Quick Update:  

According to the National Retail Federation, 197 million Americans shopped over the 5 days from Thanksgiving weekend through Cyber Monday. There are only 216 million Americans over 15 years old in the country. Even allowing for double-counting, that’s a good turn-out for a fake holiday with unexceptional discounts. 

Who won?

Well according to our Retail and Consumer expert Jeff Macke,

"Abercrombie won the mall. Walmart won Discount. William Sonoma and Dick’s Sporting Goods have won Home and Sports so hard they’re running out of chains to compete with. Amazon is winning the world and barely seems to care about (or profit from) retail at all." 

Make sure you download his...

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.

The S&P500, Nasdaq100 and Global100 Index each made new all-time highs yesterday.

This is among many other stocks, sectors and indexes around the world that are also making new cycle highs. 

We've been buying stocks very aggressively, of course, because historically it pays much better to own stocks during bull markets vs doing the alternative.

We've gone back and done the work. It's just math. 

Those investors with too much cash, or too few stocks in their portfolios, have been paying the consequences.

The pushback I get, and have been getting over the past couple of years, tends to revolve around valuation and how stocks are "too expensive". 

I find that to be a hilarious reason to avoid buying stocks during a bull market.

Common excuses for fighting this powerful trend include, but are not limited to:

• The 4th Highest Trailing P/E for the S&P500 in 124 years
• US Stock Market Concentration is at a record high, when you add up the top 10 companies as a % of Total S&P500 market-cap
• US Stocks are at a 75-year high vs the...

The New York Stock Exchange held its annual Tree Lighting Event this week. It was spectacular, as always.

But we're not here to talk about pine trees or LED lights. We're here to talk about commodities.

The NYSE has an array of vehicles to trade, most being equities.

They also have several commodity funds, which happen to offer asymmetric risk versus reward opportunities at current levels. Let's talk about them.

Our first setup is the Invesco DB Agriculture Fund $DBA:

The top five holdings are cocoa (14.8%), coffee (13%), live cattle (11.9%), sugar (11.6%), and corn (11.4%), several of which we've recently discussed.

As you can...

Seven of the ten biggest-ever options volume days have been in 2024, with the other three in 2023, according to this report in Traders Magazine.

It goes on to say: "...numbers that would be considered spikes ten or even five years ago are more like a current-day new normal."

I wouldn't have it any other way.

The growing popularity of options trading makes sense to me. No other product offers so much dynamic flexibility for traders to craft unique ways to express market opinions.

No other product gives us the ability to define our risks absolutely, while positioning ourselves with leverage to participate in theoretically unlimited gains.

We've seen some fast moving breakouts during the recent stage of this bull market cycle. 

I'm not calling for the bull market to end. In fact, I think it continues for a while longer. But its highly likely the pace of prices increases slows.

With this in mind, today's trade is the perfect kind of play for such an environment

I was wondering myself. So I asked Retail and Consumer expert Jeff Macke to shoot over some results.

His answer?

"Abercrombie won the mall. Walmart won Discount. William Sonoma and Dick’s Sporting Goods have won Home and Sports so hard they’re running out of chains to compete with. Amazon is winning the world and barely seems to care about (or profit from) retail at all."

Man is he good. 

Look at this chart of Abercrombie breaking out of this multi-decade base to new all-time highs:

Whenever I want to know what's going on in retail, Jeff is the guy I ask. 

And he...

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. No new positions today.
2. Adjustment to XOP position.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.

We've also sprinkled in some of the largest ADRs from countries that did not make the market cap cut. 

These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.

It's got all the big names and more–but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.

The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.

We take the largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Based on the market environment, we can also flip the scan on its head and filter for weakness.

Let's dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.

Here's this week's list:

Below is the 10th ASC Mastermind  Lab. In this video, I'm joined by Brian Shannon. Brian is the founder of Alphatrends, and also wrote two of the most influential technical analysis books: Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes, and Maximum Trading Gains With Anchord VWAP. 

Brian Shannon has written two of the most influential recent books on technical analysis, and moving averages are at the core of both. 

In this Mastermind Lab, Brian and I discuss the flaws of traditional moving averages, and why VWAP is itself essentially another form of moving average. 

Moving averages are generally meant to allow investors to analyze assets across multiple timeframes, and Brian literally wrote the book on multiple timeframe analysis. So when I want to talk about this stuff, Brian is one of the first guys I call. 

Enjoy this Mastermind Lab. 

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. New position in XLV.
2. No adjustments are needed today.
3. Closed USO at Profit Target.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!