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 Wednesday December 1st @ 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.
Stocks up and down the cap scale were breaking out to new highs and energy futures were resolving higher from multi-year bases -- all while emerging-market and commodity-centric currencies approached year-to-date lows.
Something wasn’t right.
We’d expect these risk-on currencies to catch higher given their strong correlation with other risk assets. But this hasn’t been the case. In fact, seeing as currency markets had been out of sync with other asset classes for months, we really didn’t want to overthink this development.
But what appeared to be another mixed intermarket signal proved a valuable warning.
Fast-forward to today and the weakness that was evident among emerging-market currencies is spreading to stocks and commodities. Small-caps and crude oil are retesting critical breakout levels, and cyclical stocks are failing to sustain their recent moves.
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.
We’ve already had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it late last year and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, “Under The Hood.”
We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…
For about a year now, we’ve focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B. That was fun, but it’s time we branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
With Oil testing 76, Financials and Industrials retesting former highs, small-caps and even Bitcoin near critical levels, we want to know if this is just a pause, or the beginning of the end.
All this and so much more on the latest episode Pardon the Price Action!
Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 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 100 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.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
We’ve pounded the table on the weakness in energy these past few days, so why stop now? When we find ourselves hammering the same topic time and again, there’s usually a very good reason.
As far as energy goes, there’s been a lot of damage done to the space this week.
Energy has been by far the best-performing sector over the trailing 12-month period.
In October, we witnessed a handful of energy stocks and industry ETFs break higher from bases and reclaim their summer highs.
Without a doubt, these are bullish developments for the space.
But over the trailing month, energy has lost that leadership position and has actually been the worst-performing sector in the market.
Today, we’re seeing a lot of the upside resolutions from last month undercut their former highs and turn into failed breakouts.
So, where do we go from here?
When we look at the relative trends in the energy sector, we get a much different picture than what we’re seeing on absolute terms. Most of them never resolved higher like their absolute trends and simply remain messy, with prices stalling at the upper bounds of their basing patterns.
If we’re going to see sustained outperformance from energy stocks, we need to see them resolve higher relative to the broader market.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge
Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a handful of major indexes, like small and mid-caps, resolve higher and kick off a fresh up leg. But breadth has really cooled off since then, as participation has been declining despite the major averages rallying.
This week, we’re finally seeing that weakness show up at the index level -- particularly from SMIDs and cyclicals.
When we were reviewing our breadth charts, we noticed the deterioration in energy sector internals has been particularly bad. Not only is breadth not confirming the new highs from energy stocks… but there are actually some pretty ugly divergences in our new high indicators.
Energy stocks are currently vulnerable, sitting just above their breakout level at former resistance. Considering the lack of support from internals, this group is on failed breakout watch.
Let’s take a look under the hood and discuss what we’re seeing.
Energy has been coiling in a continuation pattern above its year-to-date highs around 56 for over a month now. You can see this in the upper pane of this chart: