This is the video recording of our January 4, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

After several months of consolidation, the major indexes have set the foundation for another leg upward in line with their primary trends. We've been seeing many of them resolve higher in recent weeks.

We continue to see rotation into economically sensitive and cyclical assets - supporting our view that there is a strong appetite, not aversion, for risk.

And the FICC markets continue to confirm this bullish environment for stocks and risk assets.

Consumer Staples stocks are breaking out to new all-time highs. These are the stocks representing the companies whose services and products we as consumers would still buy regardless of how bad the economy might be. These stocks historically outperform by a lot when stocks in general are under pressure, which makes sense right?

I mean, no matter what, we're still going to brush our teeth and wash our dishes, drink beers and smoke cigarettes. Those are the "Consumer Staples": Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Philip Morris, etc.

When stocks are doing well, you'll see Staples underperforming, because money is less willing to pay up for those defensive less growthy stocks. I wrote about this here and how this plays into our approach in the current market environment.

Anyway, here are Staples breaking out to new highs, and key extension level:

I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to have regular conversations with many of the top Traders, Analysts, PMs and Financial Advisors in the world.

So many of these friends of mine had their best year ever. Some of my friends absolutely crushed 2020, which is not surprising given their prior success and the increased level of opportunities sparked from spikes in volatility earlier in the year.

So what was the common denominator among the ones who succeeded the most? (because I asked them all)

They told me, each in their own ways, that they shut off the news and just listened to the market. You see, the "news" is designed to be a distraction. The better they are at distracting you from what's actually important, the more their precious sponsors will pay them. That's how that works.

The "news" people are not here to help you. In fact, in many cases, it's actually a malicious effort to distract. They know what they're doing. And they're really good at it.

I got well about 6-7 years ago, when I finally turned it off for good. And I've never looked back.

Me, JC, Steve, and the rest of the All Star Charts team were casually chatting during our weekly strategy session and Steve asked me: "What was our biggest options winner this year?"

Without a doubt, our best options trade in 2020 was long Peloton $PTON. We entered long October 60 calls in $PTON on June 17 when it was trading below $52 per share. The stock then went on a rocketship ride and touched an all time high north of $139 per share on expiration day Oct 16th, which we rode all the way. It rarely happens that we hold a long calls position all the way into expiration day, but the last 3 weeks saw barely a downtick, so there was never any reason to hit the escape hatch.

As we further discussed this, it hit me and I remarked to the guys that "What's your biggest winner?" is a bit of an unfair question. I don't think 2020 was a good year because of a handful of big winners. They certainly helped, but the real reason why 2020 was so successful was because PROCESS was our big winner.

Oh man this was a lot of fun! Fahmy calls me up and says let's invite everyone to a zoom call and talk about markets and drink Champagne.

Obviously, I said I was in!

We had two questions we were asking,

1) What was the biggest lesson you learned in 2020, and 2) What's your best trade for the first half of 2021?

Next July, whoever ended up picking the best trade gets a donation from us to the charity of their choice, plus I hand select a bottle of champagne and will be sending it over to the winner.

This was a great conversation with a group of really smart people. I'd be taking some notes on this one. There's good stuff in here.

Enjoy!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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.

Since June, we've seen so many different breadth thrusts in the Large-cap Indexes, Small-cap Indexes and even within specific sectors. They keep showing up.

So when you look back historically, these breadth thrusts tend to come near the beginning of strong uptrends, not near the end of them. Go back in history and you'll notice how consistent this is.

So today, I thought I'd share some thoughts from the peanut gallery regarding my comments about this being the beginning of a new bull market, and not the end of one.

Enjoy:

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 January 4th @ 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 Tuesday evening:

When assets are in strong uptrends, they tend to not just do well on an absolute basis, but they also outperform their alternatives. In the case of stocks, some good alternatives would be Bonds and Gold. No, not bitcoin.

So with stocks all over the world breaking out to new highs, more and more stocks participating, and even the biggest laggards around the world catching a bid, how are they performing relative to their alternatives?

Well, here is Gold vs the Nasdaq Composite breaking down to new 19-year lows. The trend is strong in this one:

I took a few days off over the holidays. I couldn't tell you the last time I went that long without a chart or a tweet. It felt good.

But you know what felt even better? Getting back to those charts and digging in on what's been going on around the world. It's not work for me. I mean it is, technically. But as you probably already figured out, this is something I really enjoy doing.

So what stood out the most upon my return?

I think it's got to be the victory laps from the bitcoiners on tilt. They're acting like they've never gotten a trade right in their lives. And that's dangerous.

Sure, we're happy bitcoin is doing well. It's already up 35-40% since our latest entry point a few weeks ago. That's great. And remember, this is after it doubled immediately after our last buy point this summer.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

The major indexes continue to hold important levels and many large-cap sectors have laid the foundation for upside resolutions and another leg higher in their relative leadership. 

SMIDs and Micro-Caps have had every chance to digest their recent gains, but we're yet to see that play out. Seeing such strong upward momentum from these stocks speaks to the healthy risk appetite we continue to point out.