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.

We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.

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

And it doesn’t have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to...

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.

ETH Kicks Off Crypto Rally

It was a busy weekend for cryptocurrencies, and Ethereum, in particular. The world’s second-largest crypto just resolved higher from a bearish continuation pattern right at a key polarity zone. 

When patterns fail, it’s always great information. In this case, a downside resolution in the direction of the underlying trend was the higher probability outcome, but it didn't happen that way. Instead, buyers took control and forced an upside resolution. Another thing that makes this price action stand out is where it took place. Ethereum just dug in and reversed after a brief shakeout beneath the 2017 highs. As long as we're back above the prior-cycle peak of 1400, the bias is higher.

Key Takeaway:

• Stocks celebrating small wins.
• For evidence to improve we need to see sustained strength.
• Fed confronted with deteriorating economy while still waging inflation fight.

When new lows have exceeded new highs for 34 weeks (and counting) and the Value Line Geometric Index (a proxy for the median US stock) is no higher now than it was five years ago, even small amounts of good news get celebrated. We saw some of that on Friday.

A decline in the longer-term inflation expectations number in the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey helped fuel a broad stock market rally. Recall that it was an unexpected uptick in inflation expectations in the preliminary June data that prompted the Fed to raise rates by 75 basis points last month. Odds of a 100 basis point rate hike at next week’s FOMC meeting had been on the rise following the release of unexpectedly hot readings for CPI and PPI. By the...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Check out this week's Momentum Report, our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector, and Industry Group level.

By analyzing the short-term data in these reports, we get a more tactical view of the current state of markets. This information then helps us put near-term developments into the big picture context and provides insights regarding the structural trends at play.

Let's jump right into it with some of the major takeaways from this week's report:

* ASC Plus Members can access the Momentum Report by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.

Macro Universe:

• This week, our macro universe was negative as 79% of our list closed lower with a median return of -1.14%.
• Lumber $LB was the winner, closing with a 3.49% gain.
• The biggest loser was Copper $HG, with a weekly loss of -8.18%.
• There was a 4% drop in the percentage of assets on our list within 5% of 52-week highs – currently at 2%.
• Only 9% of our macro list made fresh 4-week highs.
• Meanwhile, 38% of our list...

Feels like market conditions are improving a bit for the bulls, but we're still going to be picky here. One way we can improve our odds of success is to align our trades with relative strength.

Today's trade is in a sector that has seen both improving absolute price strength, and a widening relative strength gap compared to the broader stock market.

We've exited a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

In recent months, we've argued in favor of a defensive approach.

Last week, we made our strategy rather clear with the following dialogue:

With the market providing extreme readings, these are conditions by which we can anticipate a mean-reversion rally higher. At the same time, trying to catch this move in a period of continual whipsaws will be difficult.

We think the better trade is to remain patient over the near term while dollar-cost averaging into long-term spot positions with a multi-year time frame.

Over the weekend, we've seen a sharp rally higher, driven by Ethereum $ETH.

Director David S. Taylor of Delta Air Lines $DAL revealed a purchase of 10,000 shares in the airline company, valued at just under $300,000.

Meritage Group LP filed a 13G revealing an ownership stake of 5.70% in the cloud-based business management platform Coupa Software $COUP.

Do you see what happens when the US Dollar is falling?

Stocks and Crypto go up.

This IS the catalyst.

Do you want to know what will get stocks and crypto back into bull markets?

It's not the fed, it's not the president, it certainly isn't a former president, it isn't a war or any kind of "news" event.

It's the US Dollar. Period.

Over the weekend we saw the price of Ethereum jump to new 30 day highs.

Looking a little deeper, you'll find that both Binance and Avalanche also hit new 30 day highs.

Some of you trade cryptos and others don't. But that's not really my point here.

As you've heard me say a million times by now, these crypto assets are just growth stocks (probably software stocks if you want to be more specific).

And the correlations prove it. They've never been higher, in fact.

In bull markets you'll see a lot more stocks making new highs than new lows.

In the current market environment we're used to seeing the opposite.

Here's an update on how that's going. For those of you keeping track at home, we're now going on 34 consecutive weeks of more stocks making new lows than new highs:

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.