[9/7: updated stop to 56]

As promised during yesterday's The FLOW show, I'm following up on a possible trade idea we discussed.

However, after Strazza and I put our heads together with the rest of the Analyst team this morning, we're going to attack an opportunity in Schlumberger $SLB from a different angle -- one that can be rewarding regardless of which direction the stock takes.

Where I come from do you know what we call higher lows and higher highs?

Uptrends.

Do you know what stocks do in bull markets?

They go up.

And speaking of going up, we just watched the Small-cap Russell2000 Index go out at new 10-month highs.

Do you know what's not evidence of a downtrend?

New 10-month highs.

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 February 6th @ 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:

It’s easy to follow a trading plan when the price action is moving our way. We feel like geniuses.

Look at me! I’m so smart! The stock market is doing exactly what I planned for it to do! Let’s go car shopping!

But how do I feel if the price action goes the other way?

Assuming I’ve put a trading plan together that accounts for both the possibility of being right AND the possibility of being wrong, why should I feel any different when the price goes the wrong way?

What’s the point of putting together a detailed trading plan if I later exit the position following the first price move in the opposite direction I hoped for?

Why go through all that effort?

It's a market of stocks.

People forget that.

They choose to obsess over every tick in the S&P500 or Nasdaq instead of recognizing what's happening among the actual components of those indexes.

As it turns out, this has become one of our competitive advantages.

If you're wondering why we tend to be ahead of the curve on changes in major trends, I would point to this.

Most people don't have the time (or are too lazy) to sit there and count how many stocks are going up vs how many are going down.

I think about thinking quite a bit.

Maybe it's because I've read too many Annie Duke books.

But as much as I love Annie's work, it's the whole behavioral finance thing that I'm obsessed over.

I can't get enough of it.

To name a few of my favorites, Dr. Brett Steenbarger, Denise Shull, Daniel Crosby, ...

It's the weekly Gold Rush!

While Gold futures digest overhead supply, strength broadens across the metals space.

Check it out...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Plenty of gold bugs have Krugerrands buried in their backyard or basement –  if not secured in a safety deposit box at their local bank.

It’s no wonder gold falls under the “end-of-the-world” category of assets.

Regardless, gold prices can also rise with risk assets.

I raise this point not only as an important reminder but because it’s pivotal to understanding our bullish thesis for precious metals.

It’s a metals story….

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...

As well as stocks all over the world have been doing over the past few months, the overhead supply in the major US Large-cap Indexes remains in place.

In other words, these large-cap, growth-heavy, market gauges still have work to do.

A couple of months ago we reiterated our more neutral positions in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P500, wanting to focus more of our attention on individual stocks and sectors.

That tactical approach has worked out well.

But fast forward to today, and...

By my work, everything started to improve for stocks after June 16th.

That was when the list of new 52-week lows peaked and stocks started the process of going up all the time, instead of going down all the time.

In bull markets, stocks go up. In bear markets they go down, not sure if you heard...

Anyway, these days I'm seeing a lot of investors pointing to October 13th as the market bottom, because that's when the S&P500 and some of the other indexes made their lows.

But by then, most stocks had already bottomed. It was only a few of those large-cap indexes left still falling.

That's why ...