It’s impossible to ignore – investors are reaching for risk.
Biotech stocks are catching higher. Copper futures are working on their tenth up-day in a row. Even the Emerging Market HY Bond ETF $EMHY is breaking to 7-month highs as it completes a multi-month base.
And don’t forget about Silver! Gold’s crazy cousin has proven by far the best-performing asset since the US dollar peaked last fall. Strength among these market areas indicates a healthy risk appetite.
I can’t overlook these signs of a constructive bottoming process, especially considering the next chart…
Check out the Emerging Market Bond ETF $EMB relative to the US Treasuries ETF $IEF:
I got a lot of feedback on my last letter where I suggested active traders need to stop trading Covered Call spreads for tactical trades and instead do a simple Naked Puts trade.
Thank you to everyone who engaged.
Anyway, here’s one question [edited to the important parts] I got from a reader where I thought my answer might be instructive to more of you:
Hi Sean,
I read your information on naked puts. When I intend to buy a stock, I would like to sell a put. I just don't know how to go about it. I just don't know where the strike price would be. I understand that I would have to buy the stock at that price (whether it is better or worse than hoped).
If you could give me an example that would help.
Cheers!
This is a great question, but one without a clear-cut answer. Here was my response:
It's the weekly currency edition of What the FICC?
The US dollar index $DXY registered a "death cross" last week, confirming a bearish trend reversal.
But it's not the confirmation of the dollar downtrend that has my attention. It's what the signal suggests for stocks in the coming months and quarters.
As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!
One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn't just end there.
We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
I'm about to show you what a healthy chart off the bear market lows looks like. One of the beautiful things about this chart is it's not heavily reliant on any one company.
This is a sector ETF for a corner of the stock market we believe should continue to do well for the foreseeable future. There will be winners and losers within the sector, and we don't know which ones will ultimately be the leaders, so why not just trade 'em all?
Additionally, trading the sector ETF significantly lessens any earnings-related or product announcement or FDA-approval-driven gap risk.
"JC, how could you say we're already in the 8th Month of a new bull market???"
The things people call me over email or on twitter are not something I would repeat in front of my mother, or daughter, and certainly not in front of any of you guys.
But I'm a big boy. I spent a lot of time on trading floors, dugouts and locker rooms. I've heard way worse.
It is interesting, however, to observe the feedback I get from just some basic arithmetic.
This isn't like some random opinion I have about the economy, or Fed policy or earnings. This is just 3rd grade math.
Are more stocks going up? Are more stocks making new highs? Or are more stocks going down and making new lows?
Since June, the answer has been up and certainly not down.
Notice how the new lows list peaked in Q2. Even though some of the large-cap growth-heavy indexes made new lows later in the year, even for just a hot second, by that point there were almost no stocks left that were going down.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that I don’t use moving averages.
For starters, I don’t like the way they look.
They muddy the pristine waters of price. And if I can't pick up on the underlying trend by looking at price action, then god help me.
Regardless, I do my best to stay open-minded. Everyone has their own process. Mine works for me, but that doesn’t make it superior by any stretch.
So, when Grant @GrantHawkridge dropped a US Dollar Index $DXY moving average crossover study in our analyst Slack chat last weekend, I couldn’t resist.
It wasn’t because it highlighted the “death cross” (when a 50-day moving average falls below a longer-term 200-day average), which always stirs a great deal of excitement.
Nor was it what his study suggests for the dollar in the coming weeks and quarters.
Rather, it’s what it implies for US stocks.
Check out the chart of the DXY with a 50-day (blue line) and a 200-day simple moving average (red line):
Maybe you have some long-term holdings showing significant gains that you don’t want to pay taxes on. But you want to squeeze some additional income out of these positions because either you’re greedy (fine) or you want to practice responsible risk management (a better reason).
That’s fine. Go ahead and continue selling covered calls from your yacht. You do you.
This post is aimed at the rest of you knuckleheads who seem to think entering covered call trades as tactical short-term plays is a productive use of your time and capital.
