On September 1st, Sean and JC hopped on a Twitter Live Stream to discuss a recent trade idea for All Star Charts Options Members.

Here's the play:

"I like an $AMZN February 3800/3900 Bull Call Spread for an approximately $29.00 – $30.00 debit. This means we’ll be long the 3800 strike call and short an equal amount of 3900 strike calls."

To learn more about the trade and the thinking behind it, click below to watch a replay of the Live Stream.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

As many of you know, something we’ve been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!

One way we’re doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega-cap status (over $200B).

Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.

But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

On this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Ed Clissold, Chief U.S. Strategist at Ned Davis Research.

I've been a big fan of Ed's work for a long time, not to mention Ned Davis is one of my personal heroes.

The work they do over there has been inspiring to me throughout my entire career. So as you can imagine, it was so fun and such a pleasure to chat with Ed.

We talk about Market Breadth, Sector Trends, Momentum and Seasonality.

If you have any exposure whatsoever in the market, or even thinking about putting on exposure, then this is the episode for you!

Enjoy!

During our team's weekly strategy meeting this morning, we were chatting about how the retail sector has just been hanging in there. And don't we know it -- we've had a long puts play in $XRT (the retailers ETF) since late July that hasn't gone anywhere for us. Our thinking was this sector would be the one to lead us down if the markets wanted to trade down.

Instead, it's been hanging tough and JC remarked that it might act as "a big trampoline" for some of the notable names in the space if we start moving higher.

And of course, the 800-pound gorilla in the space is Amazon $AMZN, so if we're going to play a move higher in retailers, it makes sense to start here.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley

Two months ago, we laid out plans to position ourselves for a push higher in the USD.

Of the four trade setups we identified--EUR/USD, GBP/USD, AUD/USD, and NZD/USD--the Aussie was the only one that worked. 

The fact that many of those trades failed or, more specifically, were never even triggered at all, is information!

Fast forward to today and we're looking at a failed breakout in the US Dollar Index that's been confirmed by strong downside follow-through since last week. Now, it’s time to flip the book long on some of these trades to express our thesis of further USD weakness, at least over the near term.

One trade setup that stands out due to its asymmetric risk-reward profile at current levels is the NZD/USD.

Let’s take a look at the Kiwi...

Here’s the daily chart of the NZD/USD cross:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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 stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest "Minor Leaguers" report.

We've already had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it late last year and started rotating it with our flagship bottoms-up scan, "Under The Hood."

To make the cut for our Minor Leagues list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters. Then, we simply sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus on the best players.

The goal is to catch the strongest names while they're small and still have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climbs the ranks to the big leagues, the returns could be huge. We're looking at 5-10x moves just to break into large-cap land!

Let's dive into this week's report and see what's happening in some of the hottest stocks in the Minor Leagues.

This is one I get asked about all the time.

"JC, are there any books you recommend for someone trying to learn more about Technical Analysis?"

The answer is yes. Of course.

The thing is, back in the day when I was studying for my CMT exams, there wasn't a well-defined curriculum like there is today. This was back in 2006. They would just give us a list of books to read and wish us the best of luck!

I really enjoyed that, actually. To this day I still tell people to go through the curriculum like they ask you to, but then go back and read the books too!

Now, if I had to do it all over again today, this is what I would do:

When Consumer Staples are underperforming, what type of environment are normally in?

Staples are making new multi-decade lows relative to the S&P500 and flirting with a catastrophic breakdown relative to Consumer Discretionary stocks:

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

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.

You can find the whole list of trades here.

Below you'll find the full PDF of this week's charts:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Pockets of strength continue to emerge within commodities.

This could be hard for some to believe when we see things like energy chopping beneath overhead supply.

Or the fact that precious metals persist in slumming it as some of the worst-performing assets on the planet.

But this is a diverse asset class with plenty of bright spots that suggest strength and support our thesis of a new commodities supercycle.

We’ve recently covered breakouts in Sugar and Feeder Cattle that are both still in play.

Even some of the laggards, like Silver and Lumber, recently defended critical areas of support.

This week, it was impossible to miss the chart of Oat futures. Let’s have a look!