From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

We can’t ignore the resiliency in base metals. 

Despite the classic year-two chop, base metals have remained buoyant while many other risk assets have come under pressure. They’ve even gained ground during the recent bout of US dollar strength. 

And now we’re beginning to see signs of serious leadership emerge as Crude Oil consolidates its recent gains. The broad-based strength beneath the surface for this procyclical group of commodities has been undeniable. These risk-on metals have been the steadiest performers within the entire asset class for the better part of this year.

Once again this month, I’m going to share info on positions that were closed in the month of July. As a reminder, our exit plans are always laid out ahead of time in each trade idea we publish. In every case, the exits mentioned below were all in accordance with the plans as laid out.

As we head towards August expiration, we only have one open position remaining with expiring August options. But July was certainly a busy month for exits -- both profitable and not -- as a couple of market whipsaws shook the trees and knocked us out of a bunch of positions.

Positions with August options that need monitoring:

Initial Public Offerings are exactly that, the initial offering of shares to the investing public. That's the beginning of price history.

This is how it used to be in the old days anyway. Today, we regularly see companies going public so their investors can take profits on their early stage bets. There have usually been several rounds of money raising along the way.

The liquidity is to pay investors, and not necessarily just to raise cash to grow the company.

And that bothers some people. But not me. I don't really care.

I'm only here to try to make a few bucks off the whole thing.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge 

We’ve been super obnoxious about the deterioration in new highs we continue to see in the US.

But the major averages haven't been phased a bit. The S&P 500 and other large-cap indexes keep charging to new heights.

Yet when we look beneath the surface, we're hearing a different story… The vast majority of stocks have NOT been making new highs along with the averages. In fact, we’re beginning to see an expansion in new lows. 

This is a new development that's commanding our attention right now, mainly because these are the weakest conditions we’ve seen many of our breadth measures since last year. 

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 August 2nd @ 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.

Here are the details for Monday evening:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

We're going to flip the script a bit this week with our RPP Report. We typically don't publish a report during week's where we have a monthly conference call as JC covers our positioning and summarizes our key themes and views there.

But we didn't do one last week either because we had just published our Q3 Playbook which laid out our current position in a painfully detailed manner (it was 250 pages!).

Premium members: read it here if you haven't yet.

In today's post, we're simply going to recap our "Key Themes For The Current Quarter" and update clients on some major developments that have taken place in the past few weeks.

We've got some important things to cover so let's get right to it!

The question I keep seeing goes something like this: "Will all this weak breadth finally cause a correction in the market?"

But the right question to ask isn't whether or not a correction is going to start.

It should be: "How much longer will this correction go on?"

As markets have gotten choppy lately, I've been on the hunt for more bearish and neutral trades to help balance out my predominantly long portfolio.

In this week's Follow the Flow report, Steve Strazza teed up a nice candidate for some downside exposure. The beauty is, the Options Gods are lining it up such that we can affordably take an aggressively bearish position that will pay off nicely if it works, while limiting our risk if we're wrong.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

The current market environment demands that we adhere to our risk management protocols as strictly as ever.

It’s a mess out there!

And with each passing day, more and more signs point to these challenging conditions persisting.

There is one data point in particular that we believe is likely to remain a serious headwind for risk assets: continued strength from the US Dollar.

We’ve covered this theme in detail the past couple of months as USD has rebounded against just about every major currency we track.

As always, we will continue to monitor the dollar as it is a vital piece to the intermarket puzzle.

Put simply, when investors are seeking safety in the dollar, it’s usually happening in an environment where stocks are under pressure.

Last week, we highlighted the violation of a key pivot low in our G-10 Ex-US Currency Index.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

This is one of our favorite bottoms-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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended July 23, 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.