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.

Have you noticed how it's the Value sectors that keep shining this year?

It's not Tech. It's not growth.

This isn't 2020.

This is 2021. 

Deal with it.

When was the last time you saw relative strength like this coming from Financials and Materials?

Every month we get a fresh batch of Monthly Candlesticks. It only happens 12 times a year.

I promise you guys from the bottom of my heart that there is no other part of my entire process that provides as much value and information as my monthly chart review. Premium Members can access the Chartbook here.

In the meantime, my friend Josh Brown and I have been doing these short monthly videos since last summer.

On this latest episode we talk about how the market is behaving like it normally does in Year 2 of Bull Market cycles. Choppy, messy, and with a much different profile than the prior year. And, not only is that normal, but anything else would be historically abnormal.

Defensive areas like Consumer Staples, Gold, Bonds and Japanese Yen have been shining. We didn't see that in Year 1. It was the exact opposite.

We like shorting the Nasdaq here and being very picky when looking for Value stocks to buy.

This is always a fun chat.

Hope you enjoy it!

The story of Value stocks continuing to be the leaders is something we absolutely cannot ignore.

But have you noticed? Many investors are ignoring it, particularly in the United States. "I'm a Growth Investor", is what they tell me lol. What even is that?

You can really see this rotation taking place in the ratio between the Nasdaq100 and the NYSE Composite:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to longer-term minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we’re turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we’re curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for 5-9 years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are “stocks that pay you to make money”. Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum & relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

By adding our technical...

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

Commodities continue to rip higher. 

Copper is breaking out to new all-time highs. Soybean Oil is trading at its highest levels in over a decade. These moves come as Grains, Lumber, and Base Metals have resumed their near-vertical ascent over the past couple of weeks. 

But risk assets hitting our price objectives or running into logical levels of supply are key themes playing out across the market right now.

As many commodities approach key levels of potential resistance, it raises an important question…

Will sellers step in as they have in stocks?

Let’s look at some charts that could provide valuable information for answering this question.

First up is Aluminum Futures:

...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The headlines this week focused on the, for lack of  better word, carnage in some of the most speculative areas of the stock market. While late week rally attempts have taken some of the sting out of those declines, many of the hottest areas from 2020 are seeing more breakdowns than breakouts. While maybe not as exciting as SPAC’s and Innovative Tech companies, I’m paying attention to what’s going on in the Financials sector. The sector made new highs this week (as did Materials and Industrials), and its new high list expanded as well. The 75% of stocks in the sector making new 52-week highs is the highest in the decade’s worth of data we have available. Maybe I’m old-school, but leadership and broad support from Financials is not usually evidence of an overall market that is on the cusp of trouble.

Fortunes change. We've seen it time and time again, where once-prominent companies -- even entire industries -- fade away to shadows of their former selves or worse -- fade to oblivion. To the trash heap of has-beens.

But, occasionally we see these companies then reinvent themselves and rise like a Phoenix from the ashes.

We're eyeing one such opportunity.

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

We held our May Monthly Strategy Session Monday 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.

Anybody who has been tracking the market closely has noticed that the one sector which has been displaying the most strength off late is Metals. The sector-specific stocks have generated handsome returns in a short span of time and don't seem to be slowing down as well.

So for those who missed this rally, or those who are already invested, what are the levels to track going forward? We've got you covered.

Here is a comprehensive list of the best stocks from the sector. Some of these are actionable and some are price targets to track.

For me saying, "I'm a growth investor", is just a lazy way of saying, "I can't overcome my recency bias."

How is it not?

There's a time and a place for everything right? I mean, we're even buying Gold and Gold Miners these days, a far cry from the "Stay away at all costs" mentality that we've had towards those useless rocks since last August.

Same with Growth stocks. They had been the place to be for a long time, ESPECIALLY when compared to Value sectors like Energy, Materials and Bank stocks!

That all changed last September.

It's a Value World now my friends:

The DeFi Revolution is upon us, at least according to Jim Bianco. For many years, I've looked up to Jim and the work he's been doing at Bianco Research and, in fact, he's the one who first inspired me to rip through hundreds of charts during my live presentations in order to get my points across. It took me about a decade to realize it, but it was him who I got that from.

Fast forward to 2021, and the Macro Technician who I've always admired has turned into one of the leading voices of what's taking place in DeFi, or "Decentralized Finance". Who better to talk to about what's going on than Jim himself? Ethereum, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Yield Farming, Metamask Wallets, Coinbase....the whole thing.

We dive right into it and talk about how investors of all kinds can take advantage of this revolution into a decentralized world. Traders, Investors, Financial Advisors and even their clients....what does everyone do about...