From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Last week’s fresh all-time highs left many gold bugs empty-hearted. 

The market continues to torment precious metal bulls as they wonder what could have been.

But hopes and dreams aren’t a viable strategy.

The only “what if” that concerns me is whether the yellow metal flashed a failed breakout.

Or are we simply dealing with a a premature move?

Let’s dig in…

Check out the weekly chart of gold futures, highlighting the breakout in question:

Bulls sliced through overhead supply, vaulting gold to new heights. But the bearish momentum divergence in the lower pane reveals a lack of fervor for the shiny yellow rock.

Divergences between momentum and price don’t guarantee a major reversal.

Gold can still break out as momentum divergences have a way of righting themselves. That’s why I prefer to focus on momentum regimes. They’re just more reliable.

From a structural perspective, the real nail in the coffin for gold lies just below the right shoulder trough at approximately 1,820. A decisive close below that level completes a failed inverted head-and-...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Cormorant Asset Management LP.

The investment firm reported the acquisition of 588,235 shares of EyePoint Pharmaceuticals Inc $EYPT, equivalent to roughly $10 million.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Cormorant Asset Management LP.

The investment firm reported the acquisition of 588,235 shares of EyePoint Pharmaceuticals Inc $EYPT, equivalent to roughly $10 million.

In today's Daily Digest, we'll review:

1. No new position today.
2. Defensive adjustment in ITB.
3. Exit in GDX.
4. Current status of open campaigns.

Let's dig in!

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Doug Field, chief EV, digital and design officer of Ford Motor Company $F.

Field reported a purchase of 182,000 F shares, equivalent to $2 million.

These are the registration details for our LIVE Mid-month Conference Call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

Our Live Call will be held on Monday December 18th @ 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 night:

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...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended December 8, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation with The Minor Leaguers.

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.

Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual...

From the Desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Remember Solana Summer?

We have fond memories of those times.

But it all changed about two years ago when the crypto market peaked and collapsed.

Going from 250 to the single digits in a little over a year, everybody thought it was the end of Solana... and everything else.

"It's never going to recover."

"It's all over for crypto."

Now look at us...

Spotify is trading in the spot where we can get paid on follow-thru back toward all-time highs. But we don't necessarily need it to get all the way there for us to earn profits on today's trade.

Here's a chart of $SPOT:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Doug Field, chief EV, digital and design officer of Ford Motor Company $F.

Field reported a purchase of 182,000 F shares, equivalent to $2 million.

In today's Daily Digest, we'll review:

1. No new position today.
2. Defensive adjustment in XRT.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.

Let's dig in!

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Julie J. Durr, the co-trustee of the Ann S. Gerdin Revocable Trust, which owns 10 percent of Heartland Express $HTLD.

Durr reported the acquisition of 182,268 HTLD shares, equivalent to $2,501,143.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Julie J. Durr, the co-trustee of the Ann S. Gerdin Revocable Trust, which owns 10 percent of Heartland Express $HTLD.

Durr reported the acquisition of 182,268 HTLD shares, equivalent to $2,501,143.

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 Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Whenever we want to gauge animal spirits in the precious metals space, we resort to our trusty intermarket ratios.

Two weeks ago in our Gold report, we covered the notable bounce we were witnessing in the Silver/Gold ratio, pointing to brewing risk appetite within this space. And this week, we outlined a bullish trade in the iShares Silver ETF off the back of this recent momentum.

But when we take this relationship one step further, we see a similar situation in the relationship between Silver and Gold mining stocks.

Here's a long-term weekly chart of this ratio:

Silver mining stocks are at their lowest levels since the inception of the fund relative to their less-volatile and lower beta Gold mining counterparts. This would be a very logical place to see a bounce in this ratio. Especially with momentum diverging on these most recent lows, if there were ever a place for Silver miners to see some relief on a relative basis, this would be it.

Now, to be clear, the primary trend...

Credit spreads have tightened a good deal since October.

I can't help but think this is just more classic bull market behavior.

As the major US equity indices have been rallying into year end, we've seen confirmation out of a number of credit ratios we track to gauge risk appetite within fixed income markets. Specifically, the the iShares High Yield Corporate Bond ETF $HYG is trading at 52-week highs relative to the iShares 3-7yr Treasury Bond ETF $IEI.

This ratio ultimately gives us an inverted chart of credit spreads. Check it out:

Notice how both the S&P 500 and the HYG/IEI ratio are pressing back through their summer highs. 

It's hard to have a bull market in equities if the bond market is positioning defensively. Think about it; the players in the market with the deepest pockets require an incredible amount of liquidity.

And they're not going to get that liquidity in small-cap stocks.

And most of the time, they're not even getting enough in large-caps.

So they need to resort to the largest and...