Can everybody just chill out a little bit?

The frenetic trading activity that defined the end of last week appears to be continuing into today. And we're seeing VIX north of 30. If I liked selling premium last week, I should love it today, right?

Well, it just so happens we've got an ETF with pricing in June options that is giving us a lot of wiggle room to sell premium into. So we're going to do just that, betting on consumers to chill.

Are you seeing this?

Inflation Protected Treasuries are outpacing nominal yielding Treasury Bonds. We're now at the highest levels since the Great Financial Crisis.

For those new to fixed income, this is the bond market expressing its thoughts about inflation.

This morning, the big market news is that Twitter $TWTR and Elon Musk are getting close to striking a deal for the eccentric billionaire to take the company private.

This is a dramatic turn of events from just last week, when the company announced it had adopted a “poison pill” to ward off Musk’s takeover efforts.

The latest reports suggest a deal could be finalized as early as today.

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.

• Our macro universe was lower on the week as 85% of our list was negative with a median return of -2.01%.
• The Volatility Index $VIX was this week's winner, closing with a 24.27% gain.
• The biggest loser was Silver $SI, with a weekly loss of -5.61%.
• There was a 6% drop in the percentage of assets on our list within 5% of their 52-week highs – currently at 17%.
• Only 9% of our macro list made fresh 4-week highs.
• ...

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.

We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…

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 new 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...

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:

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.

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

Equities continue to get hit. And yesterday, commodity-related stocks were not immune to the selling pressure.

Energy, metals, and natural resources, in general, all sold off into the close. The inflation, interest rate, and commodity trade had a really rough week.

It's never a good thing when the leaders get hit like this. At the same time, two days really doesn’t make a trend.

Before we get sucked into calling peak inflation, let’s zoom out and put all this near-term volatility into the right context.

When we do, it reconnects our eye with the underlying trend – which is unequivocally higher. It also becomes clear that many of these stocks are finding resistance at logical levels – areas where we would expect these stocks to digest gains. 

And that’s exactly what they’re doing!

Let's take a look!

First up is a triple pane chart of the Metals & Mining ETF $XME, Copper Miners ETF $COPX, and the Steel ETF $SLX: 

This chart gives a great read on how base and industrial metal stocks are doing.  

XME...

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:

And here’s how we arrived at it:

• Filter out any stocks that are below their May 10th, 2021 high, which is when new 52-week highs peaked for...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

One of the refrains I heard coming into 2022 was that, given inflation, holding cash was an expensive proposition. It is true that over the past year, inflation has eaten away 8.5% of the real purchasing power of the dollar. But it has only taken the market 75 trading days this year to reduce the value of stocks and bonds by an even larger nominal amount. Surging inflation is prompting an aggressive policy response from the Fed, pushing bond yields higher and weighing stocks and bonds. Passive investors have seen their portfolios stumble to their worst start to a year in the past quarter century. There is a challenge brewing for the passive index-based investment approaches that have soared in popularity in recent years. Holding cash in inflationary environments does come with a cost, but it has the benefit of flexibility in the face of uncertainty. And the way it looks right now, holding stocks and bonds has been even more expensive.        

I've been talking recently about how coming out of the March expiration cycle, if feels to me that volatility (as tracked by $VIX) has changed regimes. During the first quarter of this year, buyers of vol dips were rewarded. But now it is my belief that sellers of vol spikes will be rewarded.

With that quick peek into my thinking as a backdrop, the price action in the broader stock market indices over the past few days has caused VIX to pop from 20 to north of 24 in short order and it feels to me that this might offer an advantageous opportunity for us to step in and sell some premium.

This is the video recording of our April 22, 2022, All Star Charts Crypto Weekly Strategy Session.