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 March 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.
I've been incredibly fortunate to travel and learn from other cultures over the years. The tools and strategies I've picked up during my experiences in Singapore, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, Taipei, Dublin and many other cities around the world have really helped shape the way I approach markets.
After so many conversations with smart folks, from all kinds of different backgrounds, for so many years, it makes it almost impossible not to learn a few tricks along the way.
Today I want to share on of my favorite gauges of risk appetite:
Indian Small-caps vs Indian Large-caps.
This is the one we want to watch, more specifically the NIFTY Smallcap 100 Index relative to the NIFTY 50 index. The latter represents 50 of the largest Indian companies on the National Stock Exchange.
It's the ratio between the two that we want to focus on:
Oh wait, not that kind of platinum. We're talking about the metal. The guys on the ASC team are starting to get pretty geeked out about the metals space --- with good reason. Prices. Are. Breaking. Out. Sometimes it's just this simple.
What we do here is take a chart that's captured our attention and remove the x/y-axes as well as any other other labels that'd help identify it. This chart can be any security of any asset of any timeframe - on absolute or relative basis.
Maybe it's a ratio, a custom index, or maybe 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 it 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?
Key takeaway: Optimism remains elevated when looking at investor positioning (equity ETFs have seen a quarter trillion dollars of inflows since the end of Q3) and demand for call options (up 60%+ over the past year). But sentiment concerns become more acute (and stocks more vulnerable) when optimism shows evidence of meaningfully unwinding. This week’s featured sentiment chart (ratio between HYG and LQD) suggests that rather than pushing back from the buffet and beginning to tighten their belts, investors continue to have a robust risk appetite. That doesn’t preclude an uptick in market volatility, but it reduces the risk of sustained weakness at this point.
Sentiment Chart of the Week: HYG/LQD Ratio and S&P 500
Look at last year, for example. By the time the S&P500 finally put in its high in February, everything else had already been falling apart. Small-caps, Mid-caps, Micro-caps, Financials, Transportation, Emerging Markets, New Highs list, Advance-Decline Line, the Value Line Index and S&Ps relative to its alternatives had all been pointing to stocks falling.
There was more data early last year suggesting to be completely out of stocks, and in bonds instead, than before any other crash in stock market history. We discussed this last week.
But even if you ignored all of those factors. And you just looked credit, you would have seen Treasuries significantly outperforming the rest of the bond market. Credit told you:
Welcomeback to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ending February 19, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.
In this column, we 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.
Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers… there is a lot of overlap.
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance 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.
Every major asset class on Earth continues to illustrate risk-taking behavior on the part of market participants.
Yields, Oil, Equities, Base Metals, the Australian Dollar -- there's an overwhelming amount of new highs in offensive areas of the market right now. The weight of the evidence continues to suggest that we want to bebuyers, not sellers, of stocks.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Ian Culley @ianculley
We just revised and updated our Commodities chartbook and there probably couldn't have been a better time as we believe we've just entered the early innings of a new Commodities Supercycle.
As we reviewed each passing chart our bullish thesis on commodities was reinforced as the same overarching theme became clearer and clearer... Everything seems to be trending higher!
With a slew of massive bases, bullish breakouts, and major trend reversals, this once left-for-dead asset class is now demanding investors' attention.
Are Energy and Financial stocks about to lead the market?
Cyclical groups are catching all the right tailwinds in this environment.
Crude Oil and Yields are pressing to new 52-week highs as investors continue to favor more economically-sensitive stocks and commodities in general. This is a bullish development and supports higher prices for some of the most beaten-down risk assets... even Financials and Energy.
