If you’ve tuned in to either of my “Expiring Daily” Twitter spaces talks over the past two Mondays, you’ve heard me talking about a trading strategy I’m currently in the process of iterating that involves daily expiring options in the S&P 500 options complex ($SPY and $SPX options, specifically).

A thoughtful listener sent me an email with a bunch of questions about it, and I thought my answers to him might be enlightening to some of you who may be tinkering with strategy construction, particularly with short-dated, high-gamma options.

As I told the emailer, I can answer questions as of my thinking RIGHT NOW. But please know this is a work-in-process, and I’m continually tweaking my entry/exit/adjustment parameters as I learn more.

Here was our conversation:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Money flows to where it’s treated best.

That’s the foundational premise of relative strength studies. 

Remember, we always want to buy the strongest and sell the weakest. It sounds simple. But it’s impossible to overstate its importance.

One of the best ways to increase our probability of success is to buy assets that are trending higher on absolute terms while outperforming their alternatives.

Those are key ingredients of a strong uptrend. And it just so happens that gold checks both boxes…

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 April 3rd @ 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

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

We've had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.

For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.

That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.

We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.

To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

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.

The Nasdaq just went out last week at new 7-month highs.

Growth stocks are back.

But why?

Interest Rates are falling at a record pace.

And when you look at the intermarket relationships, it makes a lot of sense:

US interest rates have fallen to their lowest levels since Q3 last year.

And with falling rates has come a consistent bid into Technology and growth all year so far.

That has driven the Nasdaq100 to its highest weekly close in 7 months:

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 Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Click here to check it out.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I can’t think of a better time to review the major commodity indexes. 

The rising rate environment is reversing, and it’s taking commodities with it.

Let’s dive in and see what’s going on in the space! We also need to check in with a key intermarket ratio, revealing where we want to position ourselves in the coming months and quarters.

Check out the triple-pane chart of the Bloomberg Commodity Index $BCOM, the CRB Index, and our equal-weight index comprised of 33 individual contracts (EW33):

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Monday night we held our March Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each

Let’s get right into it!

With Financials continuing to fall apart, we're focused on the assets that are making new highs - Bitcoin and Gold being 2 of them.

I was on Fox Business yesterday talking about the importance of the 2007 highs in the Financials Index.

Here's a fun behind the scenes look.