From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The documentary "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" tells the story of a small Sushi counter operating near a subway platform in Japan. The movie glorifies routine -- the day-in, day-out dedication to doing the same thing over and over again. It’s these details and pursuit of perfection that make the dream. We see how Jiro’s sushi is the product of hours of labor and years of experience.

Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky understood this concept well, noting "Habit is the chief motive force” in his novel "The Brothers Karamazov". 

Dostoevsky and Jiro understand there are no shortcuts. Instead, the embodied consistency of habit is how we grow and make progress.

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

The first step in approaching any market is to identify the primary trend.

Is price going up, down, or sideways? Simple!

But it's easy to lose sight of the long-term trend sometimes, especially if you don't zoom out enough. This is why our process of looking at monthly candlesticks is so important. It literally forces us to take a step back and focus on the structural trends at play.

And that’s exactly what we did in this week’s Currency Report. When looking through all of our monthly charts, the big picture view of the US Dollar / Swiss Franc pair really stood out. We're going to discuss it in today's post.                                          

And Premium members, feel free to skip straight to the bottom of the page to access the report. Our feelings won't be hurt. They really are...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

This All Star Charts +Plus Monthly Playbook breaks down the investment universe into a series of largely binary decisions and tactical calls. Paired with our Weight of the Evidence Dashboard, this piece is designed to help active asset allocators follow trends, pursue opportunities, and manage risk.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When running through some scans this morning two new stocks came on our radar from our Under The Hood universe. 

You can read our most recent report here. It was just published Monday.

Today, we're going to discuss an Industrial conglomerate and well-known household name, as well as one of the largest Natural Gas companies in the world.

Not only are these stocks in some of our favorite sectors right now, but both are currently flirting with reclaiming key former highs. They also offer clearly defined risk levels to trade against, in addition to profit profiles skewed heavily in favor of the bulls.

We'd be remiss not to share these setups with you, so let’s dive right in and look at them…

Chop Chop Chop....Classic Year 2 Behavior for stocks continues.

Meanwhile, Crude Oil keeps on pressing up against these former highs. A breakout through 66 looks imminent.

This week we dropped a brand new 2-to-100 Club Report. Which names stood out from this week's scan?

And what about Fried Chicken? Which wine do we pair with that??

All this and more on the latest episode of Bearish or Bullish. Enjoy!

It's been a while since we've had some bearish setups to tackle. My bearish muscles are out of practice!

But the ASC team during the most recent Monthly Charts Session pointed out some bearish developments in the Nasdaq 100.

We debuted a new scan recently which goes by the name- All Star Momentum.

All Star Momentum is a brand new scan that pinpoints the very best stocks in the market. This time around, we have incorporated our stock universe of Nifty 500 as the base. Among the 500 stocks that we follow, this scan will pump out names that are most likely to generate great returns.

While we go through our lists of sectors and stocks on a weekly basis, we thought of launching a product that would highlight the names that are the strongest performers in our universe and those that are primed for an explosive move.

Just like The Outperformers scan, this is a list of stocks belonging to the sectors that display relative strength in the market at any given point in time. Since sector rotation is the lifeblood of a bull market, we will be ahead of the curve before the gears keep shifting.

This is the video recording of our May 4th, 2021, Monthly Charts Strategy Session.

Here is the video in full:

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

Check out our latest Mystery Chart!

What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.

This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it’s an absolute price chart, other times it’s on a relative basis.

It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!

The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize it objectively.

While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…

So let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key takeaway: Evidence of excessive optimism abounds. Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal provide anecdotes for the data: Conservative German savers are increasing their exposure to stocks and investors in the US are crowding into the market, focusing more on chasing returns than managing risks. Cyclical views trend and strategic positioning point to elevated risks but stocks have been buoyed by a favorable news backdrop (positive economic data surprises and upward earnings revisions) and resilient breadth. If these falter and investor appetite for risk fades, those areas of the market where speculative fever has burned the hottest could be the most vulnerable.

Sentiment Report Chart of the Week: Long Equity Camp Crowded

Household equity exposure finished last year near record levels. Preliminary data suggests it has now exceeded its previous peaks. There is a strong inverse correlation between...

A funny thing happened last week.

Copper prices closed the month at the exact price where it closed in February of 2011, right before it proceeded to get cut in half.

If Base Metals were to correct, wouldn't this be a logical place for it to occur?

It sure feels like a long time ago now, but it's been less than a decade since the European Union underwent a rather serious sovereign debt crisis.

This set off a roughly two year bear market for International Stocks as well as a rangebound mess for US stocks.

After this bout of volatility, most risk-assets carved out significant lows in 2016 and rallied higher until global risk peaked in 2018. Then it all fell apart again last year.

This brings us to today, where we're now seeing European countries and indexes trade right back up to their 2018 or pre-COVID highs left and right.

While diversified global indexes like MSCI EAFE $EFA and MSCI Europe $VGK recently reclaimed their former highs from 2014, 2018, and are already well above their pre-COVID peaks - they are now approaching a far more important area of overhead resistance at their pre-financial crisis highs.

Last week, we used the BRIC countries $BKF to illustrate this theme of more and more international indexes trading at inflection points. Today, we'll do the same...

This is the video recording of our May 3, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood” column for the week ended April 30, 2021. This column is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off with our Minor Leaguers column.

In this column, we 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.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers… there is a lot of overlap.

The bottom line is there are a million ways to skin this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data makes us confident that...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaway: New monthly highs reflect broad participation and a healthy rally. Stocks struggle to celebrate blowout quarters if future growth prospects are not bright. Elevated expectations bar could leave stocks & the economy victims of their own success.

Sector-level leadership is unchanged in this week’s relative strength rankings. Materials, Industrials, Financials and Real Estate held down the top four spots for the second week in a row. Choppiness and rotation continue outside of that group. Rotation can also be seen in our industry group heat map. Improving conditions are widespread at the large-cap level and deteriorating conditions are widespread at the small-cap level (see page 5 for a chart version of this rotation). Mid-cap groups dominate the top of our industry group rankings (holding seven of the top ten spots).

SpaceX has made it cool to talk and dream about Space again. I'm sure many of you, like me, had dreams of being an Astronaut and walking on the moon when you were growing up.

Now that I've grown up, I dream of stocks going on rocket ship rides to the moon. Same difference ;)