From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza 

The January Effect posits that financial markets experience a seasonal anomaly in the beginning of each year whereby stock prices tend to rise more than in any other month.

But this bullish period extends beyond a single month. In fact, our data show that buyers come out in full force starting in the late fall/early winter.

According to historic seasonal trends, the best time of the year for the stock market is from November to January. Smaller stocks are known to outperform during this period.

And if we’re focusing on small-caps, November is by far the single best month. So it should come as no surprise that the Russell 2000 and S&P Mid-Cap 400 are breaking out to fresh all-time highs this week. They did the same thing last November. In fact, November of 2020 was the best month ever for these small- and mid-cap indexes.

Let’s dive in and discuss some of the seasonal tailwinds supporting these new highs from SMIDs.

We debuted a new scan recently- The Outperformers.

The Outperformers is our newest scan that pinpoints the very best stocks in the market. It’s the fastest, easiest way to find quality names that are primed for major moves.

The goal is that as the market rally progresses, the sector rotation within the market will reflect in this scan. So while our Top/Down Analysis helps us with the broader view of the market, this Bottom/Up scan makes sure that we catch the slightest change in sentiment.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza 

We held our November Monthly Strategy Session last 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.

Let’s dive in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

Monthly Charts are very important to us. As a team, we regroup several times, but monthly charts put us on the same page, without having to discuss it.

Process is an important aspect of any activity. And so, Monthly Charts analysis is an important aspect of our research. Without this, it is easy to get swayed in the short-term moves and get carried away by them.

You can sign up for our Monthly Strategy Call and get the whole update of the market. We're here to provide a glimpse of what's going on.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended October 29, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off with our "Minor Leaguers" column.

What we do here 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.

Watch this video for a "behind the scenes" look...

This is the video recording of our November 1, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

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...

This week we’re looking at a long setup in the Infrastructure sector. The market has been quite selective over the past two weeks but we saw strength come through in pockets. Here is one such example.

Let's take a look at this stock.

What's the definition of a Bull Market?

If you say 20% price appreciation it's probably because you watch too much basic cable.

Are a majority of stocks going higher or are a majority of stocks going lower?

That's how we determine bull and bear markets.

And by the way, individual stocks do NOT have bull and bear markets. The concept of a bull or bear market is a broad market description, not reserved for individual stocks.

If anyone ever tells you that an arbitrary 10% move is a "correction" and 20% is a bull/bear market, then you know they can't be trusted. It's that simple. Move on.

So if you're interested in the way markets actually work, as of earlier this month, when breadth improved, we proclaimed that the ...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 50 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.

These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.

It’s got all the big names and more--but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.

The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.

We take the 50 largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.

Here’s this week’s list:

And here’s how we arrived at it...

• We filtered out any names that were...

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

While breadth has improved in recent weeks and months, the bulls still have their work cut out for them.

When we consider all our breadth indicators in aggregate, the evidence remains mixed. What else is new!?  It’s been that way for the majority of this year.

Many of the major indexes made new all-time highs this week. Meanwhile, some advance-decline lines are moving higher, but others are moving lower. Some are at the top of their range, but others are at the bottom of theirs.

The advance-decline line measures stock market breadth based on cumulative net advances. In other words, it takes the number of advancing stocks on a given day and subtracts the number of declining stocks. That number is then added to the previous day’s value, creating a cumulative advance-decline line.

A/D line divergences occur when price is making new highs and the A/D line is...

A couple of days back we were mentioning the areas of the market that looked weaker than the others.

Today, we are here to discuss the areas of the market where despite today's correction, we saw some strength.

Using relative strength charts for analysis is a great tool to have. But there is another way to look at it. When the market is correcting and certain stocks are going up, that is information. That is relative strength. And vice versa of course.

So let's take a look at the sectors that were displaying strength.