When I was going through my charts this week, this is one of the ones that stood out the most. I see Biotechnology, on both an equally-weighted and cap-weighted basis, breaking out of major bases.

More specifically, if you look at the Cap-weighted Index Fund $IBB, we're talking about half a decade of no progress. It looks to me like this is all changing now:

Click on Charts to Zoom in

Look at Biotech relative to the rest of the stock market. Again, I'm seeing a half-decade long consolidation resolving higher:

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.

Depending on where you're located, the month of November means many of you are looking forward to your first snow falls of the season. Were I live here in Colorado, we've already had two snow storms -- the first one on the day after Labor Day!! Don't feel sorry for me though, we love it. And with all the wildfires Colorado has had recently, it was badly needed.

With snow on my mind, it feels fitting today's trade idea is also related to snow, if in name only.

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.

Introducing the Young Aristocrats. We like to say 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 Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the 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?

Welcome to Episode 4 of the JC & Josh Brown show that he likes to call, "Big Trends Monthly". This is where we discuss a handful of the most important monthly charts that stood out during my review.

I'm always preaching how this is probably the most valuable part of my entire process: Monthly Charts! It's only something I have to do 12 times a year and might take me 30-45 minutes each month. This forces us to take a step back and gives us no choice but to identify the direction of primary trends.

Josh Brown is one of the most widely followed financial advisors in the country, and he appreciates these monthly candles as much as anyone else I know. So we're now doing a monthly show about it. You can catch up on last month's episode here.

Check out latest show where we discuss the rotation into Emerging Markets, Chinese Tech Stocks, What's next for Gold and Bitcoin, and a sneak peak at this month's Young Aristocrats list.

This is the video recording of our November 2, 2020 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

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.

We discussed markets remaining more or less a mixed bag over recent weeks/months. At the same time, we've pointed out how the weight of the evidence continues to tilt gradually in the direction of the bulls, particularly due to the action we've observed in key risk assets.

As November gets under way, it’s time to review positions with November options that remain open (haven’t already hit profit targets or been 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.

This month, we have four open positions with November options remaining on the books. All the rest have already hit their profit targets or stop loss levels. In the scoreboard below I denote the date we exited each position.

Here’s the scoreboard:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to our "Under The Hood" column for the week ended October 30, 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.

Mark Dow has been a guest on this podcast more times than anyone else for a good reason. Selfishly I always enjoy chatting with him. His perspective is fascinating to me because he does such brilliant job of combining price behavior with sentiment analysis and the global macro intermarket backdrop.

Mark worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in charge of Emerging Markets in the early 90s before ultimately running money for a Global Macro Hedge Fund in New York City. So he has a lot of opinions on economics and politics, but he's great at not letting those things get in the way of his price behavior and sentiment analysis. He's figured out how to separate them but also use his expertise to his advantage. That's not any task.

It's been a slow "ideas" week here at All Star Options for obvious reasons: the markets are getting destabilized ahead of the election and news flow on the Covid19 front.

As JC likes to remind us often -- there are no called strikes on Wall Street. We can sit in the batters box with the bat on our shoulders and just look at pitch after pitch without taking a swing.

This is one of those times.