From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
As May just came to a close, many spent the weekend celebrating the kick-off to the Summer season at Memorial day barbeques. We did that too. BUT... being the nerds we are, we also spent much of the weekend pouring over some fresh monthly candles now that yet another one is in the books.
We only get this incredibly valuable information ONCE a month. That's right. Just TWELVE times a year. As such, we really cherish weeks like these.
So, let's dive right in and talk about one of the charts that really stuck out this month: None other than the good old Thomson Reuters $CRB Index, arguably the broadest barometer for the asset class as a whole.
With the Dow Jones Transportation Average hitting our upside targets last month, it's become a wait and see game.
Are consolidations resolving higher, like they were before? Or are they resolving lower?
Based on the overwhelming amount of evidence, the bet we want to make as that Transports resolve lower, and join some of the other areas that have already been under pressure for months, like Tech and Small-caps.
When going through the components of this index, there were 6 names in particular that presented the best risk vs reward opportunities on the short side.
The first one Southwest Airlines. This looks like a top to me. How I learned it was to buy the smiley faces and sell the frowny faces.
If we're below 59, we want to be short $LUV with a target near 48.50, which represents all that former resistance last year.
What we do here is 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.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
The US Dollar remains at crucial inflection points versus both emerging and developed currencies.
In last week’s note, we pointed out the critical 19 level in the WisdomTree Emerging Currency Fund $CEW, along with the numerous tests of support in our custom USD vs. BRICS Currency Index.
Not only is the USD looking increasingly vulnerable against emerging and developed currencies, but we’re now starting to see some of the major Dollar crosses break down or resolve lower.
In many cases, these moves are confirming long-term reversal patterns with USD/CAD. For example, the Dollar just broke to fresh multi-year lows relative to the Canadian Dollar.
We reviewed the chart in this column a few weeks back, highlighting the possibility of an impending double top.
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This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Thursday June 3rd @ 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.
This is one of our favorite bottoms-up scans: Follow The Flow. In this note, what we do is simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity - either bullish or bearish... but NOT both.
What we mean by this is that we have options experts, both internally and through our partnerships with TheTradeXchange, whereby we do all the digging through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients, in order to isolateonlythose options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.
We weed out all the noise for you in terms of hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades. What this leaves us with 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 the stock is about to move in their...
And then of course there's Dr. Copper which appears to have successfully defended former resistance turned support at its all-time highs from 2011. It's impossible to overstate the importance of how this massive base in Copper resolves.
Bulls definitely don't want this move to evolve into a failed breakout... The 4.50-4.60 zone is the line in the sand.
As for Energy Markets... Crude Oil making its highest daily close since October 2018 might be the biggest development of all.
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...
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
We’ve recently pointed out the possible double tops in the Dollar index and the USD/CAD, along with our overall outlook for further weakness from king dollar.
But can we find other areas of the market that could provide further insight into the US Dollar’s direction?
After all, many market participants are fixated on the direction of the US Dollar right now as it approaches its key mutlti-year lows.
Why does the Dollar matter so much to investors?
Firs of all, USD and risk assets have had a very strong negative correlation over the last several years. The USD Index bottomed in early 2018 as stock markets around the world peaked. Conversely, the dollar topped during the Covid sell-off when stocks bottomed out at their March 2020 lows.
To gain a clearer picture of the USD, we need to go beyond the Dollar Index and developed currencies.
Let’s look at a couple of charts of emerging currencies as they provide valuable information on broad USD performance, as well as...