Initial Public Offerings are exactly that, the initial offering of shares to the investing public. That's the beginning of price history.

This is how it used to be in the old days anyway. Today, we regularly see companies going public so their investors can take profits on their early stage bets. There have usually been several rounds of money raising along the way.

The liquidity is to pay investors, and not necessarily just to raise cash to grow the company.

And that bothers some people. But not me. I don't really care.

I'm only here to try to make a few bucks off the whole thing.

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

We’ve been super obnoxious about the deterioration in new highs we continue to see in the US.

But the major averages haven't been phased a bit. The S&P 500 and other large-cap indexes keep charging to new heights.

Yet when we look beneath the surface, we're hearing a different story… The vast majority of stocks have NOT been making new highs along with the averages. In fact, we’re beginning to see an expansion in new lows. 

This is a new development that's commanding our attention right now, mainly because these are the weakest conditions we’ve seen many of our breadth measures since last year. 

At the same time (and just like JC mentioned in his...

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 August 2nd @ 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

We're going to flip the script a bit this week with our RPP Report. We typically don't publish a report during week's where we have a monthly conference call as JC covers our positioning and summarizes our key themes and views there.

But we didn't do one last week either because we had just published our Q3 Playbook which laid out our current position in a painfully detailed manner (it was 250 pages!).

Premium members: read it here if you haven't yet.

In today's post, we're simply going to recap our "Key Themes For The Current Quarter" and update clients on some major developments that have taken place in the past few weeks.

We've got some important things to cover so let's get right to it!

The question I keep seeing goes something like this: "Will all this weak breadth finally cause a correction in the market?"

But the right question to ask isn't whether or not a correction is going to start.

It should be: "How much longer will this correction go on?"

As markets have gotten choppy lately, I've been on the hunt for more bearish and neutral trades to help balance out my predominantly long portfolio.

In this week's Follow the Flow report, Steve Strazza teed up a nice candidate for some downside exposure. The beauty is, the Options Gods are lining it up such that we can affordably take an aggressively bearish position that will pay off nicely if it works, while limiting our risk if we're wrong.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key takeaway: Optimism most likely peaked earlier this year, as options activity and equity exposure have continued to trend lower in recent months. Yet, our sentiment indicators show no signs of fear. Of course, it’s hard to imagine an environment plagued by fear when the S&P 500 and Nasdaq push to new highs. However, when we look beneath the surface new highs contract while new lows expand. It seems each day a new bearish divergence in breadth emerges, adding to the fragility and deterioration of an already shaky foundation. Without a supportive backdrop, a price correction or volatility event could lead to a meaningful unwind in sentiment.  

Sentiment Report Chart of the Week: New Highs?

The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ made new highs last week but looking beneath the surface tells a different story. There were as many stocks making new lows as new highs last week. Between the NYSE and NASDAQ, the new...

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

The current market environment demands that we adhere to our risk management protocols as strictly as ever.

It’s a mess out there!

And with each passing day, more and more signs point to these challenging conditions persisting.

There is one data point in particular that we believe is likely to remain a serious headwind for risk assets: continued strength from the US Dollar.

We’ve covered this theme in detail the past couple of months as USD has rebounded against just about every major currency we track.

As always, we will continue to monitor the dollar as it is a vital piece to the intermarket puzzle.

Put simply, when investors are seeking safety in the dollar, it’s usually happening in an environment where stocks are under pressure.

Last week, we highlighted the violation of a key pivot low in our...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

This is one of our favorite bottoms-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...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended July 23, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off with our "Minor Leaguers" column.

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.

Watch this video for a "behind the scenes"...

The market has spoken.

If you're not long Crypto in one form or another, that's makes you short by default.

Do you want to make sure you underperform? Keep Crypto out of your portfolio.

These are the current circumstances and consequences.

Here we're looking at the ratio between Bitcoin and the S&P500:

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

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.

I rip through more charts than almost anyone in the world. 

Here's the bottom line. Some stocks are going up, most stocks are not.

That's the answer.

You want know what's up? That's the deal.

So are more stocks going to start going up too? 

Maybe.

But right now that's the trend. Mostly a choppy sideways hot mess, with some stocks resolving those consolidations higher.

One thing I will add, however, is the lack of downside resolutions.

We're just not seeing these stocks and indexes breaking down and holding down. Or at least, we're not seeing more and more of them do that.

So the glass is half full right now. And I think if Regional Banks can get their act together and the 10yr yield can get back above 1.4% then I believe the glass could be even more full.

In the meantime, I think we need to continue to err on the mostly messy with a few exceptions...