Like many people, we've been geeking on short squeezes lately. There's been so much action in heavily shorted names.

Pity the fools who are shorting stocks that are at or near all-time highs. If they want to try to be Heroes, be my guest. But we're smarter than that. We'll use these hurting shorts as fuel to catapult our trades higher. I recently got into Live Person $LPSN and Rackspace $RXT -- both of which are working. And I'm hungry for more.

Forget the hedge funds. You want to crush the suits?

Well, they still make sell side analysts wear suits and come into the office.

It's wild, I know.

Sell side analysts have worse herd behavior habits than your average investor. They have their cushy jobs (a few of them still do anyway). They get to tell their friends and family that they work on wall street, because some people still think that's "cool".

But the truth is, it's our job to take advantage of them. It's a lonely and dying business and they're not having any fun. In fact, they're finding it really difficult to run their antiquated valuation models on today's business. It's hilarious to watch them try.

Now, making fun of the situation doesn't get us paid. BUT, taking advantage of their conflicts of interest certainly can, if done correctly.

You see, they have families, kids in private school, expensive mortgages and used to nice vacations. It's a lifestyle. Their wives don't work and it's up to daddy to make sure the big check comes home every month, regardless of the cost.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

We've enjoyed a ton of success with the bottoms-up scans and the columns they've inspired.

We absolutely love our scans! When we combine them with our traditional top-down approach, they make it almost impossible to miss key market themes.

In fact, we've launched four columns around these scans since last year -- and we have many more that we only run internally.

Today, we're sharing one with you. We call it "Fade The Street," and it's one of my personal favorites.

The scan leverages data from sell-side analysts including their buy/sell ratings and price targets in order to identify stocks with the potential to become the market's next big winners.

How do we do this? Simple...

We scan for top-performing stocks that happen to be some of the most-hated and out-of-favor names on the street. Basically, we're looking for names that analysts have gotten wrong - or at the very least, are trending against their respective ratings.

We like buying stocks that are breaking out of bases, regardless of what sector they're a part of.

But when you combine a emerging leadership with these base breakouts, now you have a smokin' combination!

That's exactly what's happening in the Pot space. Make sure to check out our latest on Marijuana Stocks here.

But today it's the Cresco Labs that has my attention. 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to this exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe... on an absolute or relative basis.

Maybe it’s a custom index or price is inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with the asset in order to take a view based solely on price behavior.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now.

So let us know what it is... Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

In last week's report, we played "devil's advocate" and laid out some of the more bearish developments we could find out there.

But all-in-all, the market is still providing bears less room to make a sound argument. We continue to find that any bearish evidence is primarily isolated to shorter timeframes... and even then, still overwhelmed by the abundance of bullish data points.

Can you think of a more bullish combination than a bunch of angry people and indexes all over the world making new all time highs?

This is what's going on right now. And I think it's fantastic.

It's been a quiet last few days here at Allstarcharts.com as I've been meeting with the team and working on some really exciting new projects. I got together with Willie, Strazza, Peter, Danny, Jean Carlo and Matt this week, and we got a lot more accomplished than I would have imagined.

Anyway, I didn't completely fall off the grid, although I kind of tried to. Most of our conversations still revolved around the market, sentiment, breadth, rotation and the Intermarket relationships. I mean, even over dinner! We just couldn't help ourselves.

I'm seeing stocks making new all-time highs, but the questions I get from journalists is how it's possible?

How it's possible? They're in uptrends. There's more demand for stocks than there is supply of them. That's not my opinion. That's just a fact. There may not be as much demand for stocks in your household, but that's your problem. Not ours....

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ending February 5, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.

In this column, we 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.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers… there is a lot of overlap.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

Marijuana stocks have been smoking hot over the trailing quarter, with the Alternative Harvest Marijuana ETF $MJ more than doubling since the election on November 3rd.

Considering this new leadership role over the near-term, today we're going to do a follow-up on our last deep dive into the space, which we published last fall.

Back then, we were simply looking for a bottom and mean reversion move higher, which we got... Now, with the industry making new highs, we want to see how things are looking on both an absolute and relative basis.

And as always, we'll check in on some of our past trades in the space and highlight today's strongest stocks, along with trade setups skewed in our favor that we want to use to express our bullish thesis.

Before we get into the weeds, let’s start at the industry level with the Alternative Harvest ETF (MJ).

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

In a post last month JC discussed the recent strength in Commodities and posed the following question...

If the CRB Index is above its 2016 lows and Crude Oil is above all those former lows from the past decade, how can we be bearish commodities?

Over the last few quarters, we've seen more and more intermarket relationships make a significant shift in favor of risk-assets.

Many are showing early signs of a structural reversal and others simply accelerating in the direction of their underlying trend.

As February gets under way, it’s time to review positions with February options that remain open (haven’t already hit profit targets or been stopped out). This month there isn't much to discuss as most of our February options trades have already been closed out thanks to hitting their profit targets or getting stopped out.

Most trades I put on for All Star Options tend to have a minimum duration of 30 days (short premium plays) and often as long as 6-8 months (for long premium plays). As options approach expiration, greeks like theta and gamma start to become my enemy and whipsaw my P/L. Therefore, as options and spreads get into the expiration month, my best practice is to put each position on notice — it’s time to take action.

At the time of this writing, I've only got 2 remaining positions with Feb options.

In the scoreboard below I denote the date we exited each position:

Investors are so scared. They don't want to get burned. They've missed out on one of the greatest stock market rallies in history. They think it's too late for them to be buying stocks.

Here's the thing. I think we've barely even gotten started. This is the beginning, not the end.

Last week the Volatility Index saw its highest reading ever with the S&P500 within 5% of new all-time highs.

When people buy insurance at a faster rate than ever before, does that normally happen just before everyone is thankful they had that insurance? Or does that traditionally occur just after the disaster when it's not necessary anymore?

How funny is it that Saturday Night Live mentioned that the stock market is not working on 3 separate skits in the same episode last weekend?

Hilarious.