The buzzword over the last few days has been the "Metaverse", but what is it, and why should we care?

Breaking all the headlines last week was the big tech news that Facebook was changing its name to Meta, realigning it with its future goals and ambitions. The metaverse is seen as the next iteration of the internet through virtual reality, primarily as a new way of experiencing the world of social media.

Following all this talk, virtual reality and gaming cryptocurrency protocols have caught a nice bid, with Decentraland and Sandbox up over +320% and +250%, respectively, since the Facebook Connect event.

And just take a look at the explosion in google searches about the metaverse:

This has acted as an immediate tailwind for the crypto and decentralized protocols pushing this technology and has certainly been a pocket of the asset class that is garnering plenty of attention.

We may not be early to this...

Monthly Charts are very important to us. As a team, we regroup several times, but monthly charts put us on the same page, without having to discuss it.

Process is an important aspect of any activity. And so, Monthly Charts analysis is an important aspect of our research. Without this, it is easy to get swayed in the short-term moves and get carried away by them.

You can sign up for our Monthly Strategy Call and get the whole update of the market. We're here to provide a glimpse of what's going on.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended October 29, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off with our "Minor Leaguers" column.

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.

Watch this video for a "behind the scenes" look...

This is the video recording of our November 1, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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 the stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaway: Index strength fueled by new found momentum. New highs lists are expanding, but not very rapidly. Persistent inflation, sputtering growth are a headache for the Fed.

• Consumer Discretionary has been the top-performing large-cap sector on a short-term basis and was one of only two large-cap sectors to make new highs last week (Information Technology was the other). The sector’s relative strength at the large-cap level is not echoed among mid and small-caps, but it is still fairly broad-based (it’s equal-weight ranking matches its cap-weight ranking).
• Energy and Financials have lagged on a short-term basis, but remain at the top of our relative strength rankings across size levels.  

The ASC team put out their latest International Hall of Famers list late last week. Here's what you need to know about these stocks: These are the 50 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs, which the team has applied technical filters to in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

And one that caught my interest just recently got its last quarterly earnings reveal out of the way and it is now trading above the level where we want to take action.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Top 10 Charts Report was just published.

In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.

Stocks Still Flirting With Former Highs

Large-caps continue to be leaders as the S&P 500 and Russell 1000 made decisive upside resolutions this past week. Mid-caps aren’t far behind with the S&P 400 pressing back above its year-to-date highs. However, small-caps are still trading in a range and have yet to make new highs. The bet we’re making is that all of these eventually resolve in the same direction. With mid and large-caps leading the way and holding firm above their breakout levels, we think it’s only a matter of time until small-caps follow.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Check out this week's Momentum Report, our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector, and Industry Group level.

By analyzing the short-term data in these reports, we get a more tactical view of the current state of markets. This information then helps us put near-term developments into the big picture context and provides insights regarding the structural trends at play.

Let's jump right into it with some of the major takeaways from this week's report:

* ASC Plus Members can access the Momentum Report by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.

• Our macro universe was a split decision this week as 51% of our list closed higher with a median return of 0.01%.
• The Volatility Index $VIX was the big winner, closing out the week with more than a 5% gain.
• Once again, the biggest loser was Lumber $LB, with a weekly loss of -11.38%
• There was a 2% drop in the percentage of assets on our list within 5% of their 52-week highs – currently at 64%.
• 36% of our list made new 4-...

The market is still constructively absorbing overhead supply, which hasn't been surprising to see take place.

Periods of consolidation like this allow sentiment and positioning to cool down while the market prepares for its next leg higher. If Bitcoin is above 59,000, we're making the bet that the shakeout is in the process of completing, and prices will eventually move back to their former all-time highs above 65,000.

But as we'll walk through in today's note, we're waiting for prices to ultimately reclaim 65,000 before we hold much conviction on further upside.

This week we’re looking at a long setup in the Infrastructure sector. The market has been quite selective over the past two weeks but we saw strength come through in pockets. Here is one such example.

Let's take a look at this stock.

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July last year 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.

The most bullish thing a stock can do is go up.

It's not about the company's earnings. This is not about the federal reserve.

It's supply and demand.

If there is more demand for a stock than there is supply of it, the price is going to go up.

Market prices trend. We know that for a fact. It's just basic arithmetic.

We know that market returns are NOT normally distributed.

That's why Technical Analysis works, because we're identifying trends.

What's the definition of a Bull Market?

If you say 20% price appreciation it's probably because you watch too much basic cable.

Are a majority of stocks going higher or are a majority of stocks going lower?

That's how we determine bull and bear markets.

And by the way, individual stocks do NOT have bull and bear markets. The concept of a bull or bear market is a broad market description, not reserved for individual stocks.

If anyone ever tells you that an arbitrary 10% move is a "correction" and 20% is a bull/bear market, then you know they can't be trusted. It's that simple. Move on.

So if you're interested in the way markets actually work, as of earlier this month, when breadth improved, we proclaimed that the ...

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 November 1st @ 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 Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

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.

You can find the whole list of trades here.

Below you'll find the full PDF of this week's charts:

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

Procyclical commodities have attracted all the attention this year as inflation and rising rates have driven prices considerably higher.

But, as we pointed out last week, many of these contracts -- Brent crude, natural gas, copper -- are running into areas of overhead supply or are already in the process of correcting.

With that as our backdrop, let’s switch gears and focus on an area of the commodity space we haven’t talked about in months.

That’s right... precious metals!

While we’re seeing many leading commodities pause at logical levels of resistance, gold and silver have finally stopped going down and are rebounding off support. Despite trending lower since last summer, they're still holding above the lower bounds of their trading ranges. We think this basket of shiny rocks is ripe for review.

Let’s take a look around the precious metals complex and see what’s new.

First, we have a chart of gold futures:

...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 50 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.

These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.

It’s got all the big names and more--but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.

The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.

We take the 50 largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.

Here’s this week’s list:

And here’s how we arrived at it...

• We filtered out any names that were...

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

While breadth has improved in recent weeks and months, the bulls still have their work cut out for them.

When we consider all our breadth indicators in aggregate, the evidence remains mixed. What else is new!?  It’s been that way for the majority of this year.

Many of the major indexes made new all-time highs this week. Meanwhile, some advance-decline lines are moving higher, but others are moving lower. Some are at the top of their range, but others are at the bottom of theirs.

The advance-decline line measures stock market breadth based on cumulative net advances. In other words, it takes the number of advancing stocks on a given day and subtracts the number of declining stocks. That number is then added to the previous day’s value, creating a cumulative advance-decline line.

A/D line divergences occur when price is making new highs and the A/D line is...

This is the video recording of our October 29, 2021, All Star Charts Crypto Weekly Strategy Session.