JC and I were chatting this morning about things we're seeing in the markets. The big thing we're observing is the breakout in financials. And a breakout in financials is rarely something one observes in a bear market, or a bull market that is in the process of "topping."
While it might be wise to wait for pullbacks in the financials space before entering any new trades there, we were able to take some risk off in a bullish calls trade in Morgan Stanley $MS we've been in since December 11.
But one stock that has JC's attention has been lulling investors to sleep over the past six months. And this is kind of ironic since one of their main product lines is Trojan -- which promotes anything but sleep ;)
Dividend aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to longer-term minded shareholders.
As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.
Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we're turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we’re curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for 5-9 years.
Introducing the Young Aristocrats. We like to say these are "stocks that pay you to make money". Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum & relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
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 in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
After several months of consolidation, the major indexes have set the foundation for another leg upward in line with their primary trends. We've been seeing many of them resolve higher in recent weeks.
We continue to see rotation into economically sensitive and cyclical assets - supporting our view that there is a strong appetite, not aversion, for risk.
And the FICC markets continue to confirm this bullish environment for stocks and risk assets.
Consumer Staples stocks are breaking out to new all-time highs. These are the stocks representing the companies whose services and products we as consumers would still buy regardless of how bad the economy might be. These stocks historically outperform by a lot when stocks in general are under pressure, which makes sense right?
I mean, no matter what, we're still going to brush our teeth and wash our dishes, drink beers and smoke cigarettes. Those are the "Consumer Staples": Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Philip Morris, etc.
When stocks are doing well, you'll see Staples underperforming, because money is less willing to pay up for those defensive less growthy stocks. I wrote about this here and how this plays into our approach in the current market environment.
Anyway, here are Staples breaking out to new highs, and key extension level:
I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to have regular conversations with many of the top Traders, Analysts, PMs and Financial Advisors in the world.
So many of these friends of mine had their best year ever. Some of my friends absolutely crushed 2020, which is not surprising given their prior success and the increased level of opportunities sparked from spikes in volatility earlier in the year.
So what was the common denominator among the ones who succeeded the most? (because I asked them all)
They told me, each in their own ways, that they shut off the news and just listened to the market. You see, the "news" is designed to be a distraction. The better they are at distracting you from what's actually important, the more their precious sponsors will pay them. That's how that works.
The "news" people are not here to help you. In fact, in many cases, it's actually a malicious effort to distract. They know what they're doing. And they're really good at it.
I got well about 6-7 years ago, when I finally turned it off for good. And I've never looked back.
Me, JC, Steve, and the rest of the All Star Charts team were casually chatting during our weekly strategy session and Steve asked me: "What was our biggest options winner this year?"
Without a doubt, our best options trade in 2020 was long Peloton $PTON. We entered long October 60 calls in $PTON on June 17 when it was trading below $52 per share. The stock then went on a rocketship ride and touched an all time high north of $139 per share on expiration day Oct 16th, which we rode all the way. It rarely happens that we hold a long calls position all the way into expiration day, but the last 3 weeks saw barely a downtick, so there was never any reason to hit the escape hatch.
As we further discussed this, it hit me and I remarked to the guys that "What's your biggest winner?" is a bit of an unfair question. I don't think 2020 was a good year because of a handful of big winners. They certainly helped, but the real reason why 2020 was so successful was because PROCESS was our big winner.
Oh man this was a lot of fun! Fahmy calls me up and says let's invite everyone to a zoom call and talk about markets and drink Champagne.
Obviously, I said I was in!
We had two questions we were asking,
1) What was the biggest lesson you learned in 2020, and 2) What's your best trade for the first half of 2021?
Next July, whoever ended up picking the best trade gets a donation from us to the charity of their choice, plus I hand select a bottle of champagne and will be sending it over to the winner.
This was a great conversation with a group of really smart people. I'd be taking some notes on this one. There's good stuff in here.
Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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.
Since June, we've seen so many different breadth thrusts in the Large-cap Indexes, Small-cap Indexes and even within specific sectors. They keep showing up.
So when you look back historically, these breadth thrusts tend to come near the beginning of strong uptrends, not near the end of them. Go back in history and you'll notice how consistent this is.
So today, I thought I'd share some thoughts from the peanut gallery regarding my comments about this being the beginning of a new bull market, and not the end of one.
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 January 4th @ 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.
