Before you put on your first trade or buy any asset, there's one question every investor needs to ask themselves:

What's my objective?

For most investors, the answer is pretty simple. It comes down to maximizing returns and minimizing losses in a way that fits within each individual's unique preferences.

Despite this, you'd be surprised with the number of people who use the market as an outlet to express their political views rather than as a way to make money.

We're raising this today as a reminder to stay objective and always follow the money flow, rather than the opinion of journalists or analysts.

One field that crypto investors are particularly susceptible to these biases is within the decentralized finance sector.

DeFi is the darling of the crypto world.

If you bring up crypto to anyone in the financial realm, DeFi is front and center in the discussion. Knowing all the flaws and inefficiencies of the traditional industry, it could certainly help pave the way for a new financial system. I encourage you to go...

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

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.

• This week, we saw a resumption of weakness in our macro universe, as 70% of our list closed lower, with a median return of -0.70%.
• The Volatility Index $VIX was the big winner, closing out the week up more than 19% and registering a fresh 13-week high in the process.
• The biggest loser this week was the Nasdaq 100 $QQQ, with a loss of -3.52%.
• We saw a 17% drop in the percentage of assets on our list within 5% of their 52-week highs...

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.

Last week we had a major development for risk assets as the US 10-year and US 5-year yields made decisive moves higher from their recent consolidations. Now this week, we have another significant resolution to talk about… Crude Oil just blasted through its 2018 highs around 76. This is all a part of the reflation, global growth, and reopening trade. The fact that oil was able to do this in the face of a rising dollar only makes it more bullish in our opinion. It’s also worth noting that Energy stocks and other energy futures besides crude are much more supportive of this price action than they were when crude last tested this level back in July. At that time, futures weren’t confirming and energy stocks had already rolled over after peaking in June. This time around, things look much different. We think the breakout sticks, but we need to see some follow-through from price to confirm it in the...

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 Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended October 1, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated 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 at our process.

...

If one were to simply observe the daily charts for $SPY or $QQQ while listening to the teevee, one would easily conclude the sky is falling. And that would be an easy conclusion to come to.

But when we take a step back from the noise and look elsewhere, the details under the hood are suggesting a different story. And that is giving me some confidence to fade the hysteria here.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaway: Price volatility fueling sentiment reset. Indexes under pressure as the tide turns against their largest components. Positive breadth divergences lacking.

• Higher rates are fueling strength in Energy and Financials - leadership from those sectors can be seen across market cap levels.
• Our industry group heat map shows continued deterioration from large-cap groups and improvement from small-cap groups. Some 8% of large-cap groups made new 13-week highs last week vs 42% that made new 13-week lows. Among small-cap groups, it was 17% at new highs and only 13% at new lows. 

Axie Infinity is the talk of the crypto town today, and for good reason.

This thing has gone in a straight line higher and doubled from our entry when we were buying it last week.

Now, AXS is trading at a market cap of $9B putting it among one of the most valuable video game entities in the world.

For today's post, we wanted to step back and revisit why we've been so obnoxiously bullish over the last few months, and take you behind our thinking of why we've put it on the buy list six separate times in the last few months...

Here's a snippet of our first post covering Axie when we were buying it in July:

There aren’t many coins breaking out to all-time highs right now, but AXS is one of them.

We just had to break the rules with this one – it’s currently trading at a tiny market cap of $750M, so it’s $250M shy of joining our Crypto universe. So keep in mind that this one is much smaller than what we...

This week we’re looking at a long setup in the Infrastructure sector. Nifty Infra continues to display strength across different time frames. One of the stocks that stands out from this sector has been featured here.

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.

To quote the great philosopher Tupac Shakur, "All Eyez On Me". 

Makaveli - The Don would agree, if he were here, that the focus needs to be on the US Dollar and Interest Rates.

The implications will most likely impact every single asset class you've ever heard of.

Here's the recent US Dollar strength as it runs into former resistance and key Fibonacci retracement:

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:

The stock market had a good day. But Commodities have had a great year.

The relentless bid for commodities doesn't stop.

Here is the CRB Commodities Index going out at new 6-year highs:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Energy is the clear leader in the commodity markets right now. Our equally-weighted energy index is up 13.76% over the trailing month and 6.58% in the last five days.

The emerging strength from this group is supported by a rising rate environment that could be just getting started.

So, crude oil to 100 dollars and natural gas to 9?

Maybe! But before we get ahead of ourselves, there are still plenty of mixed signals and divergences that need to be resolved.

One that stands out is the lack of confirming price action between economically sensitive commodities. Let’s take a look!

Here’s a chart of Crude Oil futures, Copper futures, and Copper Miners $COPX:

All three are consolidating within an underlying uptrend. But there’s one major difference.

...

This is the video recording of our October 1, 2021, All Star Charts Crypto Weekly Strategy Session.

This is the video recording of October 1st 2021 Weekly Jam Session with Sean McLaughlin.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Index-level volatility picked up in September and by month-end the S&P 500 has experienced its first 5% drawdown in nearly a year. Beneath the surface, we’ve been seeing increasingly widespread and substantial pullbacks since early this year. More than 50% of NASDAQ stocks are more than 20% below their highs, and more than 20% are more than 50% below their highs. These percentages have been trending higher since February and reflect a market that has churned, corrected and seen a substantial amount of air come out of it since Q1. With the indexes themselves now catching down, Q4 could be when the average stock starts to get back in gear.

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 October 4th @ 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:

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 big US names 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 what some of the largest stocks around the world are doing.

Here’s this week’s list:

And here’s how we arrived at it...

• We filtered out any names...