From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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 inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

I think this is an important discussion. Which way are rates headed?

Remember, Interest Rates setting up for a collapse was one of the reasons we were so bearish equities in late January, and looking to own bonds instead.

The thought process in January was the following: If 10s are going to break their 2012 & 2016 lows, is that most likely happening in an environment where stocks are doing well? Or are rates collapsing most likely taking place in an environment where stocks are under pressure?

Our bet was the latter. We used rates as a leading indicator.

Today we're doing the same thing. But the data coming in is the exact opposite.

First of all, here are US rates going out last week at new 9-month highs:

Monday afternoon I popped on to BNN Bloomberg to have my regular chat with Catherine Murray. These are always fun because we focus on what actually happening in the market, versus all the gossip that revolves around it.

Remember, we're coming off my Just Buy Them Baby interview with Catherine from July. We got a lot of funny emails from people after that one. But as it turns out, just buying them worked out very well.

So where do we go from here?

Here's the interview in full: 

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

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 relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

In last week's report, we outlined how the market was in an incredibly healthy state of order. We've been seeing rotation into SMIDS and Micro-Caps, strong breadth, and a sustained bid for Growth, particularly down the market-cap scale.

This week, we're harping on a similar theme.

The weight of the evidence, particularly from an intermediate and long-term time horizon, looks excellent.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to our “Under The Hood” column for the week ending December 04, 2020.

What we do 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.

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.

The bottom line is there are a million ways to skin this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data makes us confident that we’re producing the best list each week and gives us more optionality in terms of finding the most favorable trade setups for our clients.

When I was younger I would fight trends a lot. I was that guy regularly betting on mean reversions.

Then over time I realized just how stupid that was.

I was actually a permabear in early 2013. I admit it. It was a great lesson that will help me for the rest of my investing life.

We all have to learn somehow.

But that's the point. We need to learn eventually.

Are you wondering whether it's justifiable for stocks to be doing what they're doing?

We continue to make new all-time highs, which makes perfect sense. More stocks are participating to the upside. More sectors and industry groups are catching a bid. And more countries around the world are breaking out.

And the bond market agrees!

This has never been about a virus or a vaccine. It's been about credit spreads, which are hitting their lowest levels since February.

If stocks were going to fall apart and these permabears were going to be right, for once, then we'd see it in credit.

We're not.

In fact, it's actually the exact opposite:

Last year Sean and I flew out to Tokyo looking for Japanese Candlesticks.

Here's what we found....

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. Stay tuned as we'll be adding more workbooks of charts this week to the Chartbook section.

In the meantime, my friend Josh Brown and I have been doing these short monthly videos since the summer. They're fun and I like how he pushes back against me sometimes. In other interviews they make it too easy on me. I like these!

This month we talk about the breakout in Biotech, Market-cap rotation into Small-caps, European Stocks performing well and what we're doing about Gold & Bitcoin.

Here's this month's video in full:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large, and ultimately to mega-cap status (over $200B).

Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B) they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.

But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.

The latest Under the Hood report is out, and as always, plenty of great ideas for me to sink my teeth into.

This week's report revealed a software name emerging from a pretty impressive base which has some pretty significant upside targets in it's sights.

This is the video recording of our December 1, 2020 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session