Metals are soaring and we're tracking this space to see if the sector breaks above its resistance. We are currently working on the Quarterly Playbook for our Premium members but wanted to pause and share some interesting ideas with you guys here.

Did you see Crude Oil breaking out above all of those former lows from the past 4 years?

Wow, Crude Oil is back!

Take a look at this massive topping pattern that completed in the first quarter this year. Crude Oil prices are now back above that massive neckline.

This is the video recording of our January 4, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

After several months of consolidation, the major indexes have set the foundation for another leg upward in line with their primary trends. We've been seeing many of them resolve higher in recent weeks.

We continue to see rotation into economically sensitive and cyclical assets - supporting our view that there is a strong appetite, not aversion, for risk.

And the FICC markets continue to confirm this bullish environment for stocks and risk assets.

Let's jump right into this week's report with our US index table.

The defensive Dow Jones Utilities Average was...

Consumer Staples stocks are breaking out to new all-time highs. These are the stocks representing the companies whose services and products we as consumers would still buy regardless of how bad the economy might be. These stocks historically outperform by a lot when stocks in general are under pressure, which makes sense right?

I mean, no matter what, we're still going to brush our teeth and wash our dishes, drink beers and smoke cigarettes. Those are the "Consumer Staples": Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Philip Morris, etc.

When stocks are doing well, you'll see Staples underperforming, because money is less willing to pay up for those defensive less growthy stocks. I wrote about this here and how this plays into our approach in the current market environment.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger more Macro thesis, we couldn't be happier to roll out and share our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We'll also be writing a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist. This is the first edition.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy.

And what better time than now to launch a small-cap focused column!? We've seen very strong evidence of a structural rotation down the market cap scale, suggesting a new period of outperformance from small-caps in recent months/quarters.

This should be a great way to take advantage of that trend. Let's dive right in!

Here...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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, and Salesforce, to a myriad of others… all would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table you will notice we are only...

Nifty Infra is pushing up against its long-term resistance. While the index has halted at these levels before, current market rally may lead to a breakout soon, going by the bullish momentum we're seeing in the index.

We've been tracking the cement space, and while earlier there were limited actionable trades, recent buying interest grabbed our attention again. We decided to dig a little deeper and found some actionable ideas.

Let’s take a look at this space and see what the charts have to say.

Nifty Infrastructure is taking another shot at its long-term resistance. With RSI alluding to bullish momentum and price moving higher, we could witness a good move in this sector going forward.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

Since we wanted to focus on Cement stocks, we created an equally weighted custom index dedicated to this space- ASC Cement Index. The custom index has taken support from a level with a lot of...

Since June, we've seen so many different breadth thrusts in the Large-cap Indexes, Small-cap Indexes and even within specific sectors. They keep showing up.

So when you look back historically, these breadth thrusts tend to come near the beginning of strong uptrends, not near the end of them. Go back in history and you'll notice how consistent this is.

So today, I thought I'd share some thoughts from the peanut gallery regarding my comments about this being the beginning of a new bull market, and not the end of one.

Enjoy:

When assets are in strong uptrends, they tend to not just do well on an absolute basis, but they also outperform their alternatives. In the case of stocks, some good alternatives would be Bonds and Gold. No, not bitcoin.

So with stocks all over the world breaking out to new highs, more and more stocks participating, and even the biggest laggards around the world catching a bid, how are they performing relative to their alternatives?

Well, here is Gold vs the Nasdaq Composite breaking down to new 19-year lows. The trend is strong in this one:

The bullish trend in the market continues as more and more sectors and subsets join the rally. We have maintained our bullish stance on the Financial Services sector for quite some time but we thought we should dig a little deeper this time. Today we decided to look at a subset that has been performing well and could witness greater returns in the weeks and months ahead - Insurance.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

The major indexes continue to hold important levels and many large-cap sectors have laid the foundation for upside resolutions and another leg higher in their relative leadership. 

SMIDs and Micro-Caps have had every chance to digest their recent gains, but we're yet to see that play out. Seeing such strong upward momentum from these stocks speaks to the healthy risk appetite we continue to point out.

FICC markets are also assigning stocks with a clean bill of health and supporting/confirming a continuance of their primary uptrends.

Let's jump right into this week's report with our US index table.

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