All Star Charts Premium Articles

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 during their journey...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Commercial hedgers are taking an interest in the Canadian dollar. 

The CFTC has finally updated its records after the recent data breach.

And, as expected, we have some extreme positioning on our hands…

Check out the chart of Canadian dollar futures with the Commitment of Traders Report (COT) in the lower pane (red line for commercials, black for large speculators, and gray for small speculators):

Commercials hold their largest net-long position since early 2019. Extreme positioning such as this tends to mark key inflection points.

Why?

Because commercial hedgers represent the largest short sellers for any given market. And strong hands move markets.

Bottom line: When commercials get this bulled up on the Canadian dollar, forceful uptrends often follow as they unwind their position.

The stage is set for a rally, but it all comes down to price.

...

Fresh two-year highs for the Gold/SPX ratio stand out this week, as gold outperforms its alternatives. It doesn't get much more bullish than fresh absolute and relative highs.

With that as our backdrop, I had Jason Perz @JasonP138 of Against All Odds Research on the show to share his view of the precious metals space.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Money flows to where it’s treated best.

That’s the foundational premise of relative strength studies. 

Remember, we always want to buy the strongest and sell the weakest. It sounds simple. But it’s impossible to overstate its importance.

One of the best ways to increase our probability of success is to buy assets that are trending higher on absolute terms while outperforming their alternatives.

Those are key ingredients of a strong uptrend. And it just so happens that gold checks both boxes…

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 April 3rd @ 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:

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 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...

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 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...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I can’t think of a better time to review the major commodity indexes. 

The rising rate environment is reversing, and it’s taking commodities with it.

Let’s dive in and see what’s going on in the space! We also need to check in with a key intermarket ratio, revealing where we want to position ourselves in the coming months and quarters.

Check out the triple-pane chart of the Bloomberg Commodity Index $BCOM, the CRB Index, and our equal-weight index comprised of 33 individual contracts (EW33):

The EW33 remains resilient despite the BCOM and the energy-heavy CRB recently posting fresh 52-week lows. Its buoyancy speaks to lingering strength in various contracts such as orange juice, cocoa, sugar, live cattle, precious metals, copper, and steel.

But the environment is changing as yields begin to turn lower. I find it hard to imagine that commodities – at the index level – will continue to trend higher...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The Federal Reserve handed down a 25-basis-point rate increase on Wednesday.

And Fed Chair Jerome Powell implied an impending pause in the hiking cycle.

You know what this means...

It’s time to buy the four "Bs" – Bonds, Bitcoin, Big-Tech, and Bullion.

JC and Strazza talked about it on Pardon the Price Action earlier this week.

Today, I’ll highlight bonds with a couple key levels to trade against as we add these assets to our portfolios.

First up is the 7-10 Year US Treasury ETF $IEF:

It’s not there yet. But if and when IEF reclaims the critical shelf of former lows at approximately 100, we’re long!

The next potential resistance level hangs overhead at last year’s August pivot high of 105.75. This is a logical level to take profits or “feed the ducks.” 

But these trades are more about adding bonds back into the mix after last...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as "a market of stocks."

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions. But there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club.

We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports.

Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to the Short Report.

We...