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.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The increased selling pressure across grain markets might not be on your radar. 

But pay close attention: The soybean complex, corn, and wheat are edging toward their respective year-to-date lows as demand wanes. 

Even if you don’t trade these ag contracts, fresh multi-month lows – especially in wheat – carry broad implications for equities and cyclical assets. (Hint: It has to do with crude oil.) 

That’s why I’m on high alert for a potential breakdown in Chicago wheat…

Wheat has been in a strong downtrend since its March 2022 peak, entering a bearish momentum regime last summer.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

With earnings season underway, financials are making a statement this week.

The first few weeks of reporting are always heavy with banks and financial stocks. As these are the market laggards, we knew we would get some critical information from their earnings reactions.

While it hasn't been fireworks to the upside by any means, there also hasn't been much downside from these stocks.

It is never a bad thing if the bears can't take down the weakest stocks. That's what is going on right now.

Meanwhile, more and more bullish setups keep crossing our desk. It's all very constructive.

Let's talk about two we like right now.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Click here to check it out.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

I’m in the process of creating a formal “business plan” for one of my trading strategies.

In 2002, I went through an arduous experience of creating an operating agreement, disclosure documents, and strategy explainers to attract investors as I built a small commodities hedge fund from scratch. Ignorance was bliss.

It was a chore, but a worthwhile investment in my time and energy because I ultimately won the business and started the fund. Success!

Now I’m entertaining the idea of managing OPM (other people’s money) again, and I’m reminded of the rewards of this process.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

What caught my attention following the SVB collapse wasn’t the headlines so much as how the markets handled the news and the stress that followed.

It’s difficult to find the silver lining of one of the largest bank failures since the financial crisis. But I’m more of a glass-half-full kind of guy.

Despite the relentless barrage of negative headlines, it’s undeniable that risks have been contained, and the markets have weathered the storm – at least for now.

Investors ditched equities and ran to the safety of US Treasury bonds as the saga unfolded. It was like the good old days when stocks were risk assets, and bonds acted like – well, bonds!

Now that the dust has settled, I believe the renewed classic intermarket relationship between stocks and bonds and the familiar patterns of risk-on/risk-off behavior bodes well for the overall market.

Especially when you consider easing volatility…

Here’s an overlay chart of the Bond Volatility Index $MOVE and the S&P 500 Volatility Index $VIX:

The weakness in the US Dollar over the past couple of quarters comes as no surprise to us.

The journalists nailed it again.

What else is new?

But here's what really has surprised me.

If you would have told me in September that the Dollar would fall apart over the next 2 quarters, I would have told you that precious metals are likely doing well in that environment. I would have also said that Silver would outperform Gold during that period.

In this case I would have been absolutely right.

Great.

But what I would have also been confident about is foreign equities doing well in that weaker Dollar environment.

And while I would have also been correct in that guess, I would have definitely told you that it would be Emerging Markets outperforming, not Developed Markets.

And that would have been very wrong.

It's been the Developed Markets outside the U.S. that have been dominating the equities markets over the past couple of quarters. Look at the performance of these assets since the Dollar peaked:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Monday night we held our March Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each

Let’s get right into it!

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 Hall of Famers, 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.

For a swing trader like me, earnings season is always tough. I often find myself in a situation where my favorite setups have a looming earnings release on the nearby horizon, introducing binary risks that make me uncomfortable.

And this season is no different. All of my favorite setups right now are fraught with earnings risk.

But I've found one opportunity where a pending earnings release may actually benefit us, allowing us to get positioned at attractive prices for a post-earnings run.

Friday is April monthly options expiration day.

It used to be a big day. Back in the day (cue old person lecturing) we used to only have monthly options expirations. And because of this, the third Friday of every month tended to offer up some fireworks on the regular.

These days, daily expiring index options and weekly expiring stock options have kinda taken the starch out of the monthly happening. Boo.

Call me old fashioned (just don’t call me old!), but I still prefer to do my directional options trades – and most of my delta-neutral option spreads – in regular ol’ monthly expirations. And there seem to be plenty of traders out there like me because we still see the majority of the open interest in the monthlies.

I’m bringing this up because I’ve got some April long calls on the books that are still working for me (barely).

In bull markets you regularly see more and more stocks making new highs.

That's just a normal characteristic of this type of market environment.

Yesterday we saw a ton of stocks making new 52-week highs - names like Nvidia, AstraZeneca, Salesforce, Lockheed Martin, General Electric, Chipotle, Autozone, Motorola, Lennar and many others.

However, in aggregate we have yet to see that key breakout in breadth expansion in the new 52-week highs list.

The new lows list is non existent. It's been that way since the 4th quarter last year.

But where the new highs at?