From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
We’ve been pounding the table about rising rates for over a month now.
It’s hard not to when they're rising across the curve in both the US and abroad. Cyclical and value-oriented assets have increased in tandem, as energy and financials have become leadership groups.
We continue to see countries with heavy exposure to financials emerging from multi-decade bases. Just last month, the Euro Stoxx 600 made new all-time closing highs, while Italian equities reached their highest levels in 13 years.
But when we look further out on the curve, the long end hasn’t been keeping pace with shorter duration yields in recent weeks.
Taking a look at the 30-year beside the 10- and 5-year yields tells this story best.
The January Effect posits that financial markets experience a seasonal anomaly in the beginning of each year whereby stock prices tend to rise more than in any other month.
But this bullish period extends beyond a single month. In fact, our data show that buyers come out in full force starting in the late fall/early winter.
According to historic seasonal trends, the best time of the year for the stock market is from November to January. Smaller stocks are known to outperform during this period.
And if we’re focusing on small-caps, November is by far the single best month. So it should come as no surprise that the Russell 2000 and S&P Mid-Cap 400 are breaking out to fresh all-time highs this week. They did the same thing last November. In fact, November of 2020 was the best month ever for these small- and mid-cap indexes.
Let’s dive in and discuss some of the seasonal tailwinds supporting these new highs from SMIDs.
Ok, so technically Microstrategy $MSTR is not a bitcoin ETF.
But for those of you paying attention to this space, you know that the CEO Michael Saylor has gotten very long and very loud about his company investing significant portions of its operating capital in Bitcoin. And because of this, the share price of $MSTR stock has since become highly correlated to the price action of Bitcoin.
We were chatting about it this morning and the one thing the team all agreed on is 10 years from now, Saylor is either going to go down as the Greatest Fool in History, or, The Greatest Investing Genius in History. There's really no other outcomes here for him. And you know what? I say cheers to you, Michael Saylor! Way to put your cohones on the line for something you so passionately believe in. Your investors will either one day elevate you to Sainthood or sue you into oblivion. Godspeed.
We've got our popcorn ready and we'll be watching!
Anyway, all of the above makes for fun coffee table conversation. But we traders only care about the price action and how we can profit from it. So let's get right to it.
We held our November Monthly Strategy Session last night. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.
Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.
By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.
Let’s dive in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.
Energy futures are resolving higher from multi-year bases. Stocks are pressing to new highs all along the cap scale. And the more cyclical, value-oriented markets are catching a bid and becoming leadership groups again -- think financials and energy.
It appears everything is falling into place. But a few pieces are still missing…
For instance, you might assume the US dollar is under pressure as commodities and stocks outperform.
But it’s not.
In fact, the dollar made new 52-week highs not long ago and has since consolidated at the top of its range while riskier areas of the currency market have struggled to catch a bid.
We’ve highlighted the US Dollar Index and the mixed signals coming from developed currencies in recent posts.
Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended October 29, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off with our "Minor Leaguers" column.
What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.
We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names. There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: A list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.
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.
If you say 20% price appreciation it's probably because you watch too much basic cable.
Are a majority of stocks going higher or are a majority of stocks going lower?
That's how we determine bull and bear markets.
And by the way, individual stocks do NOT have bull and bear markets. The concept of a bull or bear market is a broad market description, not reserved for individual stocks.
If anyone ever tells you that an arbitrary 10% move is a "correction" and 20% is a bull/bear market, then you know they can't be trusted. It's that simple. Move on.
So if you're interested in the way markets actually work, as of earlier this month, when breadth improved, we proclaimed that the bull market was finally back, after the last one came to an end in February.
These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.
This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Monday November 1st @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.
