Markets are a mess. They've been a mess. And this year is very different than last year.
Look at the Equally-weighted S&P500 and Nasdaq100.
While these are certainly good overall gauges for the health of the US Stock market, always, in this particular environment they are even more representative of what's going on out there.
Currency crisis or not, Tokyo is willing to defend the yen in the open market. It's proven this multiple times over the past three years, and today’s FOMC-related volatility will likely test its resolve.
Considering previous yen-buying interventions, the dollar, interest rates, and the dollar-yen pair could be headed lower in the coming months.
Before we dive into the yen, here's a quick update on the action in the euro and pound.
The euro retested its breakdown level from earlier this month, forming a bear flag:
A close below 1.06 completes the flag pattern and sets a rough downside objective of 1.0450.
I know I've already said it a lot over the past few months, but for those people in the back who may not be able to hear so well...
THIS YEAR IS NOT ANYTHING LIKE LAST YEAR.
The strategies that worked so well throughout 2023 are not the ones working this year.
Last year's leaders are some of the worst stocks in 2024.
The leaders in 2024, in many cases, were some of the worst sectors in 2023.
It's not bad or good. Better or worse. It's just different.
The better you get at adapting to the current environment, the fewer headaches you're going to have.
I'm 42 years old. I've been doing this for over 2 decades.
I have 3 kids.
Do you think I need more headaches at this point in my life? Or fewer?
And so that's why we've adapted our strategies to the current market, instead of trying to go to the beach in the winter, or wear a raincoat on a beautiful sunny day, like many investors like to do because they haven't bothered to check the weather.
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended April 26, 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.
In today's Flow Show, Steve Strazza laid out the case of how both the Nasdaq 100 and Chinese tech stocks (particularly Chinese internet) might be signaling an important rise in speculative appetite which could fuel the next bull run.
Of the names Steve shared, the one that made the most sense to me was JD.com $JD. Check out this chart: