Below is the 4th ASC Mastermind Lab Course. These are special videos that will be made available throughout the duration of the 12-week course featuring conversations with professionals from across Wall Street discussing topics in their expertise. 

The theme of ASC Mastermind Week 2 is momentum trading, and why it works. So naturally it made sense for me to talk to All Star Charts Director of Research Steve Strazza. Steve uses momentum as much in his day-to-day as I do. 

The main concept Steve wanted to hammer home is momentum thrusts, what they are, when they happen, the different types with examples, and how to analyze them. 

Enjoy this Mastermind Lab Course on momentum.

Earnings season is closing in. And the election is right behind it. Surely land mines will be discovered all over the place. There is risk.

So any directional bets I place over the coming weeks will be of a defined-risk nature.

But, where there is risk, there is opportunity. We'll get paid when we're right, perhaps handsomely so.

That is why it is worth wading into the rising rivers here to take some shots while keeping our downsides in check.

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

1. New position in XLP (consumer staples).
2. No adjustments are needed today.
3. Exited SMH position.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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.

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.

We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.

Nowadays, to make the cut for our 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 filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus...

The last time the yield curve inverted, they promised us a recession, maybe even a market crash if we're lucky!

Instead all we got was a historic bull market, including back to back years of 20%+ returns in the S&P500. 

You see, this is what happened AFTER the yield curve inverted.

And why is this such a big deal? 

There's this really hilarious function in the way humans think. A large population of economists and wall street sell side analysts get very sad when the yield of one bond pays more than the yield of another.

It's this really weird thing in the markets that gets these folks very afraid, and so they want their customers to be afraid too. 

And if these economists and sell side analysts do their jobs right, as they have for many years, they're loyal following of sheep will be sure to sell their stocks and run to cash just before a historic bull market.

And that, of course, is exactly what happened over the past couple of years, as investors piled into more money market funds than any other time in history, only for that to be one of the worst possible decisions any investor could have made at any point since...

This is the tape to begin thinking about taking trade setups.

As such, here are three potential meme coin trades.

It appears this seven month bear market is reaching its concluding stages.

There is an increasing number of bullish developments that point to a Bitcoin breakout.

I think there is going to be tremendous opportunity to make money in the altcoins in the coming quarters.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

The market keeps squeezing short sellers out of their biotech positions and rewarding bulls with big breakouts. 

Knowing this, our strategy is simple. We want to keep buying the best-looking and most heavily-shorted biotech stocks.

Today, we're covering one that has rallied nearly 200% since late last year. Despite this extreme upside momentum, the stock still has a massive short interest.

With the stock resolving a multi-year accumulation pattern, we think this short squeeze has plenty of room to run. To get back to the all-time highs from just a few years ago, it would require about a 10x.

We're looking for something much smaller and quicker for now, but you never know!

Let's talk about how we're trading our latest Freshly Squeezed setup.

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.

When you go back and study bull markets and all the healthiest environments for stocks throughout the past, do you know what you'll find?

Historically, Consumer Staples stocks underperform during the healthiest market environments.

So with that in mind, notice how Consumer Staples on an equally-weighted basis just closed at NEW ALL-TIME LOWS relative to the equally-weighted S&P500:

Money is fleeing the defensive nature of Consumer Staples and continuing to rotate into more offensive areas of the market. 

Take Financials for example. Here is the equally-weighted Financials Index completing a multi-year base and closing once again at new all-time highs.

The equally-weighted Financials Index eliminates the massive weightings in Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and others.

This chart above shows Financials Equally-weighted making new all-time highs, reiterating the broad strength in Financials, which is typical in the middle of a bull market.

Meanwhile, the Communications Index on an equally-weighted basis is making new multi-year highs as well. 

But for me, it's the market-...

What happens if you can't exit a position on your brokerage platform?

Do you sit and wait it out, hoping for a quick resolution and an opportunity to exit at your price, or better?

Has that ever worked out for you?

I'm fairly certain that has nearly never worked out for me. If it has, it certainly didn't compensate me for all the times it hasn't. Not financially, and certainly not emotionally.

There's a certain panic that sets in when we lose the ability to take control when we need to. We can't control the markets, but we can control how we react to them. We can choose to take action when we need to.

Except when we can't.

Your broker has a glitch, the platform is down, and nobody will take your calls because their customer service lines are being bombarded by traders just like you who are stuck in positions, looking for a quick exit.

This is a pretty powerless feeling.

Some traders I know experienced this on Friday when a well-known broker for some reason wasn't allowing trading in a certain ticker. It was an error on the broker's part, but nonetheless, customers of this broker went the entire day without the ability to exit...

Last week, we discussed China and Gold futures as potential catalysts for resolving a multi-decade basing pattern in Dr. Copper.

If we're in an environment where Copper futures are printing fresh all-time highs, then we should spend some time identifying opportunities in the equities market that benefit from rising base and industrial metal prices globally.

Over the last 6-months, the Steel $SLX, Copper $COPX, and Metals and Mining $XME ETFs have underperformed the S&P 500:

However, the weekly RRG is hinting at a potential rotation back into these stocks during this final quarter of 2024. All 3 of these ETFs are pointing higher and rotating out of the lagging quadrant and into the improving and leading quadrants.