This is the video recording of our June 3, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood” column for the week ended May 28, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off 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.

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

The US Dollar remains at crucial inflection points versus both emerging and developed currencies.

In last week’s note, we pointed out the critical 19 level in the WisdomTree Emerging Currency Fund $CEW, along with the numerous tests of support in our custom USD vs. BRICS Currency Index.

Not only is the USD looking increasingly vulnerable against emerging and developed currencies, but we’re now starting to see some of the major Dollar crosses break down or resolve lower.

In many cases, these moves are confirming long-term reversal patterns with USD/CAD. For example, the Dollar just broke to fresh multi-year lows relative to the Canadian Dollar.

We reviewed the chart in this column a few weeks back, highlighting the possibility of an impending double top. 

Well, here’s what it looks like now:

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Thursday June 3rd @ 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 Thursday evening:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

This is one of our favorite bottoms-up scans: Follow The Flow. In this note, what we do is simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity - either bullish or bearish... but NOT both.

What we mean by this is that we have options experts, both internally and through our partnerships with TheTradeXchange, whereby we do all the digging through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients, in order to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.

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

Here we are on Friday, and it's been yet another eventful week for the commodity complex.

Steel futures ripped higher. Corn was limit-up on Thursday. Lumber continues to digest its gains with the same volatile fashion it made them in, giving back another 10% on the week.

And then of course there's Dr. Copper which appears to have successfully defended former resistance turned support at its all-time highs from 2011. It's impossible to overstate the importance of how this massive base in Copper resolves.

Bulls definitely don't want this move to evolve into a failed breakout... The 4.50-4.60 zone is the line in the sand. 

As for Energy Markets... Crude Oil making its highest daily close since October 2018 might be the biggest development of all.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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 Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

We’ve recently pointed out the possible double tops in the Dollar index and the USD/CAD, along with our overall outlook for further weakness from king dollar.

But can we find other areas of the market that could provide further insight into the US Dollar’s direction?

After all, many market participants are fixated on the direction of the US Dollar right now as it approaches its key mutlti-year lows.

Why does the Dollar matter so much to investors?

Firs of all, USD and risk assets have had a very strong negative correlation over the last several years. The USD Index bottomed in early 2018 as stock markets around the world peaked. Conversely, the dollar topped during the Covid sell-off when stocks bottomed out at their March 2020 lows.

To gain a clearer picture of the USD, we need to go beyond the Dollar Index and developed currencies.

This is the video recording of the May 2021 Conference Call.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

We've already had some great trades come out of this Small-Cap focused column since we launched it late last year and began rotating it with our flagship bottoms-up scan, "Under The Hood."

To make the cut for our Minor Leagues list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. After applying price and liquidity filters, we simply sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus on the best players.

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

Gold has been one of the last places we have wanted to put our money over the past eight months, second only to Bonds.

Other areas of the commodities space, like Base Metals, Energy, and Ags, along with risk assets in general have experienced an explosive rally. While Precious Metals have gone nowhere. But are we starting to see signs that this could be changing?

Last week we pointed out that Lumber had reached our target and could be due for a pullback. And we’re seeing that play out.

The previous week we noted that other procyclical commodities within the Base Metals group were also reaching our targets and testing areas of potential resistance. And like Lumber and so many other risk-assets, they remain trapped below key levels of overhead supply.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

As the market has become increasingly mixed, it's time to switch up our strategy a bit.

As we outlined in our post yesterday, for the first time in about a year, we are shorting stocks.

But this statement requires an asterisk...

We are shorting some stocks. And at the same time, we're still buying the leaders as plenty of stocks continue to show impressive strength -- particularly those with cyclical or value characteristics. That's where we're focusing for long ideas.

As for shorts, it's all growth. That is where the weakness is. We're not only seeing deterioration and relative weakness at the index level for growth stocks -- the internals are also deteriorating beneath the surface.

This is simply a tale of two markets. As growth-heavy averages like the Nasdaq roll over, the leadership areas are registering bullish breadth thrusts and carrying on higher like business as usual.