It's the weekly currency edition of What the FICC?
The US dollar index $DXY registered a "death cross" last week, confirming a bearish trend reversal.
But it's not the confirmation of the dollar downtrend that has my attention. It's what the signal suggests for stocks in the coming months and quarters.
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...
Dynamic Portfolio Update: With new highs outpacing new lows every day so far this year, our net new high A/D line has turned higher and moved our "Fear or Strength" tactical model into its bullish zone. We are following the model and increasing risk exposure in the Tactical Opportunity portfolio.
The Investors Intelligence measure of advisory services sentiment shows Bulls rising to their highest level in over a year. Bears have not (yet) undercut their summer lows and the Bull-Bear spread is still just below its August peak.
Why It Matters: We need bulls to have a bull market. This flies in the face of a desire to only see sentiment from a contrarian perspective. The way I learned it, it pays to go with the crowd until it reverses at an extreme. After the persistent and excessive pessimism of 2022 (which was certainly present in word if not deed), the best prospects for a sustained rally at this juncture is for investors to shift their attitudes and embrace stocks. A failure for investors to turn more optimistic at this juncture could hasten a longer-term positioning re-balance. We have gotten hints of that in recent weeks as ETF flows show investors eschewing US equities in favor of international equities and fixed income ETFs.