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

Check out our latest Mystery Chart!

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 of 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?

Whether you know it or not, we're all exposed to risk from the financials sector (think big banks, GE, etc).

And when I look across the positions in my portfolio, I have significant open exposure on the long side of the market.

This is top of mind for me right now, coming out of our weekly team call. The recent sloppy market action, with no real expansion of new highs, is opening the door -- if ever so slightly -- for the bull market doubts to creep in. We are certainly not making a "Top" call here by any means, but we are observing that the risks of a potential correction appear to be increasing.

So, while we don't need to get aggressive with short bets here, it might be prudent to start exploring some bearish setups and keep our eyes and minds open for opportunities to get tactically short in names and sectors that would likely lead on the downside if the broader markets were to stumble here. And we can do this without exposing our portfolio to too much risk, thanks to the existence of long exposure already on the books.

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

We’ve been pounding the table about the broad-based strength from the US Dollar since earlier this month. Due to the momentum of its recent move, we believe this rally could have legs beyond just the near-term... But we'll address that when the time comes.

For now, we're positioned to take advantage of this swift rebound from the Dollar through a handful of USD crosses currently offering favorable risk/rewards. 

Though the Dollar gave some of this month's gains back last week, our short-term outlook remains higher. As I write this, many G-10 currencies like the Euro, Pound, Aussie, and Canadian Dollar are all rolling over relative to USD. 

We’ll be revisiting this theme plenty as it plays out over the coming weeks to months.

But in the meantime let’s focus on a currency pair that’s bucking the trend, the US Dollar-Brazilian Real $USD/$BRL.

Here’s a weekly bar chart of USD/BRL:

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

I was taught early in my career to never fight Papa Dow.

You know what I used to do all the time early in my career? I would constantly be fighting Papa Dow.

"It's only 30 stocks", I would argue.

"It's a global market", is what I would say.

Guess what?

Never fight Papa Dow.

Thanks Ralph

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is the world's most important stock market index, followed by the Dow Jones Transportation Average.

Here's an old post about how the Dow is underrated.

Anyway, fast forward to today and we have the Dow Industrials hitting our upside objectives in early May:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

Welcome to our latest RPP Report, where we publish return tables for a variety of different 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've been pretty obnoxious about our position that markets are a total mess these days. But it is what it is, and we can only play the hand we're dealt. 

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 for the week ended June 27, 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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We have been adamant about our view that we are in a rather messy environment. For this reason, we've been approaching markets with caution for months now.

Up until earlier this year when risk assets began consolidating in sideways patterns, it had been nothing but blue skies and new highs.

When the weather report is sunny, the water is calm, and the sky is clear, we know the weight of the evidence is with the bulls and we can focus our attention on finding the best opportunities in the strongest areas as ways to express our thesis.

But that's just not where we find ourselves today. The current forecast is cloudy with a chance of rain. And it's already been overcast for months!

And when the outlook is murky, as it is now, we want to take a step back and really weigh the evidence that's in front of us. We need to stay up on incoming data points and monitor how markets react with so many charts currently at key levels of interest.

In this podcast episode I sit down with Ian McMillan to talk charts and answer the question: Why Technical Analysis?

Ian makes some good points about Financial Advisors who "buy and hold", that you can often find at the golf course. He's always striving to be the opposite of that.

When it comes to the market, we dive right in to talk market internals, major trends, Gold, Energy and Bitcoin.

Ian and I have known each other for years so it's always fun to catch up and see what's on his mind. Enjoy!

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

One thing that stood out to me this week was the relentless amount of mixed intermarket signals.

On one hand, we have Lumber Futures getting completely destroyed. When I've ignored Lumber in the past, it's been a mistake.

This is probably something we shouldn't ignore:

On the other hand, if things were about to get worse for the Stock market, then why are Consumer Staples and Utilities both making new relative lows?

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

As markets remain mixed we continue to see lackluster action from some US indexes even as some others make new highs.

Large-Caps recently charged back to fresh all-time highs, but the Small- and Mid-caps are still facing some serious overhead supply.

As always, we’re snooping around our market internals chartbook to see what’s really happening underneath the surface in these areas, and whether internals agree with the price action in these smaller market-cap indexes. And even more importantly, if they support, or disagree with the new highs in Large-Caps.

We'll also answer the question: "Just how bad is the recent deterioration in breadth in some of the weaker indexes?"

We have been getting fewer new highs for a while now, but after such extreme initiation thrusts this isn’t too unordinary, and nothing to cause huge concern.