From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Money flows to where it’s treated best.

That’s the foundational premise of relative strength studies. 

Remember, we always want to buy the strongest and sell the weakest. It sounds simple. But it’s impossible to overstate its importance.

One of the best ways to increase our probability of success is to buy assets that are trending higher on absolute terms while outperforming their alternatives.

Those are key ingredients of a strong uptrend. And it just so happens that gold checks both boxes…

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Monday April 3rd @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Monday evening:

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.

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.

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...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

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 Nasdaq just went out last week at new 7-month highs.

Growth stocks are back.

But why?

Interest Rates are falling at a record pace.

And when you look at the intermarket relationships, it makes a lot of sense:

US interest rates have fallen to their lowest levels since Q3 last year.

And with falling rates has come a consistent bid into Technology and growth all year so far.

That has driven the Nasdaq100 to its highest weekly close in 7 months:

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 Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

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. Click here to check it out.

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:

Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month. 

Then...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I can’t think of a better time to review the major commodity indexes. 

The rising rate environment is reversing, and it’s taking commodities with it.

Let’s dive in and see what’s going on in the space! We also need to check in with a key intermarket ratio, revealing where we want to position ourselves in the coming months and quarters.

Check out the triple-pane chart of the Bloomberg Commodity Index $BCOM, the CRB Index, and our equal-weight index comprised of 33 individual contracts (EW33):

The EW33 remains resilient despite the BCOM and the energy-heavy CRB recently posting fresh 52-week lows. Its buoyancy speaks to lingering strength in various contracts such as orange juice, cocoa, sugar, live cattle, precious metals, copper, and steel.

But the environment is changing as yields begin to turn lower. I find it hard to imagine that commodities – at the index level – will continue to trend higher...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Monday night we held our March 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

Let’s get right into it!

With Financials continuing to fall apart, we're focused on the assets that are making new highs - Bitcoin and Gold being 2 of them.

I was on Fox Business yesterday talking about the importance of the 2007 highs in the Financials Index.

Here's a fun behind the scenes look.

I mean, do I really know my risk?

Stocks and Futures traders like to talk about how they use stop-loss orders to define their risks, and that’s smart.

A lifetime ago I managed a small, independent hedge fund that traded commodities with a trend-following strategy. This strategy entered positions that I’d attempt to hold for weeks or months (if they were working).

Every position I had on had a resting stop-loss order working in the market, giving me comfort that I knew the most I could lose if I was wrong.

All that comfort I was enjoying changed one day after a trip to my clearing firm’s office in downtown Chicago.

I sat down with one of the firm’s risk managers for a simple “get-to-know-you” chat. He was curious about my...