From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

As I scrolled through my currency charts this weekend, the same three-word phrase kept popping to mind: "Can’t be short!"

Whether it’s the Swiss franc, the British pound, or the Thai baht, we can’t be short most global currencies against the US dollar. Not at current levels.

There is one major exception. It’s the euro.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like duck, then it's probably not a chicken.

That's how I look at what is potentially year 3 of a new bull market.

Look at all the most important cycle bottoms in stock market history.

You'll notice the powerful thrust in year 1, followed by a messy digestion of those gains in year 2. And then all those bull markets resumed in year 3:

This is the video recording of the August 2022 Mid-month Conference Call.

We discussed:

• Seasonally, this is the time to buy stocks
• S&P500 above key support
• More new highs than new lows for the first time in 2022
• Is Year 3 about to get started? What do other Year 3s look like?
• Average NYSE stock is up 33%, average Nasdaq stock is up 42%
• Financials Bounce Off Pre-GFC highs
• Russell2000 & Nasdaq100 above AVWAP off Covid lows
• Gold & Silver Miners down near multi-year relative lows
• A little Dollar weakness sparked a huge risk-on rally
• New multi-month highs for Discretionary vs Staples
• Apple highest S&P500 weighting of any stock ever
• Free ride in Facebook through the end of the year
• Healthcare plans setting up: $UNH $HUM $CNC $CI
• Breadth Expansion in Industrials
• Indian Banks are the leaders in Banking
• Energy stocks below overhead supply - work to do
• Which coal stocks are we buying
• Lithium continues to act strong, in US and outside US
• Defensive Sectors...

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.

And it doesn't have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to...

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...

This summer is the most ideal time to be buying stocks, according to the 4-year cycle.

Q3 of the Mid-term Election years. That's the sweet spot.

Do we see new all-time highs for the S&P500 before the end of the year?

The seasonal tailwinds certainly support that:

Today's Chart of the Day was a unanimous decision internally.

How can it not be this one???

Every single week in 2022 we've seen more stocks hitting new lows than stocks hitting new highs.

In bull markets we see the exact opposite of that.

Well, this week the bulls finally got it done. For the first time all year we saw more stocks hitting new highs than new lows.

It wasn't by much. But they pulled it off.

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 Ian Culley @IanCulley

It doesn’t matter where you look: Commodities are digging in, finding support, and reclaiming key levels.

Grains, softs, base metals, and energy have all stopped going down. Even gold is bouncing off critical levels of former support.

But it’s not just the fact the commodity correction is hitting the pause button that’s important.

It’s where it's happening.

Let’s take a look at a few charts.

First we have cotton futures:

Cotton completed a monster base, breaking to fresh 10-year highs last October. A strong advance took hold during the following months.

But it was answered by a near-vertical decline back into its prior range.

After falling more than 45% from its May peak, cotton is reclaiming a key level of former resistance marked by its 2014, 2018, and 2021 highs.

That shelf of former highs kept a lid on cotton prices for almost a decade. And the 2018 highs...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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 which you can check out here.

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:

Click table to enlarge view

• We filtered out any laggards that are down 5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month. 
• We sorted the remaining...

From the Desk of  Ian Culley @Ianculley

More pieces of the puzzle are falling into place for the bulls.

We’ve been pounding the table about the dollar and rates for months, and now they’re starting to take shape.

On Wednesday, the US Dollar Index $DXY broke to fresh lows, violating a multi-month trend line.

And interest rates… well, they haven’t moved much. They continue to hold their range after peaking in June. 

As expected, stocks surged yesterday in response to a weaker dollar and stable bond market. 

But stocks aren’t the only risk assets on the rise. Investors are moving out on the risk curve and bidding up high-yield bonds, too.

Here’s a dual-pane chart of the Fallen Angel High-Yield Bond ETF $ANGL and the S&P 500 Index $SPX:

ANGL is one of our favorite high-yield bond ETFs because it contains the...

These are the registration details for our live mid-month conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

Our next Live Call will be held on Monday August 15th at 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: