Tuesday night we held our January Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.
In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.
The number crunchers are reporting that workers have gone missing. Plenty of jobs are available. But no one is showing up to fill the open positions.
They are calling this phenomenon the Great Resignation.
It makes sense if you’re looking at the situation through the lens of the established system. Folks are dropping out, which means they must be giving up. If they wanted to work, they would work.
But what if people aren't so much opting out of one system, but actually opting into a different one?
We're putting on an $SMH March 265/270/320/325 Iron Condor for an approximately $2.15 credit.
This means we’re short the 270 puts and 320 calls, while protecting our position $5 away on both sides with long 265 puts and long 325 calls. We’ll be doing the same number of contracts at all four strikes to keep the risk even.
Check out our short video with the thought process behind these trades:
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
There have been some fireworks to kick off the new year. One of the biggest developments in 2022 has to be the US 10-year yield breaking to its highest level in two years.
The direction in which yields resolve from their 2021 consolidation will impact all the major asset classes, including bonds, stocks, and commodities. We’re already seeing procyclical assets catch an aggressive bid as the 10-year flirts with an upside resolution.
For now, the path of least resistance is higher. But we still need to see follow-through and confirmation before we can be comfortable that these new highs are here to stay.
When we look at the international bond market, it’s not just domestic Treasury yields that are on the rise. We’re actually seeing rates make new highs all across the developed world.
This is bullish confirmation of what we’re seeing domestically, as it suggests the current rising rate environment is a global...
If you're a trader, you don't need to pretend to understand the underlying.
Money flow is the only thing that moves markets. Everything else is just noise.
We pride ourselves on always adjusting our thesis to new data and never being dogmatic in our approach.
In the case of cryptocurrencies, it's been made out that gold and Bitcoin are sworn enemies.
Bitcoin is the "better store of value," they argue.
This black-and-white mentality does considerably more harm than good to investors.
If you're a trader, your only job is to follow money flow, not to assert your views on the market.
We bring this up because, when it comes to gold, there are early but constructive signs developing, with the shiny metal beginning to work its way out of an 18-month downtrend.
As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!
One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn't just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at...
Key Takeaway: A sentiment unwind can be constructive if it bends but doesn't break. That is, if volatility squeezes out some excessive optimism without ushering in pessimism. On the other hand, when it breaks it becomes like water through a dam, creating a messy and, at times, chaotic environment. So far the unwind from the speculative extremes of early 2021 has been orderly and has not broken through. But pressure is building and the dam must hold if we want to still talk about rotational churning and not move on to discussing sustained cyclical weakness. That's the challenge for 2022.
Sentiment Report Chart of the Week: ARKK Sinks
One of the superstars during the recent bout of speculative fervor, the ARK Innovation ETF ARKK, now struggles to stay afloat. It’s meteoric rise and subsequent decline have been dramatic with a 380% run up off the March ‘20 lows followed by a 50% decline from its peak. ARKK’s recent breakdown is a great example of the speculative unwind we’...