From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge
In today's post, we’re going to do an update on some of our favorite and most essential intermarket indicators. We’ve also updated our risk checklist so we can discuss the changes that have occurred over the past week or so.
Are market participants embracing more or less risk these days?
We’ll get there.
We've been obnoxious about our theme that this remains a messy environment for stocks, which is nothing but classic "year two" bull market behavior.
But guess what: That’s just what it is right now. You have to play the cards you’re dealt, and right now they’re not the best. This is particularly true for trend-followers like ourselves.
Let’s talk about why.
Our custom “Risk-On” and “Risk-Off” indexes have been a perfect illustration of the 2021 market environment.
This is what a hot mess looks like… and it’s true for both custom indexes as well as the ratio of the two!
Welcome to our latest RPP Report, where we publish return tables for various asset classes and categories, along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
We consider this our weekly state of the union address, as we break down and reiterate both our tactical and structural outlook on various asset classes and discuss the most important themes and developments currently playing out in markets all around the world.
"We’re buying $CSCO January 70 calls for approximately 23 cents. These options are priced as a long shot and we’ll be treating it as such. I’m fully prepared to lose 100% of my capital on this trade if $CSCO doesn’t make the move we need. So I’ll be sizing my position accordingly.
But if it goes our way, we should get plenty of opportunity to take our original risk off the table along the way. My best practice is to sell half of my position when the value of the options have doubled. And I will do that in this case. Then I’ll hold the rest, looking for the big move.
If $CSCO gets to our 74 price target, those 70 strike calls will be worth at least $4.00 — probably more, depending on when that price is reached. $4.00 per contract would be 20x what we originally paid. YAHTZEE!"
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.
Key Takeaway: Sentiment is teetering on the edge of a complete unwind. Six months of choppy markets has taken its toll on optimism and now pessimism is starting to move higher. This week’s II data could just be a shot across the bow in terms of a more cautious stance from investors, especially if the struggles seen beneath the surface make their way to the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite. Volatility has started to pick up but there is plenty of room for price weakness to prompt fear and re-positioning on the part of investors. For stocks, the weakest part of the sentiment curve is after optimism peaks and as pessimism becomes more widespread.
What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.
This chart can be any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes, it’s an absolute price chart. Other times, it’s on a relative basis.
It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!
The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize the price behavior objectively.
While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…
So let us know what it is: Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?
This is not something we do often -- usually because these types of opportunities don't present themselves frequently. But we've identified an under-appreciated potential for a 20x gain on our invested capital if the markets cooperate.
Its the perfect storm of a megacap stock emerging from an long base, options flow showing people are starting to position for "something" and an ASC price target that doesn't appear to be priced in by the crowd.
Of course, part of the reason for the elevated options activity is due to an "Investor Day" event happening today, but the action still has been raising some attention.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
The US Dollar has been trapped in a sideways trading range for the trailing 12 months now. The primary trend is lower, and we continue to see near-term weakness from the DXY Index as well as most USD crosses.
Commodity-centric currencies have been some of the best performers versus the Dollar since early last year, although most of them have been correcting since Q1 or Q2, giving back a good deal of their earlier gains.
So, will we see a resurgence back to those risk-on pairs, or will they keep sliding lower against the Dollar?
Today, we’re going to focus specifically on the currencies of some of the largest oil-producing countries in the world.
This should give us information not just about currency markets, but also commodities and risk assets in general.
Let’s talk about it.
An easy way to aggregate and measure their performance as a group is by analyzing our Petrocurrency Index. It includes currencies like the Canadian Dollar $CAD, the Russian Ruble $RUB, and the Brazilian Real $BRL, among others.
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.
We've already had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it late last year and started rotating it with our flagship bottoms-up scan, "Under The Hood."
We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps….
For about a year now, we’ve focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B. That was fun, but we think it’s time we branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
The way we’re doing this is simple...
To make the cut for our new Minor Leaguers list, 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.
