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 relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

We discussed markets remaining more or less a mixed bag over recent weeks/months. At the same time, we've pointed out how the weight of the evidence continues to tilt gradually in the direction of the bulls, particularly due to the action we've observed in key risk assets.

As November gets under way, it’s time to review positions with November options that remain open (haven’t already hit profit targets or been stopped out).

Most trades I put on for All Star Options tend to have a minimum duration of 30 days (short premium plays) and often as long as 6-8 months (for long premium plays). As options approach expiration, greeks like theta and gamma start to become my enemy and whipsaw my P/L. Therefore, as options and spreads get into the expiration month, my best practice is to put each position on notice — it’s time to take action.

This month, we have four open positions with November options remaining on the books. All the rest have already hit their profit targets or stop loss levels. In the scoreboard below I denote the date we exited each position.

Here’s the scoreboard:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to our "Under The Hood" column for the week ended October 30, 2020.

What we do is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names. There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: A list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

Whether we're measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers... there is a lot of overlap.

The bottom line is there are a million ways to skin this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data makes us confident that we're producing the best list each week and gives us more optionality in terms of finding the most favorable trade setups for our clients.

Mark Dow has been a guest on this podcast more times than anyone else for a good reason. Selfishly I always enjoy chatting with him. His perspective is fascinating to me because he does such brilliant job of combining price behavior with sentiment analysis and the global macro intermarket backdrop.

Mark worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in charge of Emerging Markets in the early 90s before ultimately running money for a Global Macro Hedge Fund in New York City. So he has a lot of opinions on economics and politics, but he's great at not letting those things get in the way of his price behavior and sentiment analysis. He's figured out how to separate them but also use his expertise to his advantage. That's not any task.

It's been a slow "ideas" week here at All Star Options for obvious reasons: the markets are getting destabilized ahead of the election and news flow on the Covid19 front.

As JC likes to remind us often -- there are no called strikes on Wall Street. We can sit in the batters box with the bat on our shoulders and just look at pitch after pitch without taking a swing.

This is one of those times.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Thanks to everyone who participated in this week's Mystery Chart.

Most of you said that you were buyers of this big base because we like to buy smiley faces, not sell them.

Unfortunately for you all I pulled the flip-flop on this week's chart and inverted it, so let's see what you were actually selling.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In this week's RPP Report we discussed some of the major developments recently such as the increasing bid for risk-on and reflationary assets, as well as continued rotation into more cyclical areas across all asset classes.

Our report focused mainly on Financials as well as some discussion regarding the recent outperformance from Small and Mid-Caps.

To follow up on this theme, today we'll dig into some other economically sensitive areas like Mid-Cap Industrials and Materials.

We'll take a look at the charts as well as the internals in these sectors in order to illustrate our current outlook.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Today we want to look at why the difference in Interest Rates between European and US Bonds are causing trouble in the markets.

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 November 2nd @ 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:

I've done over 115 Podcast episodes and I don't remember being this excited to interview someone. I've read all the Jack Schwager books and some of them multiple times. I know traders who regularly read these chapters as part of the mental training.

Think about it, Jack has interviewed the greatest traders in history. All of them. It's incredible. And you know what strategies he uses to trade his own personal money? Technical Analysis.

He's interviewed all of the best traders for his Market Wizards books. And he says about half of them choose their market direction using Technical Analysis. But almost all of them have some sort of Technical component for risk management. This concept of Risk Management is the one common denominator between all of the most successful Traders.

Jack also pokes fun at the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which you know always brings a smile to my face. He discusses some of the success of these traders and how their consistent returns over such long periods of time completely dismiss what he refers to as the Deficient Market Hypothesis.

Don't walk to listen to this one. Run!

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 relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

We discussed markets remaining more or less a mixed bag over recent weeks/months. At the same time, we've pointed out how the weight of the evidence continues to tilt gradually in the direction of the bulls, particularly due to the action we've observed in key risk assets.

This week, we finally witnessed a meaningful rotation into reflationary assets as yields rallied to their highest levels since June. We also saw a noticeable strengthening from cyclicals.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to our "Under The Hood" column for the week ended October 23, 2020.

What we do is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names. There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: A list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

Whether we're measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers... there is a lot of overlap.

The bottom line is there are a million ways to skin this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data makes us confident that we're producing the best list each week and gives us more optionality in terms of finding the most favorable trade setups for our clients.