The Energy sector has had some interesting moves in both directions in 2020.

Sell off with everything else in March. Hard bounce with everything else in the Spring. Then a slowly accelerating slide into mid October where it caught another bounce.

But what's notable to me is that the down move which ended in October did not undercut the March lows, and the current recovery seems to be running out of steam below the June highs. Feels to me that Energy, and it's $XLE sector ETF is consolidating. 

JC published a bullish piece on Japan today. He's been pounding the table on the potential for a massive base breakout for some time. He's so exited about it, we even traveled to Tokyo last year to see what's going for ourselves!!

One of the names he mentioned in the post stood out to me and I'm willing to step in and take a position.

2008-2009 was a dark period for the banking industry. The "Financial Crisis" nearly brought the whole system to its knees. Stocks in household name banks became penny stocks (Citibank!), Warren Buffet had to rescue Goldman Sachs, and a few had to put themselves up for sale (Merrill Lynch), or even became extinct (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers).

For some long-term investors (and former employees in this sector), this is still a fresh wound.

But charts in this sector are starting to tell a different story.

Few things take the mind on a flight of fancy like the thought of interstellar space travel. Who hasn't taken a look at the night sky and wondered what's up there?

Richard Branson took a look and wondered the same thing. Only, he decided to try to make it happen. Enter: Virgin Galactic, a company looking to open up space for recreational travel.

Investors seem to be willing to bet along with Sir Branson that humanity with believe space travel is a worthwhile exploration. This chart here shows $SPCE on the verge of emerging from a 10-month base. And as JC often says: "The bigger the base, the higher in space!" And that couldn't me more appropriate than here.

One thing you'll read between the lines in nearly everything we do here at All Star Options and allstarcharts.com: We stick with winners. We ride trends. We get long relative strength and we get short relative weakness. We don't overcomplicate things. We don't need to be the Hero who shorts a parabolic stock at its zenith, or buys the oversold stock at its generational bottom. Those trades make for sexy stories, but that graveyard is a mile wide and 50 feet deep.

With this in mind, here's an undeniable leader that is setting up again:

As Steve Strazza was putting together the latest "2-to-100" report, he and I were chatting about his latest great stock idea. He is pretty excited about this one, and who am I to not join him?

Let's get right to it.

This is the video recording and slides from the All Star Options Monthly Conference Call: December 3, 2020.

The latest Under the Hood report is out, and as always, plenty of great ideas for me to sink my teeth into.

This week's report revealed a software name emerging from a pretty impressive base which has some pretty significant upside targets in it's sights.

As December gets under way, it’s time to review positions with December options that remain open (haven’t already hit profit targets or been stopped out).

Most trades I put on for All Star Options tend to have a minimum duration of 30 days (short premium plays) and often as long as 6-8 months (for long premium plays). As options approach expiration, greeks like theta and gamma start to become my enemy and whipsaw my P/L. Therefore, as options and spreads get into the expiration month, my best practice is to put each position on notice — it’s time to take action.

As it turns out, we only did five trades in total with December options. Currently, we only have two open positions with December options remaining on the books, and only one of them requires any action. The rest have already hit our profit targets or stop loss levels. In the scoreboard below I denote the date we exited each position.

Here’s the scoreboard:

We've been keeping tabs on a stock that we traded successfully earlier this fall. The stock hit our price objective, our spread hit our profit target, and we moved on.

Lo and behold, the stock consolidated around that last price target as we expected, and now after about a month of working through the weak hands, it appears Snap Inc $SNAP is ready to make another run.

Here's another idea from the semiconductor space. And why not? Semis are leading the way right now.

There's nothing wrong with playing "follow-the-leaders" in the investing world. We'd rather ride the wave than fight the current.

The race for a cure is on!

Interest in stocks with direct and indirect exposure to the "vaccine trade" is through the roof. And with this interest comes some wild price action in both directions.

Today's play is in one of those names, but we like it more for its chart action than anything else. (It's kinda what we do here) ;)