From the desk of Willie Delwiche & Ian Culley. 

Key Takeaway: The overall market continues to digest gains within a larger structural advance. Market sectors that relate to tangible goods push to new highs. Traditional safe-haven assets fail to ensure safety.

Financial, Energy, Industrial, and Material sectors continue their reign in our relative strength rankings, while mid-cap groups narrowly surpassed small-caps to command the top-tier of our industry group rankings. Though more defensive sectors continue to have the best relative strength on a short-term basis, Technology and Consumer Discretionary are starting to pick up in the near term as well. Small-cap deterioration persists at the industry group level, whereas large and mid-caps improve.     

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley.

We held our April Monthly Strategy Session Thursday night which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

For these calls, we really take a step back and put things in the context of their structural trends by focusing only on Monthly charts. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises.

In this post, we’ll provide a summary of the call by highlighting three of the most important charts and topics we covered along with commentary on each.

Let’s dive into it.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ended April 2, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.

In this column, we 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...

Signals act as indicators for what's to come or what we can expect. If you look closely, there are several signals that can be picked up from the market in order to stay ahead of the curve. A lot of analysis goes into arriving at the bottom of the funnel that is stock selection.

While the bigger trends are in place and their relative analysis helps us understand their strength and weaknesses, there are certain signals that can be picked up on a regular trading day as well.

Once again this month, I'm going to share info on positions that were closed in the month of March. As a reminder, our exit plans are always laid out ahead of time in each trade idea we publish. In every case, the exits mentioned below were all exited in accordance with the plan as laid out.

From the desk of Steve Strazza & Grant Hawkridge

Don't miss this weeks Momentum Report; our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector and Industry Group level. As a reminder, we analyze this shorter-term data within the context of the structural trends at play.

This week we're looking at a long setup in the Metal sector. Several stocks in this sector are performing well with our Outperformers scan throwing up another popular name last week.

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.

This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.

One of the things that stood out to me this quarter was most certainly the performance of Value Stocks over their Growth counterparts.

Take a look at the difference in Q1:

The big news to end of the week is Ethereum completing this monster base and breaking out to new all-time highs.

For me, I don't care if we're talking about Crude Oil Futures, Apple or Tesla shares, Treasury Bond ETFs, Gold, Silver, Crypto....

It doesn't matter to me. It's just letters and math. All that other stuff isn't my problem.

The trade has been to be long ETHUSD if we're above those former highs from 2018. It was that simple. The risk was very well-defined and the potential reward was exponentially greater. That's what we look for. And so far, that strategy has worked well for us.

But now, while stocks are on holiday, Ethereum is really making a go of it:

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Many of the same themes that we came across in last week's Commodity Report continue to play out.

Overhead supply keeps demand at bay while price churns sideways, offering mixed signals.

Like many areas of the market, Commodities are a bit messy.

While sideways price action and choppy market conditions are the norms at the moment, there is one consolidation in the Commodity space that demands our close attention.

As JC pointed out in last night's Monthly Strategy Session, one of the most important charts right now is the Copper/Gold ratio as its intermarket implications span far and wide.

As the...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Many financial assets made new highs in the first quarter. Gold and bonds did not. The drawdown they have experienced since their August highs has been remarkable - eclipsing 20% in the case of bonds, and approaching that level in the case of gold. In the Wall Street Journal’s list of Q1 winners and losers, long-term US bonds came in dead last (with a quarterly decline of 14%). For many conservative investors, this is their safe money and, especially for bonds, thought to be risk-free. The behavioral response to this will be interesting to track and may put further pressure on outdated passive portfolio management approaches.