The ASC team put out their latest International Hall of Famers list late last week. Here's what you need to know about these stocks: These are the 50 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs, which the team has applied technical filters to in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

And one that caught my interest just recently got its last quarterly earnings reveal out of the way and it is now trading above the level where we want to take action.

The team is out with a bearish piece on US Treasuries this week. Have a read. In it, they lay out the case why we should be looking to position for further downside trading action in a variety of Treasury instruments.

It's been a while since I've had an opportunity to put a Bear Put Spread on, and these setups look like good candidates for them.

Feels good to be back from vacation! And I'm glad to see the stock market fared nicely while I was gone.

Looking around, we're seeing lots of fresh setups. But with earnings calls on deck, I'll have to be patient with many of my favorite ideas to let the event pass so as not to caught offsides by a sudden move in the wrong direction.

However, one of my favorite setups just got its latest earnings release out of the way this morning and thankfully it basically amounted to a non-event. Its recent breakaway gap continues to hold above its prior 3-year resistance level. And with the binary earnings event out of the way, options premiums have been evaporating throughout the day. This sets us up for taking a longer-term position at advantageous prices.

(While on vacation until Oct 26th, I’m going to be sharing some anecdotes on my favorite trading strategies: why I use them, when, and how I manage them once they are on.)

A Vertical Spread is one where you are long options at one strike and short an equal amount of options at another strike, both in the same expiration series. These can be done both for debits or credits, depending on whether you purchased the more expensive option (debit) or sold short the more expensive option (credit). And these can be done with either all calls or all puts.

But my favorite version of the vertical spread is a Bull Call Spread, where I purchase an at- or slightly out-the-money call and sell a further out-of-the-money call against it to lower my net purchase price.

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July last year to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.

This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.

(While on vacation until Oct 26th, I’m going to be sharing some anecdotes on my favorite trading strategies: why I use them, when, and how I manage them once they are on.)

Ok, so perhaps there's some recency bias here as the most recent bullish Risk Reversals I've put on have worked. Really though, all that has done is remind me that I should probably do more of these trades.

In a nutshell, a bullish Risk Reversal is a trade where we short naked puts and use those proceeds to pay for long calls. That's right, the market pays me to get long!

The trade is put on for a small net credit (ideally), and the short term goal is to ride an increase in the value of the calls which will allow us to sell a portion of them and use those proceeds to buy-to-close all the naked short puts. This then leaves us long the remaining portion of our calls for free! The calls could eventually reverse on us and go to zero, but we'll still keep the credit we received when we originally put the trade on (plus whatever credit we may have gained when we sold some calls to close all the puts). This is a great situation to be in!

(While on vacation until Oct 26th, I’m going to be sharing some anecdotes on my favorite trading strategies: why I use them, when, and how I manage them once they are on.)

The majority of trades we do here with All Star Options tend to be directional in nature. And why not? We're leveraging best-in-class technical analysis to give us an uncommon edge to participate in emerging and/or continuing trends. And if we know anything as Traders, we know that if we have an edge, we should attempt to execute against that edge as often as possible.

Meanwhile, I recognize there is an entire cottage industry around "selling options premium" and for good reason -- it works! That doesn't mean it always works nor does it mean it's easy. I just don't like to make it my only thing.

That said, one of my favorite strategies is to sell premium via Short Strangles.

(While on vacation until Oct 26th, I'm going to be sharing you some anecdotes on my favorite trading strategies: why I use them, when, and how I manage them once they are on.)

Here's the thing about options trading: you can make it as complicated as your heart's content. And there are plenty of incredibly smart practitioners out there who run amazingly complex strategies involving all kinds of volatility and statistical arbitrage.

They analyze 3D volatility surface graphs, use lesser understood greeks, and interpret things like "volatility smile" and dispersion.

If that works for you, great! I always say: if it works, do more of it!

But another beautiful thing about options trading is that there are many different ways to pull profits out of the market, and most of them aren't as complicated as they may sound -- even if the strategies have exotic sounding names like "iron condor" or "broken-wing butterfly."

And my absolute favorite options strategy isn't even really a strategy at all -- it's simply buying long calls when I'm bullish!

Shame on me for using the word "Hope" in the headline for this post, but I cannot resist a good pun ;)

We've got a play here in an old school Aerospace & Defense company that is on the verge of making new all-time highs. And it just so happens it's approaching the magical $100 a share price point that often tends to act as a price magnet. We call this the hundred-dolla-roll!

One thing the team and I have observed during recent market volatility is how well big banks have held up. Yes, they've pulled back like everybody else. But their relative strength remained in tact, and most charts in the sector held above significant support levels. In other words, the big picture is still pointing to higher prices.

So with that being the world we're living in right now, its time to place a bullish bet on a name everyone loves to hate.

The short puts we entered on $SPY on Monday hit our profit target today and we are out. Profit target hit in under 4 trading days. We’ll take it!

Meanwhile, the $FCX Bullish Risk Reversal we entered yesterday has quickly moved in our direction.

I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I’m going to take this opportunity to remove the risk from the trade.

For details on the trade, you can review it here. In short, we sold naked short puts to pay for the cost of our long calls. Thanks to today’s move, we’re able to sell some of our calls to pay for closing our entire naked short puts position. And we did that today… 

During today's internal Analyst Call, JC asked me what I was looking at for a trade today.

I mentioned I hadn't fully fleshed it out yet, but whatever I did would likely involve selling premium. With the $VIX hovering around 24 at the time, it felt like the edge was on the side of the premium sellers.

At this point, Steve Strazza piped in that he liked Freeport McMoran $FCX as a likely candidate for a bounce here. And then JC got excited about the idea of a bullish Risk Reversal spread to express this idea.

Selling elevated puts premium to offset the cost of a long call position? Yes... I liked the sound of that.