All hell seems to be breaking loose at the BOJ.

I'm not going to pretend to know, or care. But I can tell you that Yen traders like it.

And investors in precious metals sure as hell love it.

These are good things to wake up to if you're long gold and silver:

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.

To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

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.

This market environment is not like others that came before it.

Remember people used to complain that only 5 stocks were driving the market?

Now they complain that those 5 stocks aren't working.

But many others are.

And that's the point.

With new environments comes new leadership. We've seen this happen over many decades.

And those 5 stocks that everyone used to complain were driving the market, have now been laggards for quite some time.

I think people just like to complain.

But if you're like us, and would rather look for opportunities to profit instead of just bitching all the time, then it's important to look underneath the surface.

A great way to visualize the broader leadership vs just a few names is in the equally-weighted chart of the S&P500. This eliminates those mega-caps from dominating the indexes.

Here's how that looks compared to the market-cap weighted version:

Fun Fact: In addition to being a Market Technician and CEO of All Star Charts, I am also a Certified Sommelier.

That's like the CMT but for wine.

And just because I own a Winery in Napa Valley and passed a few exams, people think I know everything about wine.

But that's not how it works.

Just like in markets. I've been doing this for almost 20 years. I've passed plenty of exams. But I don't know everything.

That's not what it's about.

Technical Analysis doesn't give us all the answers. But it sure goes a long way in helping us ask the right questions.

In the wine world it's the same thing.

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. You can 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:

It's the weekly commodity edition of What the FICC?

Today, we focus on metals and the differences between correcting though price versus time.

Check it out!

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

We all learn how to fall – the sooner, the better.

As adults, we forget this is one of the first skills we learn early in life. For better or worse, my one-year-old reminds me daily.

He’s amazing. 

Yes, I’m one of those proud, doting fathers. But his coordination and acrobatics keep both of us out of the pediatric ER (and me, the doghouse). He pops right up whenever he hits the ground and keeps chasing his older brother.

Pure gold.

Since my mind is always lost in the charts, his agility and doggedness remind me of gold’s resilience during the past two years.

You often hear us refer to markets correcting through price or time. It’s an important concept that can reveal underlying strength. 

The dual-pane chart of copper and gold futures presents both:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Equity markets around the globe are getting rocked as we close out another rough week.

And then there's China, which is green on the day.

This isn't just a one-day thing. In fact, it's quite the opposite. China has been showing impressive relative strength since bottoming in late October.

Today is just a microcosm of what that leadership has looked like.

It's had our attention for a while already, which is why we're about to discuss the structural outlook for Chinese stocks and outline some long ideas in the strongest names.

Here's the performance of a basket of international equity ETFs since markets bottomed and ripped higher on Oct. 13:

An All Star Options community member recently sent me an email asking about the Average True Range (ATR) indicator and whether or not it is helpful in ascertaining if options premiums are elevated or depressed in the underlying instrument. 

For a pretty thorough explanation of what ATR is, here’s a blurb I found on macroption.com:

With the major indexes below overhead supply, you're seeing the choppy action.

There are stocks continuing to do very well, like Homebuilders for example. And there are some stocks really struggling, like U.S. Banks.

But in the aggregate, at the index level, you're seeing the grind.