From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Commodities are on the rocks.

Our Equal-Weight 33 Commodity Index is printing fresh two-year lows. Crude oil is hanging around the lower bounds of a multi-month consolidation. And Dr. Copper is loitering below former support.

This isn’t bull market behavior.

But just as the stock market is a market of stocks, the commodity market is a market of, well, a diverse set of commodities.  

So, while I don’t want to buy many high-profile procyclical contracts – and certainly not the commodity indexes – I do like the more obscure areas showing strength…

Areas such as uranium!

I outlined my case for uranium stocks at the start of the year. It was pretty simple: If gold and copper are printing fresh highs, peripheral areas likely enjoy a bid. That includes uranium.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

US interest rates have churned within a tight range for months. 

Remember: Sideways is a trend. 

While intermarket evidence suggests a breakdown in yields, they simply refuse to roll over.

It makes perfect sense when we zoom out…

Rates are in a well-defined structural uptrend!

Check out the US 30-year Treasury yield overlaid with live cattle futures:

They look almost identical as both exhibit the classic base-on-base formation – one upside resolution followed by another.

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 June 5th @ 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

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as "a market of stocks."

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions. But there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as The Hall of Famers, The Minor Leaguers, and The 2 to 100 Club.

We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports.

Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to The Short Report.

My spidey senses are beginning to tingle with speculative fervor.

What we're seeing in the AI space as well as in the comeback in cryptocurrencies as of late has me thinking speculative players are soon to begin widening their net to capture alpha.

And some of these highly shorted equities with crypto exposure could be extremely ripe for short squeezes.

High on this list is Marathon Digital Holdings $MARA. It currently has in the neighborhood of 40% of its outstanding shares held in short positions. That is some major fuel for a short-covering rally if this stock starts ripping.

Here are a bunch of pictures illuminating why we think $MARA might be set up for a run higher. First up, the $MARA chart:

This is the big question for me right now. Do we get rotation into the sectors that led this market off the lows last June?

We'll be discussing it on our NEW Morning Show today. Make sure to catch us LIVE from 830AM - 10AM ET using this link.

First, here's what I mean.

Check out these 3 Index Funds that have been underperforming this year. Financials and Small-caps flirting with last summers lows, and I threw Industrials in there too as a representation of the more Value areas of the market:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended May 26, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with The Minor Leaguers.

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.

It's not going to be finished in my lifetime or in yours or my kids' or grandkids'. That's not the point. The point is to get it started.

~ Korczak Ziolkowski

Last weekend, I took a little six-hour road trip to South Dakota to spend a full day hiking in Badlands National Park. It was amazing. The landscape is stunning and challenging to describe. It’s not quite desert. It’s not quite grassland. It’s not quite mountainous. It’s remote. Some have likened it to a moonscape. But even that doesn’t quite capture it.

You just have to go and experience it for yourself. Trust me – it’s worth it.

I also took advantage of my proximity to Mt. Rushmore to arrive at 7 a.m. the next day. I was one of the only people in the park and was lucky to have Mt. Rushmore to myself for the better part of an hour.

As amazing as Mt. Rushmore is, being there alone on a bright, sunny morning – just me, the birds, and a cup of coffee – was truly surreal. If you ever get a chance to visit the Mt. Rushmore monument, it’s worth getting there early ahead of the crowds.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

"Buy stocks if the US Dollar Index $DXY trades below 105!"

Simple and straightforward. That was our roadmap back in early March.

Now, almost three months later, the dollar is putting that strategy to the test as it approaches 105 from below.

That multi-month consolidation with “continuation pattern” written all over it never continued lower.

Instead, the dollar index has chopped sideways within a tight range for almost six months. And the evidence is beginning to support a possible upside resolution…

The lack of broad US dollar weakness caught my attention back in April. 

Our G-10 currency index and US dollar advance-decline line were printing potential higher lows, while DXY was on the verge of undercutting pivot lows from earlier in the year. The divergence suggested burgeoning USD strength.

Interestingly, DXY has gained roughly 3.5% since.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

All-time highs remain out of reach for gold bugs.

But not all is lost. In fact, I still see constructive consolidations on longer time frames. 

It’s messy. But I’m impressed with gold's and silver’s resilience as they twist and bend beneath supply.

But how low can they go before they break…

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

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.

You're hearing a lot these days about weakening market breadth.

But if you've noticed, those lies are only coming from journalists and other types of people with no formal training or experience in technical analysis.

That's like me pretending to be an expert in chess because I watched some people playing this one time in Washington Square Park.

If you think that the Equally-weighted S&P500 underperforming is evidence of deteriorating market breadth, you fall into this category of the misinformed and confused.

It's not a market breadth thing. It's simply a sector rotation thing.