half the nasdaq stocks dropping 20% for sentiment to mean revert. Take a look at this chart showing that we’re down to levels where bulls historically start showing up, and that’s usually because of an increase in stock prices: [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 we think 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 JC
One of the first things you learn in Technical Analysis is that markets are fractal.
That means that you’ll find the same human behaviors (i.e. price patterns) whether you’re looking at daily timeframes, weekly time frames or even intraday (e.g. 10-min or 30-min candles).
This is a concept that Brian Shannon has done an amazing job of highlighting throughout his career. Brian has been an inspiration to me since about 2005, which is pretty unbelievable to think about. Since then we’ve become friends and go skiing together and all that. It’s pretty cool how life works sometimes.
Anyway, the idea behind “Multiple Timeframes”, which is literally part of the title of Brian’s book (go buy it), is to use this reality of “markets being fractal” to our advantage.
That can mean a lot of different things to different people.
For us, in what we do here at All Star Charts is, we start with Weekly and Monthly time horizons. That’s where it all begins. [Read more…]
by JC
One thing unique about the market is that the game is never over. There aren’t four 15-min quarters or two 20-min halves like in sports.
In those endeavors there is a beginning and an end.
You know who won (or who tied in some cases). But the match is over, and there will be another one in a few days or a few months, depending on the sport.
In the market, it never ends. This can cause issues psychologically, so it’s something we should all be aware of and keep in mind.
But if you ask me, currently the bulls are scoring a lot more points. This is the first time we’ve seen that since Q1 this year, when the bears started running up the score.
Look at the S&P500 break out to new all-time highs relative to US Treasury Bonds. [Read more…]
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.
by JC
We’re back with another podcast episode of The Compound & Friends with Josh Brown and Michael Batnick of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This time we were also joined by Tyrone Ross, CEO of Onramp.
While the main focus may have been crypto markets, we also discussed rising rates, bank stocks, energy and gold.
This was a lot of fun, as usual with this crew!
Hope you enjoy. [Read more…]