From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It's like a hangover: The market was in party mode all last week, and now it's coming off its high.

$SPY has support at 416.70. Below that is 414.51.

My spidey senses are beginning to tingle with speculative fervor.

What we're seeing in the AI space as well as in the comeback in cryptocurrencies as of late has me thinking speculative players are soon to begin widening their net to capture alpha.

And some of these highly shorted equities with crypto exposure could be extremely ripe for short squeezes.

High on this list is Marathon Digital Holdings $MARA. It currently has in the neighborhood of 40% of its outstanding shares held in short positions. That is some major fuel for a short-covering rally if this stock starts ripping.

Here are a bunch of pictures illuminating why we think $MARA might be set up for a run higher. First up, the $MARA chart:

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

The largest insider buy on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.A.

In his third filing since May 17, Buffett reported the acquisition of another 4,660,809 shares, equivalent to $272 million.

This is the big question for me right now. Do we get rotation into the sectors that led this market off the lows last June?

We'll be discussing it on our NEW Morning Show today. Make sure to catch us LIVE from 830AM - 10AM ET using this link.

First, here's what I mean.

Check out these 3 Index Funds that have been underperforming this year. Financials and Small-caps flirting with last summers lows, and I threw Industrials in there too as a representation of the more Value areas of the market:

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Today is the last day of May!

We started the month as high as 417 on $SPY and, as of now, we're at 419.

$QQQ was the leader -- the only index that had real strength, the others not so much.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended May 26, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated 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 options activity, or...

It's not going to be finished in my lifetime or in yours or my kids' or grandkids'. That's not the point. The point is to get it started.

~ Korczak Ziolkowski

Last weekend, I took a little six-hour road trip to South Dakota to spend a full day hiking in Badlands National Park. It was amazing. The landscape is stunning and challenging to describe. It’s not quite desert. It’s not quite grassland. It’s not quite mountainous. It’s remote. Some have likened it to a moonscape. But even that doesn’t quite capture it.

You just have to go and experience it for yourself. Trust me – it’s worth it.

I also took advantage of my proximity to Mt. Rushmore to arrive at 7 a.m. the next day. I was one of the only people in the park and was lucky to have Mt. Rushmore to myself for the better part of an hour....

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

"Buy stocks if the US Dollar Index $DXY trades below 105!"

Simple and straightforward. That was our roadmap back in early March.

Now, almost three months later, the dollar is putting that strategy to the test as it approaches 105 from below.

That multi-month consolidation with “continuation pattern” written all over it never continued lower.

Instead, the dollar index has chopped sideways within a tight range for almost six months. And the evidence is beginning to support a possible upside resolution…

The lack of broad US dollar weakness caught my attention back in April. 

Our G-10 currency index and US dollar advance-decline line were printing potential higher lows, while DXY was on the verge of undercutting pivot lows from earlier in the year. The divergence suggested burgeoning USD strength.

Interestingly, DXY has gained roughly 3.5% since.

The G-10 index is now posting a series of higher...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

All-time highs remain out of reach for gold bugs.

But not all is lost. In fact, I still see constructive consolidations on longer time frames. 

It’s messy. But I’m impressed with gold's and silver’s resilience as they twist and bend beneath supply.

But how low can they go before they break…

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market seemed very slow today after a long holiday weekend.

As of now, the indices are consolidating.

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

All-time highs remain out of reach for gold bugs.

But not all is lost. In fact, I still see constructive consolidations on longer time frames. 

It’s messy. But I’m impressed with gold’s and silver’s resilience as they twist and bend beneath supply.

But how low can they go before they break…

For gold, I’m focusing on the prior commodity supercycle peak at roughly 1,924. 

If it loses those former highs, the key retracement level at approximately 1,825 highlights the next potential support area:

I like this level for two reasons.

It marks a former polarity zone, coinciding with last summer’s pivot highs and the March pivot lows earlier this year. And it gives gold room to dance.

Gold futures are simply shimmying within a multi-year range as long as they hold above the March lows. 

I imagine the gold bugs find the sideways action frustrating. Regardless, the bull case remains intact from an intermediate-term perspective. 

On the other hand, the bullish argument becomes increasingly thin on a break below 1,825 as the lower bounds of the...

The next new position in our Paid-to-Play portfolio is:

The largest insider buy on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Carl Icahn, who revealed a purchase of $11.2 million in Southwest Gas Holdings $SWX.

Icahn now owns 15.65% of outstanding shares of SWX.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

As I write this note, $SPY has finally filled its gap pre-market at 421.22.

The push higher was brought on by the debt ceiling deal.

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...

You're hearing a lot these days about weakening market breadth.

But if you've noticed, those lies are only coming from journalists and other types of people with no formal training or experience in technical analysis.

That's like me pretending to be an expert in chess because I watched some people playing this one time in Washington Square Park.

If you think that the Equally-weighted S&P500 underperforming is evidence of deteriorating market breadth, you fall into this category of the misinformed and confused.

It's not a market breadth thing. It's simply a sector rotation thing.

Week starting May 29, 2023 | Edition No. 13 

Our mission at The Buzz is simple: to identify and profit from the most-talked-about stocks on social media. 

Every week, we compile a list of stocks trending tickers that are experiencing a large increase in the investor interest. We use social media data from our partners at Likefolio. 

In each weekly report, we outline 1-3 actionable trades. We also take a closer look at a few other charts from our list. Some weeks will have more actionable setups than others, as we don’t want to force trades. 

With any bottoms-up scan, many of these stocks are at the mercy of the broader market. We will always consider the current market environment when identifying our long/short ideas. 

None of these setups are guaranteed to work. Profitable trading requires you to take small losses and let your winners run. If price closes below our risk levels, we want to take the small loss and move on, to preserve capital for future opportunities. 

As always, feel free to reach out to me at Patrick@thechartreport.com...

In bull markets historically there's less of a need, or no need at all, for the safest stocks.

These defensive sectors include areas like Consumer Staples, Utilities, Healthcare and stocks with Low Volatility.

All of them made new 52-week lows on Friday relative to the S&P500: