It's the weekly bond market edition of What the FICC?

Today we're breaking down two reasons we like buying bonds.

Check it out!

It's hard not to notice the strength we've been seeing in the metals space lately. This surely is getting the Gold Bugs excited.

We wouldn't consider ourselves any kind of "bug," but it's fair to say we're biased toward charts that trend. If line goes up, we like to buy. If line goes down, we like to sell. Simple.

If we can get into an emerging trend early -- so much the better!

"Poor man's gold" (as JC called it), might just be starting a big relative outperformance trend that could spell a big opportunity for us.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

That was a big move yesterday. A little digestion would be beneficial.

We broke the 200-day moving average in the $SPX. The next leg up is at 4,120.

After we got past sharing each others' Thanksgiving dinner menus, wine pairings, and recipe swaps, the All Star Charts gang got back to business this morning hunting for trade ideas.

We arrived at today's idea in a roundabout way:

"Discretionary stocks have been the 'least shitty' performers as of late."

"We're seeing relative strength in 'da homies. [Homebuilders]"

"In that sector, Lennar $LEN is showing the best relative strength relative to the others."

...and that is a taste of how the Thanksgiving sausage is made.

So let's dig into some visuals to highlight what we're seeing.

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.

This is the video recording of the November 17th, 2022, Weekly Town Hall w/ Willie Delwiche.

11/17/22 2:00 PM ET

So we were talking about a guy who's apparently subsisting only on McDonald's patties for the next 30 days. Just the patty --- no bun, no condiments, no lettuce. He's trying to prove some kind of point that it's not McDonald's burgers that are unhealthy, it's everything else in a typical American's McDonald's order at the drive-thru window.

Ok. Whatever.

But all this "healthy McDonald's" talk got us thinking about the even healthier looking chart of its stock $MCD in recent weeks:

This week we're looking at cement stock. After an underperformance, the strength is coming back to this industry group.

There’s a profound mental shift that happens when you flip from being in positions where bad luck could damage or ruin your trading account, to being in a position where the unexpected might actually make you a ton of money!

For options traders, an excellent example of these two positions is a short straddle vs. a long straddle.

In a short straddle, a trader is naked short an equal amount of calls and puts at the same strike and expiration. The PnL graph of a hypothetical 100-strike short straddle looks like this:

You’ll notice that as long as the underlying price (as displayed along the x-axis) stays +/- $20 from today’s price of $100, the trader will likely earn a profit as options expiration approaches.

“Why do you rob banks?” authorities asked notorious bank thief Willie Sutton.

His response: “Because that’s where the money is.”

We're not planning on robbing anybody, but if today's trade plays out like we think it can, it might feel like we're stealing. Only, we won't need to worry about the authorities coming after us, nor will we need to feel bad about it.

Our Analyst Willie Delwiche says that a basic requirement for many bullish ideas right now is that any stock or ETF in question needs to be above August highs. Anything below August highs is subject to a rude reversal. I'm on board with this line of thinking.

So, today's trade is in an American bank that is above its August high and showing signs of wanting more.