From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Welcome to this week’s edition of Louis’ Look, where I document the lessons I’ve learned in the last week through interning at All Star Charts.

Today, I want to take a step back from the hectic world of financial markets and remind us all of two very important things:

1. Having some fun every now and then.
2. Being passionate about the work you do.

This is our ASC Research Q4 Playbook.

The first section dives deep into the US Stock Market, and the second half covers International Stock Markets and FICC (Fixed Income, Commodities & Currencies).

You can skip right to the trade ideas here if you'd like, or give the full report a read!

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 recent week's RPP Reports, we've discussed how Equity Markets had become more of a mixed bag with many key assets trading right at or near critical levels.

This week, we'll follow up on some of these areas we've been pointing out in recent reports and see how they look now.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to our "Under The Hood" column for the week ended October 9, 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.

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 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 Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Thanks to everyone who participated in this week's Mystery Chart.

Most off, you said you'd do nothing with this one, opting for more attractive longs and shorts in things that are trending well.

With that as our backdrop, let's just right into it.

You're probably hearing a lot about SPACs these days. SPAC technically stands for "Special-Purpose Acquisition Company. So in this video I chat with Howard about these "Blank Check" vehicles. Historically they haven't exactly had the greatest reputation, but supply and demand is trying to prove otherwise.

The world is becoming SPAC crazy! Is it a good thing? It seems like it is. Let's discuss!

This is the video recording and slides from the All Star Options Monthly Conference Call: October 8, 2020.

After 33 months of zero progress, the market is proving that it is finally time for Transportation stocks to move forward. We call these big bases. It was a well-deserved consolidation in prices after a historic run throughout 2016-2017.

This all seems perfectly normal to me. Not sure why some media outlets are telling investors about turmoil not seen since 2008. Maybe they're looking at the charts upside down? Or blindfolded perhaps?

Here is the second most important stock market index on planet earth breaking out of a long consolidation to new all-time highs:

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 and into mid-cap status (over $2B) then they enter our radar.

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. Some of the best-performers in recent decades – from the likes of Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, and Salesforce, to a myriad of others… they all would have been on this list at some point.

When you look at the stocks in our table you will notice we are only focused on technology and growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online Retail, Solar, and more.

The curious case of higher implied volatility in out-of-the-money calls than the correspondingly distant OTM puts continues in a lot of high flying names. This is neither good nor bad, rather a data point we can use to our advantage when crafting bullish trade designs.

One such name that's on our radar which also made the cut in ASC's latest Under the Hood report is everyone's favorite blue bird -- Twitter $TWTR.