Nifty Auto has been on our radar for quite some time now. When Nifty50 was under short term pressure, Nifty Auto was one of the sectors that stood out as a strong performer.

With the ensuing move in the Auto stocks, we thought of doing a deep dive into this sector to see if we could find some actionable setups.

The Auto sector has closed comfortably above the resistance level of 10,400 effectively absorbing overhead supply at these levels. In the weeks and months ahead, this sector could make a dash towards the level of 12,110. The strong bullish momentum regime indicated by RSI alludes to the same view.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

Relatively speaking, Nifty Auto has broken out of its resistance zone and is ready for the next leg of the rally.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ending February 5, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.

In this column, we 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.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers… there is a lot of overlap.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

Marijuana stocks have been smoking hot over the trailing quarter, with the Alternative Harvest Marijuana ETF $MJ more than doubling since the election on November 3rd.

Considering this new leadership role over the near-term, today we're going to do a follow-up on our last deep dive into the space, which we published last fall.

Back then, we were simply looking for a bottom and mean reversion move higher, which we got... Now, with the industry making new highs, we want to see how things are looking on both an absolute and relative basis.

And as always, we'll check in on some of our past trades in the space and highlight today's strongest stocks, along with trade setups skewed in our favor that we want to use to express our bullish thesis.

Before we get into the weeds, let’s start at the industry level with the Alternative Harvest ETF (MJ).

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

In a post last month JC discussed the recent strength in Commodities and posed the following question...

If the CRB Index is above its 2016 lows and Crude Oil is above all those former lows from the past decade, how can we be bearish commodities?

Over the last few quarters, we've seen more and more intermarket relationships make a significant shift in favor of risk-assets.

Many are showing early signs of a structural reversal and others simply accelerating in the direction of their underlying trend.

There is a big difference between those who follow the market on a daily basis and those who take a quick glance at it once in a while. One category tracks moves for short term trades and the other looks out for long term investments.

What catches the attention of both these categories simultaneously though?

When the top two gainers of the day in Nifty50 go by the ticker names of SBIN and ITC.

This is not a frequent phenomenon and hence attracts more eyeballs upon occurrence.

Read on to know more.

SBI and ITC are like the elephants of the jungle - they move when they have to but stay under the radar for the most part. These are evergreen names that have the good fortune of being held in high standards in the eyes of the market, regardless of market conditions.

Ask around for long term investment tips, and all analysts big and small manage to throw these two names in the mix pretty often.

But why are we focusing on these names?

Has anything changed? Maybe.

Are we observing something new in the price action? Maybe.

Investors are so scared. They don't want to get burned. They've missed out on one of the greatest stock market rallies in history. They think it's too late for them to be buying stocks.

Here's the thing. I think we've barely even gotten started. This is the beginning, not the end.

Last week the Volatility Index saw its highest reading ever with the S&P500 within 5% of new all-time highs.

When people buy insurance at a faster rate than ever before, does that normally happen just before everyone is thankful they had that insurance? Or does that traditionally occur just after the disaster when it's not necessary anymore?

How funny is it that Saturday Night Live mentioned that the stock market is not working on 3 separate skits in the same episode last weekend?

Hilarious.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

They say the Bond Market is where the smart money is. Maybe it is. I have no idea.

What I do know is that it's where a lot of the smart information is.

Due to the diversity among credit instruments, there is a swath of unique data that we can use not just for Bond prices and Interest Rates but also to glean insight into other asset classes.

I'm talking about things like TIPS for inflation expectations and Emerging Market or High Yield Bonds to analyze risk-appetite for other assets such as the stock market.

Alpha has been in Equities and risk-assets for a while now. As such, we haven't needed to discuss bonds from a portfolio perspective... but that doesn't mean we aren't paying close attention to these assets.

The Bond Market is overflowing with information. We'd be foolish to neglect it.

Nifty 50 witnessed a strong move of 4.74% on Monday as the index bounced back from lows to close near the high of the day. Does this change the way we look at the short-term trend in the market?

Read on to know more.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different 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.

As we discussed in our latest report, bears are running out of any substantial fuel to support their position.

And despite the arrival of some long-awaited selling pressure last week, that absolutely remains the case.

In case you didn't see my Saturday morning note, it seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people.

You see, somewhere along the way, people ignorant to reality just assumed that if we did a better job of educating investors, then it will prevent them from making reckless decisions in the stock market.

It's so adorable to believe that.

I mean, you can tell yourself it's all rainbows and butterflies, if you want to. You have that right.

But it's complete nonsense. The truth of the matter is that it's an ugly world out there. Grow up.

You can try to help these people all you want. It's not going to matter. That's just not how humans work.

I reached out to a colleague who's much better on the science side of this, and here's what he had to say,

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist.

We've already had some great trades from this universe and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.

In light of this week's events, I hope it’s become more clear than ever to you that it is MUCH MORE important for traders & investors to focus on the behavior of markets themselves, instead of the goods and services in which the market deals. 

Technical Analysis represents the former, while "fundamental analysis", we're told, represents the latter. 

I came to this revelation in 2005 when my $MECA completely collapsed because some activist hedge fund manager wasn’t able to accomplish the things he said he would or that we were betting on him doing.

I lost like 70-80% or something like that. Plus, you have to include all the opportunity cost in me not owning the other things, considering it was an epic bull market and I was sitting there buying this p.o.s. $4 horsetrack in Baltimore 

You live and learn right?

Now you know part of the reason why I am the way I am.