From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest "Minor Leaguers" report.

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 bottoms-up scan, "Under The Hood."

Ultimately, to make the cut for our Minor Leagues list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus on the best players only.

Have you noticed how it's the Value sectors that keep shining this year?

It's not Tech. It's not growth.

This isn't 2020.

This is 2021. 

Deal with it.

When was the last time you saw relative strength like this coming from Financials and Materials?

Every month we get a fresh batch of Monthly Candlesticks. It only happens 12 times a year.

I promise you guys from the bottom of my heart that there is no other part of my entire process that provides as much value and information as my monthly chart review. Premium Members can access the Chartbook here.

In the meantime, my friend Josh Brown and I have been doing these short monthly videos since last summer.

On this latest episode we talk about how the market is behaving like it normally does in Year 2 of Bull Market cycles. Choppy, messy, and with a much different profile than the prior year. And, not only is that normal, but anything else would be historically abnormal.

Defensive areas like Consumer Staples, Gold, Bonds and Japanese Yen have been shining. We didn't see that in Year 1. It was the exact opposite.

We like shorting the Nasdaq here and being very picky when looking for Value stocks to buy.

This is always a fun chat.

Hope you enjoy it!

The story of Value stocks continuing to be the leaders is something we absolutely cannot ignore.

But have you noticed? Many investors are ignoring it, particularly in the United States. "I'm a Growth Investor", is what they tell me lol. What even is that?

You can really see this rotation taking place in the ratio between the Nasdaq100 and the NYSE Composite:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to longer-term minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we’re turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we’re curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for 5-9 years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are “stocks that pay you to make money”. Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum & relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

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

Commodities continue to rip higher. 

Copper is breaking out to new all-time highs. Soybean Oil is trading at its highest levels in over a decade. These moves come as Grains, Lumber, and Base Metals have resumed their near-vertical ascent over the past couple of weeks. 

But risk assets hitting our price objectives or running into logical levels of supply are key themes playing out across the market right now.

As many commodities approach key levels of potential resistance, it raises an important question…

Will sellers step in as they have in stocks?

Let’s look at some charts that could provide valuable information for answering this question.

First up is Aluminum Futures:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley.

We held our May Monthly Strategy Session Monday night which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

For these calls, we really take a step back and put things in the context of their structural trends by focusing only on Monthly charts. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises.

In this post, we’ll provide a summary of the call by highlighting three of the most important charts and topics we covered along with commentary on each.

For me saying, "I'm a growth investor", is just a lazy way of saying, "I can't overcome my recency bias."

How is it not?

There's a time and a place for everything right? I mean, we're even buying Gold and Gold Miners these days, a far cry from the "Stay away at all costs" mentality that we've had towards those useless rocks since last August.

Same with Growth stocks. They had been the place to be for a long time, ESPECIALLY when compared to Value sectors like Energy, Materials and Bank stocks!

That all changed last September.

It's a Value World now my friends:

The DeFi Revolution is upon us, at least according to Jim Bianco. For many years, I've looked up to Jim and the work he's been doing at Bianco Research and, in fact, he's the one who first inspired me to rip through hundreds of charts during my live presentations in order to get my points across. It took me about a decade to realize it, but it was him who I got that from.

Fast forward to 2021, and the Macro Technician who I've always admired has turned into one of the leading voices of what's taking place in DeFi, or "Decentralized Finance". Who better to talk to about what's going on than Jim himself? Ethereum, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Yield Farming, Metamask Wallets, Coinbase....the whole thing.

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

The first step in approaching any market is to identify the primary trend.

Is price going up, down, or sideways? Simple!

But it's easy to lose sight of the long-term trend sometimes, especially if you don't zoom out enough. This is why our process of looking at monthly candlesticks is so important. It literally forces us to take a step back and focus on the structural trends at play.

And that’s exactly what we did in this week’s Currency Report. When looking through all of our monthly charts, the big picture view of the US Dollar / Swiss Franc pair really stood out. We're going to discuss it in today's post.                                          

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When running through some scans this morning two new stocks came on our radar from our Under The Hood universe. 

You can read our most recent report here. It was just published Monday.

Today, we're going to discuss an Industrial conglomerate and well-known household name, as well as one of the largest Natural Gas companies in the world.

Not only are these stocks in some of our favorite sectors right now, but both are currently flirting with reclaiming key former highs. They also offer clearly defined risk levels to trade against, in addition to profit profiles skewed heavily in favor of the bulls.

We'd be remiss not to share these setups with you, so let’s dive right in and look at them…

Chop Chop Chop....Classic Year 2 Behavior for stocks continues.

Meanwhile, Crude Oil keeps on pressing up against these former highs. A breakout through 66 looks imminent.

This week we dropped a brand new 2-to-100 Club Report. Which names stood out from this week's scan?

And what about Fried Chicken? Which wine do we pair with that??

All this and more on the latest episode of Bearish or Bullish. Enjoy!