After Covid there was no sector that did better than Consumer Discretionary stocks.

Locking everyone down and sending them all a check to go spend, as it turns out, was great for the Consumer Discretionary sector. 

And then 2021 ended and the correction in Consumer began...

Years in the making, here is the massive top in Consumer Discretionary relative to the S&P500 that's got people talking...

Or is it that the Consumer stocks are just finding support once again where they did a decade ago?

Is the squeeze now ready to get going?

It's interesting that Chip Stocks find themselves in a very similar position.

See:...

Did you hear about the massive top in Semiconductors?

Everyone is talking about it on the internets. So it must be true. 

Seems the easy call here to make is to say "that was it". The Semiconductor story and the bull market as we know it is over...'

One of the things they teach you in the first week of Technical Analysis kindergarten is that infamous Head & Shoulders top.

The reason this is so popular is because it is "easy" to recognize. You have a left "shoulder", followed by a higher high (head), and completed with a lower high, forming the "right shoulder".

Once the "neckline", represented by these gray shaded lines above, gets broken, the whole house of cards collapses.

Or so we're taught.

But here's the thing. 

Asset prices trend. Massive topping formations are much more rare. 

In most cases, particularly during bull markets, these sorts of formations tend to resolve higher, and these "massive tops" are just figments of traders' imaginations.

This could very well be a historic top and selling opportunity in Semiconductors.

It could.

And that's the beauty of Technical...

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...

High Beta outperforming Low Volatility stocks is usually something we see in healthy market environments.

This year, however, High Beta has been struggling to make any progress vs their Low Volatility counterparts.

"Beta" is essentially how volatile a stock is relative to its benchmark.

So High Beta think $SMCI, $NVDA, $AMD, $AVGO and others. You have half the S&P500 High Beta Index in Technology and another 17% in Consumer Discretionary.

In contrast, for Low Volatility think Berkshire Hathaway, Coca-Cola, Visa, Procter & Gamble. You'll find a lot of Financials, Consumer Staples, Utilities and Industrials in this group.

Here is the ratio of High Beta vs Low Volatility breaking down to the lowest levels all year.

This breakdown in High Beta / Low Vol comes in an environment where we have yet to see any real meaningful expansion in stocks hitting new lows.

You can't have a bear market or a correction of any kind without the prices of stocks falling. And we haven't seen that yet.

Check the new 1-month lows, new 3-month lows, new 6-month lows. You'll see.

And don't even bother with new 52-week lows, because they're...

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.

With fall approaching us, things are beginning to change.

The weather is perfect for golfing, the Kansas City Chiefs are back to dominating the NFL, and it's the best time of the year for Natural Gas futures.

In July, we outlined asymmetric risk/reward setups in Natural Gas futures and 4 natural gas stocks.

As we expected, it has taken some time for these setups to come to fruition. 

However, the cleanest fossil fuel has carved out a textbook reversal pattern and looks poised to blast off any day now.

Here's the average monthly performance for Natural Gas futures over the past 3 decades:

Natural Gas has a tendency to rally in the fall as September and October are the two best months of the year.

The longer-term structure is also shaping up quite nicely:

Historically, we've seen demand for methane step in at this level time and again.

But these bottoms have been messy...

So instead of getting chopped up in a range, we like the monthly MACD as a mechanism for timing our entry.

This long-term...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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, we sort the remaining names by their proximity to new 52-week highs.

This leaves us with only the strongest stocks. Let’s talk about some of...

With interest rates coming off and expectations for rate cuts on the rise, US Treasury Bonds are hitting the highest levels they've seen all year.

Look at the size of this base in the 7-10yr Bond ETF:

All the attention has been on the yield curve and how we're now officially getting back above the zero line.

This yield curve inversion has lasted longer than ever.

The "recession" was supposed to start when the yield curve originally inverted. 

The "recession" was going to come any minute because the yield curve was inverted for so long.

The "recession" is now going to come because the yield curve is uninverting.

Imagine spending your time worrying about other people's recessions instead of your own personal gain in the market?

Recessions are a choice for many investors, especially the people who own almost all of the assets in the stock market.

And even if the recession wasn't a choice, and something we all have to live with, we know from history that price leads first, and then the economy follows. 

So if your goal as a trader or investor is to profit from the market, then why would you spend any...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Precious metals stocks have been ripping since Gold futures resolved a multi-decade accumulation pattern earlier this year.

But most of these stocks don't have much short interest...

We love to trade stocks with high short interest as there is a built in catalyst of forced buyers when the stock makes an upside move.

Today, we're outlining a trade for a precious metals stock with an extremely high days-to-cover ratio and short interest.

First, check out this long-term uptrend in A-Mark Precious Metals $AMRK:

There aren't many precious metals stocks that look this good...

Here's how we're trading it:

The stage is set for a strategic shift.

Since this summer, safe haven assets have been catching a bid and outperforming across the board.

Investors are paying attention to growth indicators like ISM and PMI data. Other investors are looking at CPI and paying extra-close attention to the Fed… 

Here's the US Core Inflation Rate along with the 7-10 Year Treasury Bond ETF $IEF. Since inflation peaked and rolled over in 2022, bonds have been building a massive base:

However, similar to economic growth data, inflation is a lagging indicator.

The same is true for employment.

Here's the unemployment rate along with the 2s/10s spread.

We are starting to see some pressure in the labor market, which goes hand-in-hand with rising treasury spreads.

July job openings dropped to 7.67 million, the lowest since January 2021. This marks a significant decline from the March 2022 peak of 12.2 million. 

There were only 1.1 jobs for every unemployed person, down from 2.0 last year. Major declines were seen in healthcare, government, and transportation. Voluntary quits decreased to 3.3 million...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.

However, when it comes to this one, it couldn't be any simpler!

With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US stocks.

Welcome to The Junior Hall of Famers.

This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That's good enough for us.

The bottom line is it is a bull market. We want as many vehicles and...

We're now over 2 years into a bull market, so you know what that means?

It means correlations have come off a lot.

Keep in mind that when volatility spikes, correlations among S&P500 components shoot up to one. 

It seems like they all move together, either up or down, depending on how the day goes.

We saw that in 2022 and we most certainly saw that during Covid.

But now that we're 2 years into this bull market, correlations have come off so much that it is easier than ever to find BOTH winners and losers out there.

This is NOT an "everything moves together" market. It's actually the furthest thing from it.

Take a look at SharkNinja, for example, making new all-time highs again this month.

Earlier this week I was just trying to do some harmless research on SharkNinja $SN and now I got my wife asking me why I'm looking at women's vibrators on amazon...

"It's just part of the job babe. Just part of the job..."

Apparently SharkNinja's product line extends beyond vacuum cleaners and blenders.

I had to learn that one the hard way...

Meanwhile, a big question I find myself asking here is...