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

Treasury Bonds have collapsed in recent months as interest rates have rallied to their highest levels in years.

And it’s not just treasuries, the trend is lower for corporate bonds as well.

While fixed income markets have experienced steady selling pressure since 2021, downside volatility has accelerated in recent months. Following the worst Q1 returns in decades, bonds have continued to plunge to kick off the 2nd quarter.

The best way for us to take advantage of this is to keep finding clean setups to short.

Today, we will outline a couple of shorts in high-yield debt and discuss what a sustained downtrend for these bonds could mean for the broader market.

First up is the High-Yield Corporate Bond ETF $HYG:

These are the registration details for our live mid-month conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

Our next Live Call will be held on Monday April 18th at 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Monday night:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!

One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega-cap status (over $200B).

Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.

But the scan doesn't just end there.

We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley

The turmoil in equity markets has stolen all the attention since last year. But stocks aren't the only asset class that's a mess. We're getting the same kind of mixed signals and sloppy price action from forex markets.

While stocks remain under pressure, currencies have been throwing head fakes and dishing out whipsaws all year long. The AUD/USD broke to fresh nine-month highs just last week only to reverse 200 pips by Friday’s close.

We're seeing this type of action from currencies all over the world. It’s hard to trust a breakout these days. As frustrating as these failed moves may be, there are some clean chart patterns and favorable setups shaping up right now.

One area where the trend is very clear is the Japanese yen. Just about anything priced in Yen has been rallying recently as the currency continues to collapse.

Today, we’re going to highlight the massive base in the USD/JPY.

Lets’ dive in.

Here’s the weekly chart of the USD/JPY cross:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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.

The way we did this is simple…

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

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.

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

You can find the whole list of trades here.

Below you'll find the full PDF of this week's charts:

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 $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

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, which you can check out here.

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 Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley  

Following some explosive moves earlier in the year, the past few weeks have been full of sideways action for commodities.

Energy contracts are correcting. Copper continues to consolidate. And gold is chopping around in the middle of its multi-year range.

But when it comes to commodities, there’s always an opportunity right around the corner. 

Last week, we pointed out the burgeoning strength in natural gas futures despite the corrective action in crude oil and its derivatives.

Today, we’re going to outline a few developing setups with a focus on ags.

Let’s dive in!

First up are corn futures:

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

Benchmark yields have moved in a vertical line higher since the beginning of March. This isn't just the case in the US; we're seeing similar action all across the globe.

But as rates rally higher and higher, more and more classic intermarket relationships are failing to confirm the move.

Yes, commodities and commodity-related stocks remain resilient, and bonds are an absolute dumpster fire.

Most other assets we would expect to do well in a rising rate environment simply aren’t. This is especially true for the banks!

Meanwhile, those groups that we'd expect to underperform in this kind of environment, such as utilities and other defensive stocks, are actually outperforming.

All of this speaks to risk-aversion, not risk-seeking behavior.

We discussed this at length on Tuesday night (re-watch here).

Large-cap Healthcare.

And there's an element of defense to it as well. Let's not get it twisted:

You see how large-cap healthcare does when stocks are under pressure?

Pretty good huh?

Look at the size of some of these bases:

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.