We're making an adjustment to an existing position in our Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

Yesterday, Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management filed a 13D revealing the purchase of an additional 16 million shares of the fast food chain, Wendy's $WEN.

This brings Trian’s total interest to just shy of 20%.

Buried in the footnotes of the filing, Trian also disclosed that it advised the board of directors it’s exploring a potential transaction.

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

In yesterday's note, we made a brief argument for caution.

Today, I want to add some further context and discuss one of the difficulties involved with trading in a tape as messy as this.

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

The US dollar is front and center as risk assets hang in the balance.

Earlier in the month, we placed the Australian and Canadian dollars on breakdown alert as they completed major topping patterns.

US dollar strength was expanding at the time, and the AUD and CAD were the last dominos to fall.

Or so it seemed.

What started as strong downside resolutions for these top commodity currencies quickly turned into potential failed breakdowns.

Now that the most resilient currencies are snapping back against King Dollar, it's compromising the broad US dollar rally and could usher in a more favorable environment for risk assets. 

Let’s discuss what it means for stocks and commodities if these failed breakdowns resolve higher.

Here’s a chart highlighting the recent action in the Canadian dollar and Australian dollar futures:

Two weeks ago, these top commodity...

I heard a good one this morning:

Where do Traders go for Drinks?

An Outside Bar!

haha

Hat tip to Sean for that one.

Anyway, how are you enjoying what is historically the worst part of the 4-year cycle?

Some tools and some strategies work great in certain market environments but terribly in others.

The range can include the following: looking for bearish breadth divergences at the start of bull markets; using a long-term moving average as an entry in a sideways market environment; or even something as fundamental as deciding how to approach tactical trading opportunities.

In the case of today's crypto market, a big mistake would be to directionally trade Bitcoin when no real direction has been ascertained.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

They are cracks more than crevices at this point, but the fissures are there. And they are becoming more widespread. Signs of financial (and economic) stress are on the rise. While generally still at historically low levels, they merit watchful attention as the Fed moves forward with an accelerated program of interest rate hikes.

Evidence of stress is emerging across the fixed income landscape: high yield spreads are rising, corporate bond yields have the most upside momentum since the financial crisis and mortgage rates are at their highest levels in over a decade.

We are already seeing the implications of this in the housing market. New single-family home sales have fallen 20% over the past year while homes for sale have surged 35%.

As stresses continue to build, we could see renewed interest in traditional safe haven assets (especially Treasury Bonds). Whether this period ends up being labeled a recession (formal or otherwise) is an open question. But the data increasingly point to a meaningful deterioration in economic conditions.

...

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

The largest insider transaction on today’s list is a Form 4 filing by Winder Investment, which reported an additional $1.8 million purchase in Sensient Technologies $SXT.

The firm now owns more than 6 million shares, representing a 12.4% ownership interest in the specialty chemicals stock.

As the market continues to churn sideways, certain stocks are putting their head out of the water and making a move.

Today we're looking at a Fertilizer stock that looks interesting.

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

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.

They’re doing so for one reason only: because they think the stock is about to...