From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Last Week, we held our November 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!

Last night was our LIVE Mid-Month Strategy Session. It was probably one of the most important Live Conference Calls we've ever held.

It's odd because we're in the middle of a raging bull market, but it feels that almost no one is participating in it.

Just look around. Over the past 18 months people have told me how crazy I am for buying stocks. But you know, it's been really rewarding buying stocks.

It's the selling of stocks that has generally not worked out very well for investors.

But what do we do now, as we enter the early stages of the most bullish time of the year?

This is the video recording of the November 2023 Mid-month Conference Call.

This is the best time of the year for stocks.

And stocks are doing very well.

In other words, perfectly normal market behavior.

In fact, this is exactly when Small-caps historically start to outperform their large-cap counterparts.

And sure enough, that's exactly what we're seeing.

Here's a great chart from Jeff Hirsch and Jay Kaeppel showing these seasonal tendencies:

This is the video recording of our November 1st Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

This is the video recording of the October 2023 Mid-month Conference Call.

This is the video recording of our October 3rd Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

This is the video recording of our September 5th Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

Is now the time to get long equities?

If you kept up with the headlines and what the sell side analysts have to say, you'd think it would be.

Fortunately we try to stay ahead of the curve around here.

Yesterday we discussed the recent sentiment shift among permabears, wall street analysts, hedge funds and financial media.

You can read that again here.

To add to that sentiment shift, here is the our internal sentiment composite which includes data from Individual Investors, Advisories, Active Investment Managers, Volatility and the Options Market.

As you can see last year saw some of the most pessimistic levels in history, giving us one of the greatest buying opportunities we've ever seen.

Today, Sentiment is at the opposite extreme:

This is the video recording of our August 2nd Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

Technical Analysis is the study of the behavior of the market and its participants.

So while identifying price trends is our ultimate goal, sentiment plays an important role in that process.

Prices don't move up or down because of "fundamentals" or "the economy". The price of assets move based on positioning.

When investors are all positioned one way, and are at a consensus, who's left to drive prices further in that direction?

Last summer we saw some of the most pessimistic sentiment towards stocks in history.

Some of that sentiment has started to shift a bit, like in the AAII and II polls. We're back somewhere towards the middle in those. You need, at least, some bulls to buy stocks to have a bull market.

But when it comes to Fund Managers, Cash is still their largest position, and they're most bearish on equities.