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

Despite the trendless nature of the major forex pairs, there’s still plenty of information coming from the exotics right now – particularly emerging market currencies.

The Chilean peso – and its relationship to copper – now has our attention.

Let’s take a look.

Here’s a chart of the USD/CLP cross overlaid with Copper Futures $HG_F with a correlation study in the lower pane: 

Chile is the world’s largest copper producer, which explains the strong negative correlation between the USD/CLP pair and the price of copper.

You can see this relationship in the chart, as USD/CLP tends to peak and roll over at the same time copper bottoms out, and vice versa. 

The USD/CLP now appears to be topping and turning lower after finding resistance at its 2020 highs. USD/CLP also peaked at these levels after the COVID crash, which coincided with the start of copper’s rally to new all-time highs. ...

No, it’s not April 15th just yet. But I’m getting into that zone where I need to start sending relevant info to my accountant to get the ball rolling for my 2021 tax return.

I hate that I have to farm out my tax return preparation to a professional in order to get them done. I wish the US tax code wasn’t the way it was – who doesn’t?

But let me relate a little story to you that might get your mind right about whether or not to go it alone when doing your taxes…

I don’t remember the year, but it was somewhere around 2003-2004 when I first moved to Chicago. I had been using an accounting firm to prepare my tax returns since I began trading in 1998. But this year, I thought to myself:

“Sean, you’re smart. You’re college-educated. You almost minored in accounting, and you had straight A’s in all your accounting classes. You should be able to handle the filing of your own taxes!”

So I don’t remember if it was out of an act of curiosity, boredom, or just trying to pinch a penny, but I decided that year I’d prepare my own taxes.

I read all the official instruction manuals provided by the IRS. I gathered all my necessary trading documents...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaways:

• News headlines exacerbating underlying trends.
• Leadership rotation has accelerated in 2022.
• Time in the market is a waste of time if you are in the wrong market.

While the leaders of the last decade are weakening, the laggards of the last decade are gaining strength. Commodities are making new highs and Energy, which is the worst performing sector over the past 10 years, is the only sector in the S&P 500 in positive territory on a YTD basis. Globally, we are seeing strength and leadership from the rest of the world versus the US. Trends in Emerging Markets versus Developed Markets are as strong as they have been in over a decade. As we see these shifts, staying in harmony with the trend is critical. “Time in the...

Are you betting this trend continues?

Do you think Technology stocks can keep dominating like this, particularly vs Energy?

Most Americans are making that bet.

Look at your typical American portfolios. They own a bunch of Tech and almost no Energy.

From this week's Follow the Flow report, it's clear that options players are betting on the house!

And recent market action is giving us a nice pullback to get positioned into, increasing our odds of success if the dealer plays his cards right.

So let's take advantage of the price action and position ourselves to win.

Somebody tell the waitress to send over another round of complimentary drinks!

Yesterday's report, which you can read here, laid the groundwork for today's note. 

To summarize, we're of the strong view that there's little to no edge in pushing directional bets in this tape.

Because Bitcoin's lost all momentum, we anticipate more weeks of ranging and contracting price action that's likely to involve a high concentration of whipsaws.

This is not a market conducive to aggressive moves.

The vast majority of crypto investors are better served by not pressing trades.

However, in today's note, we'll discuss market-neutral trades that can quietly yield results in periods where absolute price trends hold little edge for directional bets.

I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago where I was going over the geographic locations of all the members of our team. These places include California, Florida, Colorado, Venezuela, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mumbai, Delhi, South Africa and the list goes on....

The gentleman asked me how I was able to find all these people.

When I told him I just sent out a tweet whenever I needed to add someone, he almost fell out of his chair.

For me this is just common sense. Others are still coming around to the power of social.

We are a team of almost 30 people now.

And we're looking to add another one, if you or someone you know is interested.

The market hasn't been easy off late and a sideways move means that market participants get trapped more often than not. Today we have a trade setup from the Chemicals that has some eyeballs on it. We thought this might be a good time to check it out.

Let's take a look at the trade for this week!

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.

In last Monday's report, we pointed out a handful of bearish developments but restated our neutral outlook on the crypto market.

We noted that there was demand coming from spot, while futures were still in the process of selling.

This continues to be the key theme to monitor; selling spot no longer appears to be the primary way savvy and large investors are going to cash.

Rather, they're doing it through shorting calendar futures driving down Bitcoin's term structure.

Since then, we've seen Bitcoin lose our risk level of 41,000 and are positioned heavily in cash.

We're anticipating a longer period of sideways price action, and this is a tape conducive neither to trading nor to establishing aggressive long positions.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended February 18, 2022. This report is published biweekly and rotated 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.

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

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based...

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...