From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The smart money is snatching up Canadian dollars.

Last month, commercial hedgers extended their Canadian dollar exposure to their largest net-long historical position.

While positioning represents a condition – not a signal – we can only view the hedger's appetite for the loonie in one light…

Bullish!

Notice that extended commercial long positioning (the bright blue line in the lower pane) coincides with critical inflection points:

These market turns preceded extensive rallies in 2016, 2017, and 2020.

Before boarding the loonie’s next rip-roaring rally, price must provide a well-defined entry with a favorable risk-to-reward profile.

But the past two years of sideways action look more like a topping or bearish continuation pattern, not a bullish reversal:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

We've had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.

For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.

That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.

We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.

To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list now, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Investors are becoming restless.

Silver is dancing around a significant breakout level. And gold continues its sideways chop for the third straight month.

It’s certainly been a challenging time to hold precious metals trades – even for the most patient investors.

To kick off the third quarter, let’s utilize fresh monthly data to step back and review the primary trends for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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 $3T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Arista Networks and Crowdstrike.

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:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Our cotton and sugar trades are working. Coffee is raring to go.

And crude oil is pushing toward a solid first-half finish.

Beyond that, commodities are dribbling lower.

Let’s review an energy contract that broke out two months ago and has never looked back—Natty Gas!

Natural gas futures are carving out an eighteen-month base below last year’s high:

I outlined our bullish outlook in late April. Natty Gas ripped the following week, rallying more than a dollar in just six weeks.

Now, price is consolidating within a twenty-percent range (potential right shoulder):

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

While the market remains a mixed bag and participation is lacking, we're still seeing evidence of risk appetite.

How do we know?

The stocks that investors are betting against the most are making big moves... to the upside.

And we know just what to do in these environments.

We find the most heavily shorted stocks in our freshly squeezed universe. We wait for momentum to come into these names, and then we ride them higher with the squeeze.

We got new short data recently, so let's talk about how we're playing it.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions. When a stock is shorted, it means incremental buyers are waiting in the wings to close out their bearish bets.

We love this, as new buyers are the one true catalyst for higher prices.

When shorts are proven wrong, they become buyers of the stock. In many cases, this happens as momentum flows into these names and fuels massive short-covering rallies.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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 long-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 five to nine years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are "stocks that pay you to make money." Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and 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

We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.

However, when it comes to this one, it couldn’t be any simpler!

With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US stocks.

Welcome to The Junior Hall of Famers.

This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That’s good enough for us.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

Have you heard about the breakout in America's online marketplace?

Amazon is up 5% this week as it follows other mega-cap growth stocks to new record highs. Everyone is talking about it.

But there's more to this story.

Online retail is a burgeoning industry, offering investment opportunities in a variety of companies around the world.

These growth stocks provide some of the highest beta vehicles as they are direct plays on the consumer economy.

And Amazon doesn't dominate around the globe the way they do in America. There are other regional plays that offer investors exposure to higher growth markets outside the US.

With Amazon $AMZN making a decisive resolution to fresh all-time highs today, it is an opportune time to talk about the broader online retail space.

Let's dive in!

Following the path of other Magnificent Seven names, here's Amazon.com $AMZN surging to new all-time highs:

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.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Precious metals bulls are taking a stand.

It’s easy to overlook following Friday’s selling pressure.

But price is respecting critical support levels for gold, platinum, palladium, and even gold’s crazy cousin.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended June 21, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation 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.