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.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point...

These are the registration details for our LIVE Mid-month Conference Call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

Our Live Call will be held on Monday September 18th @ 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 night:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Equities like a deadstick dollar.

But stocks can’t always get what they want – or “like.” 

A swift 5 percent gain in the US Dollar Index $DXY was not on the S&P 500’s wish list.

Yet that’s what the dollar served up following its mid-July failed breakdown. 

Unsurprisingly, stocks have struggled since, peaking less than two weeks after the dollar posted its year-to-date low.

The DXY is now challenging a critical overhead supply level as dollar bulls have once again lowered their horns.

But will they finally hook 'em by the end of the week?

We’ll know if the DXY decisively closes above 105.

That’s the level:

Meanwhile, investors and traders appear reluctant to relinquish the euro (the largest component of the US Dollar Index at 57.6% of the weighting). 

Perhaps US dollar bulls are making contact at the...

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.

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...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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.

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...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Precious metals deserve the benefit of the doubt.

These shiny rocks are in the early stages of their next secular bull run. But I won’t let my bullish bias detract from the obvious: Gold has seen brighter days.

Overhead supply dominates the charts while risk appetite cools and prices fall toward critical support levels.

Is it time to buy the dip? 

No, especially as investors focus on more attractive investments…

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 Ian Culley @IanCulley

I recently outlined five reasons to bet on energy.

While I stand by my line of reasoning, I did manage to leave out one overarching theme. And it’s an important one!

It’s a market theme that’s played out for almost three years, extending beyond energy to encompass commodities as an asset class.

I’m talking about the commodity-bond ratio…

Commodities relative to bonds was the most impactful high-level chart headed into 2021.

A major trend reversal favoring raw materials over US treasuries signaled a new, wild world on the horizon – a world characterized by inflation and rising interest rates. 

This shift in relative strength caught many investors off guard as commodities also outpaced stocks for the first time in over a decade.

Shockingly, commodities were back in the conversation as analysts struggled to deem the energy space a viable investment. (As if the price charts didn’t provide ample evidence.) 

Meanwhile, energy stocks...

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. 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...

Stocks are messy these days.

The major indexes peaked in July and the new 52-week highs list topped out almost 2 months ago.

This is all perfectly normal market behavior for this time of the year. In fact, if markets were behaving any differently, then THAT would actually be unusual.

Just like over the past 3 quarters. If stocks didn't do as well as they did, again, that would have been weird.

The market continues to behave according to historical trends, obnoxiously so.

And to be clear, it's when the market ignores seasonal tendencies that we want to pay more attention,...

While in the process of preparing for this week’s live Options Jam Session, I came across an open trade in $HMC that has been performing quite well for us.

It reminded me that when I wrote about the trade back on May 15th for subscribers, I began the piece with this:

I’m filing today’s trade under the category of “Hard Trades.” Not because it’s particularly hard to execute or because it’s a complicated multi-legged spread. It won’t require an excessive amount of margin to get positioned nor is there any risk of unlimited losses.

It’s hard because people might look at the trading action of the past few days and think that it’s “gone too far” and “I should wait for a pullback.”

And traders who think that way may be right.

But here’s the thing: sometimes the best trades to get into are the best precisely because they are the “hardest” to pull the trigger on. And that’s where our opportunity is. Those of us who fight through the conventional wisdom of average traders and get positioned ahead of the crowd will be lifted later on by those same traders...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

We held our September Monthly Strategy Session Tuesday night. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.