The rotation into Consumer Discretionary is happening.

And isn't this exactly what we've always seen in bull markets?

You buy the pull back in the offensive sectors during bull markets.

That's literally what the BTFD stands for.

This rotation into Consumer Discretionary has been exactly that - a BTFD moment.

Look at Tesla up 10% today and up 30% since we highlighted the trade right here 2 weeks ago.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The smart money is snatching up Canadian dollars.

Last month, commercial hedgers extended their Canadian dollar exposure to their largest net-long historical position.

While positioning represents a condition – not a signal – we can only view the hedger's appetite for the loonie in one light…

Bullish!

Notice that extended commercial long positioning (the bright blue line in the lower pane) coincides with critical inflection points:

These market turns preceded extensive rallies in 2016, 2017, and 2020.

Before boarding the loonie’s next rip-roaring rally, price must provide a well-defined entry with a favorable risk-to-reward profile.

But the past two years of sideways action look more like a topping or bearish continuation pattern, not a bullish reversal:

The bullish argument for Canadian dollar futures doesn’t improve when we slap on a...

Last night was the big LIVE Event that I host at the beginning of every month.

There is no better way to start a new month, and in this case a new quarter, than going one by one and identifying the direction of primary trends for the world's most important stocks and assets.

Just for perspective, here are the S&P500 and Nasdaq100 Quarterly Candlesticks making new all-time highs, again.

As you can see, these are the types of things you tend to see in bull markets. You do NOT see them in bear markets.

This is the video recording of our July 1st Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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 now, 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 new highs in order to...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Investors are becoming restless.

Silver is dancing around a significant breakout level. And gold continues its sideways chop for the third straight month.

It’s certainly been a challenging time to hold precious metals trades – even for the most patient investors.

To kick off the third quarter, let’s utilize fresh monthly data to step back and review the primary trends for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.

This past February the market was running hot!

Too hot.

We saw some of the most bullish sentiment readings in years. And this sentiment came after a historic rally for equities throughout the 4th quarter last year that couldn't miss. Everything was working.

But things can't just go up forever. They need to rest eventually, and reset some of that excessive optimism.

That's exactly what happened.

Despite some of the growth indexes making new highs, a lot of the most important groups of stocks have done absolutely nothing since February.

Look at Consumer Discretionary, Financials, Industrials and Healthcare trading sideways to down this entire time:

I'm being told that the Consumer is dead and can't afford anything.

That's why "it's only the high end retail" that is doing so well....

Take Williams-Sonoma for instance. It's harder to afford the things they sell at this place:

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

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 $3T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Arista Networks and Crowdstrike.

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, we sort the...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Our cotton and sugar trades are working. Coffee is raring to go.

And crude oil is pushing toward a solid first-half finish.

Beyond that, commodities are dribbling lower.

Let’s review an energy contract that broke out two months ago and has never looked back—Natty Gas!

Natural gas futures are carving out an eighteen-month base below last year’s high:

I outlined our bullish outlook in late April. Natty Gas ripped the following week, rallying more than a dollar in just six weeks.

Now, price is consolidating within a twenty-percent range (potential right shoulder):

An upside resolution above the June highs offers another opportunity to buy natural gas. I like adding to current...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

While the market remains a mixed bag and participation is lacking, we're still seeing evidence of risk appetite.

How do we know?

The stocks that investors are betting against the most are making big moves... to the upside.

And we know just what to do in these environments.

We find the most heavily shorted stocks in our freshly squeezed universe. We wait for momentum to come into these names, and then we ride them higher with the squeeze.

We got new short data recently, so let's talk about how we're playing it.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions. When a stock is shorted, it means incremental buyers are waiting in the wings to close out their bearish bets.

We love this, as new buyers are the one true catalyst for higher prices.

When shorts are proven wrong, they become buyers of the stock. In many cases, this happens as momentum flows into these names and fuels massive short-covering rallies.

For this reason, we pair short-interest data with short-term momentum overlays, as this...