This month, I'm going to start presenting these monthly reviews in a different way. I think what would be far more useful to all of you would be a review of all trades we exited in the previous month, as well as updates on any positions approaching expiration in the current month.
While we had a bunch of exits in February, we don't have any positions remaining on the books with March expirations. Let's get to it...
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley.
We held our March Monthly Strategy Session last night which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.
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.
Key takeaway: Another bout of late-month market volatility produced quickly frayed nerves. The VIX spiked and put/call ratios moved away from excessive complacency. Our tactical sentiment indicators point to still-elevated optimism even as sentiment surveys have eased recently. Risks arise when breadth deteriorates and a sustained shift from optimism to pessimism emerges. We are not seeing this yet. The $78 billion of equity ETF inflows in February (over the past two months equity ETFs have seen daily net outflows on only 3 occasions) suggests excessive investor positioning, but the risks inherent in that have not yet been manifested. Despite last week’s volatility, cyclical sector leadership persisted and defensive areas made new lows. That does not suggest investors are moving quickly to a risk-off posture.
Sentiment Chart of the Week: XLU/SPY & XLP/SPY Ratios
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
We think it's time to buy Gold Miners again, specifically the VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF $GDX.
The yellow metal has not been a great place to deploy capital over the last 6 months as the environment has significantly favored stocks over rocks... and risk-assets over defensive ones in general.
Owning Gold or Gold Miners has been nothing more but opportunity cost. However, there is mounting evidence that suggests now might be the time to jump back into this trade.
First, Commodities have really been working as an asset class. We've been pointing this out for months now, from Industrial Metals and Ags to even petroleum-based commodities.
Although through the early innings of this Commodities resurgence, Gold and Gold Miners have taken a back seat as prices peaked all the way back in the summer of last year and have been trending lower since.
We've enjoyed a ton of success with our bottoms-up scans and the columns they've inspired over the past year.
We've already launched four columns around them since last summer, and we have more coming soon.
When we combine these scans with our traditional top-down approach, they make it almost impossible to miss profitable opportunities and key market themes.
Today, we're sharing one of our internal favorites with you. It's called "Fade The Street,"and we introduced it in a report last month which you can read here.
It was a big hit and there's been a lot of change since then, so we thought a follow-up was appropriate.
Our Fade The Street scan leverages buy/sell ratings and price target data from sell-side analysts to identify strong stocks with significant potential tailwinds that can propel prices higher in the future.
In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."
We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist.
We've already had some great trades from this universe and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.
Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.
In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.
Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
Over the last few months, there's been a distinct rotation into Financials and other cyclical areas across equity markets not just in the US, but across the globe.
This topic is nothing new around here as it's been a big theme for us recently. Consider some of our calls from this month:
Intermarket analysis is always an area of focus over here at All Star Charts. Right now, there are a lot of changes taking hold beneath the surface in some key cross-asset relationships.
For the longest time, the alpha has been in the US... it's been in large-caps... and it's been in growth stocks. That's been the playbook. We know because we've been running it back for years now.
Although, we're seeing strong evidence that this is no longer the case...
One of the best things about our approach is that it allows us to be incredibly flexible and adjust our views as new data becomes available.
We pride ourselves on never being dogmatic. Speaking of which, despite how much we've leaned on secular leadership from growth and tech stocks in recent years, the data is suggesting we reposition ourselves in favor of Value (read more about it, here).
The bottom line is breadth has been overwhelmingly bullish and is one of the main reasons we're in the camp that this is likely the early innings of a new cyclical bull market.
Whenever I want to talk about bonds, I always know just who to call. Larry McDonald is a former bond trader at Lehman Brothers and author of the book, Colossal Failure of Common Sense. I highly encourage you to give it a read, especially if you're looking for some perspective on what really happened back in 2007-2008.
It's no coincidence that I reached out to him to come on the podcast. Larry and I had a very timely conversation in February of last year. So with the bond market recently losing 5-6 Trillion dollars in such a short period of time, who better to talk to than by favorite bond trader.