From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Anyone can enter a trade. It’s easy. 

But before you step up to the line to place your bet, you must have a plan – a set of rules rooted in risk management to guide you through your trade.

There’s no way to enter and manage a trade if you don’t know where you’re right, where you’re wrong, and where you’re taking profits. Without a plan, your strategy and philosophical approach to the markets don’t matter. 

That brings us to the British pound.

Here’s a chart of the GBP/USD cross:

A few weeks ago, we outlined a short setup in the GBP/USD pair. The pound was breaking down to levels associated with the Brexit sell-off, and we wanted to ride that trend lower.

Around the same time, the EUR/USD reached parity, as the US Dollar Index $DXY hit its highest level since November 2002. "Long dollar, short everything else" was the trade.  

But now that the GBP/USD is back above our risk level around 1.2025, we can’t...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

It’s been over a month since the S&P 500 made a new year-to-date low and market volatility has cooled somewhat. After averaging a 1% move (in either direction) every other day in the first half of the year, the S&P 500 has only had 5 such moves so far in July (16 trading days). The last one was over a week ago.

A couple 9-to-1 up volume days on the NYSE and an uptick in bulls on the sentiment surveys is providing some hope that the bear market environment may be fading. Our Risk Indicators (as well as the continued presence of more stocks making new lows than new highs) argue that it is premature to jump to that conclusion. 

We have seen some improvement over the past month, and of the 20 risk off - risk on asset pairs, 14 are closer to their risk-on extreme than they were a month ago. But even with that improvement, only 3 of the pairs are closer to the risk-extreme than the risk-off extreme. In this fight over field position team “Risk Off” is winning. As we get into the details, this story is more about a lack of risk appetite and risk on weakness rather than broad...

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

The next new trade in our Paid-to-Play portfolio is:

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

And, just like that, any residual strength in crypto has once again dwindled.

Guys, we like to keep it honest and real with you.

At a certain point, we feel obnoxious about being so repetitive. But we're not going to tell you anything other than what's happening -- it's just our job as technicians to follow the money flow.

In yesterday's note, we outlined how we were taking a small, low-conviction long if Bitcoin $BTC was above 22,000. Just one day after we put the position on, Bitcoin's fallen back into its range:

A funny thing happened this Spring.

Inflation expectations peaked. Our equally-weighted Commodities Index peaked. And then the Copper/Gold ratio collapsed.

All of these point to lower Interest Rates.

And so here we are with the US 10yr Yield struggling with those 2018 highs.

The largest insider transaction on today’s list is a Form 4 filing by Director Lorence H. Kim, who reported a purchase of roughly $1 million in Revolution Medicines $RVMD.

We have a new sector that's making a new all-time high! Nifty FMCG is successfully putting in higher highs and higher lows. And today we're here to discuss a long idea from FMCG.

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.

This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to the latest edition of Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended July 22, 2022. We publish this report bi-weekly and rotate it 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.

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

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual...

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...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Top 10 Charts Report was just published.

In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.

Materials Hook Higher

Procyclical areas of the stock market are bouncing back after the recent bout of selling pressure. The Equal-Weight Materials ETF RTM is a prime example as it reclaims a critical level of former support. Now that these raw material and commodity-related stocks are back within their prior ranges, we're watching commodities closely to see if they follow suit. As long as RTM is holding above its shelf of former lows from last year, our equal-weight commodity index is most likely finding support at its respective level. On the flip side, the search for a floor in commodities is likely to continue if the recent rebound in materials is only a dead cat bounce. Ultimately, these two charts should resolve in the same direction.