From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley
US dollar bulls are in control.
Fresh highs dot the US Dollar Index $DXY chart. Sellers are nowhere to be found.
The question is, when – or where – will buying pressure ease?
Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
by Ian Culley
From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley
US dollar bulls are in control.
Fresh highs dot the US Dollar Index $DXY chart. Sellers are nowhere to be found.
The question is, when – or where – will buying pressure ease?
Look what we have here: a $VIX popping its head up to two-month highs.
Are investors getting a little spooked by the prospect of a tricky earnings season?
We’ll be able to figure all that out after the fact. In the meantime, we will use these elevated options premiums to help us ride out some portfolio profitability.
I asked my analysts to find me a big cap name that is trading sloppy.
And the one they came with is a widely followed mega-cap name that has been flopping around in a sideways choppy range which, coupled with upcoming earnings, is helping to juice options premiums.
Here’s everyone’s favorite EV car maker Tesla $TSLA: [Read more…]
by JC
Many Small-caps have been leaders from the very beginning of this bull market.
Even through the first couple of weeks of 2024, which haven’t been great, Small-cap Industrials are still up over 42% since the Summer ’22 lows. Small-cap Consumer Discretionary is up over 37%.
Both of these have outperformed even the S&P500 during this period.
So maybe the “Russell2000” has underperformed. But that doesn’t mean that “Small-caps” have underperformed.
It’s on a case by case basis.
Here is a list of our Minor Leaguers, for example, which include the strongest stocks between $1 Billion – $4 Billion in market cap: [Read more…]
One of the areas I’ve identified where I can improve my trading is in trade selection. Specifically, my trade avoidance.
Due to my early trading experience as a stock trader, it was ingrained in me during my formative trading years to avoid positioning in stocks that are about to announce earnings.
And for good reason.
Once a stock trade is on, our only real defense against punishing losses is to have a stop-loss order working. That’s fine if you trust yourself to always honor your mental stops. But for most of us mere mortals, the good-til-canceled stop-loss order is our best protection.
99% of the time, a stop-loss order works as intended. Sure, we might suffer a little slippage here and there. But it works like a charm in preventing disaster. Especially for intraday trades.
But for overnight holds, a stop-loss order has its limits. And these limits are fully exposed in the event of a binary news release – most notably earnings announcements. [Read more…]
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.
To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list now, 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.
The goal is 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.
From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts
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.
by Ian Culley
From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley
The US dollar is marching higher, stomping gold mining stocks into dust.
Harmony $HMY, Kinross $KGC, and Eldorado Gold $EGO are hovering just above last month’s breakout levels.
And Franco Nevada $FNV – a secular leader among royalty companies – is sliding toward fresh multi-year lows!
by JC
Coming into 2024, we already had a nice list of things that needed to happen to approach the market from a much more defensive perspective.
Let’s remember that throughout the 4th quarter we were going out of our way to be more aggressive than even we were accustomed to.
It was a different environment.
And while we did not know what 2024 would bring, we still don’t, at least we came in with a good list of developments that would likely be occurring before a more severe correction was underway.
Remember, the new highs list peaked on December 14th. So that means we’re over a month into a market correction that you can only see taking place underneath the surface if you bother to look.
Here’s how each of the sectors have performed during this correction: [Read more…]