Last week, something magical happened.

Something that hasn't happened in a long time!

ITC was up by 6.83%.

If you've invested in this stock, then you know that such a move in ITC is not that common. And more often than not, the follow-through move is generally absent.

But what do we have this week?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Last night we held our September 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

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.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades. What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind… and they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think the stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended September 17, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with our "Minor Leaguers" column.

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.

Watch this video for a "behind the scenes" look at our process.

Whether we...

This week we’re looking at a long setup in the Energy sector. Nifty Energy broke out above its overhead resistance. While this stock has been an absolute outperformer, the sector-specific breakout can only add more strength to the existing move.

Let's take a look at this stock.

Nifty 50 has been making new highs, moving past the early 2021 high in May and continuing to rise further. That's well and good. But if these new highs aren't coming through in Banks and Financials, then that's an issue.

Financial stocks make up 37.58% of Nifty 50. So it's safe to say that Nifty50 can't get very far for too long without the cooperation of Bank Nifty and Financial Services.

Every year in the Spring we hear about "Sell in May and Go Away".

And this year that would have worked out well for you. That's when the NYSE Advance-Decline line peaked. That's when the NYSE stocks really began their drawdowns. That's when the new 52-week high list peaked on the NYSE.

It's when all the Cyclicals stopped going up:

But this seasonally weak period is coming to an end soon.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Risk assets have been getting hit for the past two weeks. Stocks have been under pressure, and commodities have been struggling.

Meanwhile, we never saw any real follow-through lower in the Dollar, as DXY has bounced right back to the upper bounds of its year-to-date range.

But, as usual, we continue to see pockets of strength in the commodities complex.

Last week, we wrote about the resilience from base metals, such as Steel, Nickel, and Aluminum.

More recently, we're seeing relative strength from the Energy complex. That's what we're going to talk about today...

Energy is actually the only sector that's positive over the trailing two weeks. And Energy futures haven't been looking too shabby, either.

Here's a bubble chart of all of our commodity subgroup indexes with their one-month return along the x-axis:...

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

In today's post, we’re going to do an update on some of our favorite and most essential intermarket indicators. We’ve also updated our risk checklist so we can discuss the changes that have occurred over the past week or so.

Are market participants embracing more or less risk these days? 

We’ll get there.

We've been obnoxious about our theme that this remains a messy environment for stocks, which is nothing but classic "year two" bull market behavior.

But guess what: That’s just what it is right now. You have to play the cards you’re dealt, and right now they’re not the best. This is particularly true for trend-followers like ourselves.

Let’s talk about why.

Our custom “Risk-On” and “Risk-Off” indexes have been a perfect illustration of the 2021 market environment.

This is what a hot mess looks like… and it’s true for both custom indexes as well as the ratio of the two!

These charts...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza 

Welcome to our latest RPP Report, where we publish return tables for various asset classes and categories, along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

We consider this our weekly state of the union address, as we break down and reiterate both our tactical and structural outlook on various asset classes and discuss the most important themes and developments currently playing out in markets all around the world.

In our RPP Report from the end of August, we discussed how the weakest areas were registering failed breakdowns and digging in at support.

In our most recent report, we focused on how the strongest areas were making fresh record highs. Things were looking up for the bulls... but that changed once again.

We've talked about how it's been a back and...

We live in a world where everything is connected. We have access to the globe as a whole, be that for information, goods, or services.

This is the theme we want to touch upon today. In the post-pandemic era, our definitions of normal have changed several times. Consumer patterns have changed drastically with every version of normal. So why is it that we're discussing this today?

The cost of transportation of goods has skyrocketed, thanks to a variety of reasons. A direct impact of this, of course, would be on the constituents of this unique group.

So we thought this would be a good time to analyse this space and see if there's anything worth looking into here.

At All Star Charts, we enjoy making custom indices and looking out for developing patterns in all the sectors (grouped or ungrouped). We're happy to put together a family of stocks that belong to the same category and study the impact or trend of that particular index. We're doing just that!

Here we have the ASC equal-weighted Shipping and Logistics Index. As clear as this chart can be, it's trading at an all-time high. This has come on the back of a close to three-year base breakout...