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

Our last RPP report took a deep look at the damage endured by the most important assets in the world during the recent selloff.

We held this report back a few days this week because the S&P just broke beneath our risk level and was in correction territory, down roughly 10% from its highs intraday on Monday. We wanted to see how things would shake out, and we're glad we did. Let's talk about it.

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Welcome to this week’s edition of Louis’ Look, where I share the lessons I’m learning while interning at All Star Charts. You can read the previous post here. Today, I want to touch on how the small elements are the most powerful, particularly in markets.

This weekend, I managed to catch a clear night to go out with my telescope to hunt down the stunning Orion Nebula and Andromeda galaxy, located a mind-blowing two and a half million light-years away. When I found them, they were lying in an empty and devoid section of the night sky.

A tiny sliver of darkness was hiding a sea of beauty and information.

As intense as that may sound, the market is in no way different.

This week on the show, Strazza and I chat with Howard Lindzon as we continue thinking through our "2 to 100" List and how to best set our parameters. Remember, we're looking for the next $100 Billion companies.

We already have industry filters, momentum & relative strength, market capitalization and now we're working in some social sentiment to really give this list some juice. These things are always a work in progress, so I hope this gives you some insight as to how we think through our ideas and have a little fun along the way.

Here is our conversation in full:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to our "Under The Hood" column for the week ended September 18, 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.

Everyone is used to complaining about how large-cap tech stocks are the leaders of this market.

I think there could be something new for them complain about.

You see, last time the Russell 2000 Small-cap Index was at these levels relative to the Large-cap Nasdaq 100 Index, Small-cap stocks went on a historic run, particularly relative to those large-caps.

It started exactly 20 years ago, from the exact price we're at today.

Here's what that looks like:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Thanks to everyone for responding to this week's Mystery Chart as always.

We had some great responses, most of which were mixed, with a slight majority wanting to "do nothing" and wait to see how price reacts at its former highs.

The chart was the Lithium ETF $LIT, which is breaking out to fresh highs along with a ton of other subsectors within the Materials space right now.

In this post, we will analyze almost every one of the key Materials industry groups to determine whether participation is broadening underneath the surface and supporting the recent strength and rotation into the sector, or vice versa.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Last night we held September's Monthly Conference Call which our Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we'll provide a summary of the call by highlighting 5 of the most important charts we covered along with commentary on each.

Let's dive into it.

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?

This is the video recording of the September 2020 Conference Call.

Whatever your geopolitical, global macro, moral, or ethical concerns are about the price of gold and its implications about the US dollar, the Fed, the US Economy, etc --- the only truth is price.

And price is telling us that Gold is setting up for another run higher.

Sorry if that conflicts with your world view?

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Welcome to this week’s edition of Louis’ Look, where I write a brief note for the blog to document the lessons I’m learning every week. You can read the previous post here. Today, I'll fill you in on some of the neat stuff we’re building over here and my realization that passion is the engine of creativity and uniqueness.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Something we discuss a lot, especially internally, is what we refer to as "New Dow Theory."

It's merely the idea that instead of looking at Dow Transports $DJT as the confirming average for Dow Industrials (or the broader market), we should be looking at the Semiconductors index $SOX.

The reasoning behind this is simple, and we won't get too far into it. The bottom line is that as the US has shifted from a Manufacturing to Services Economy, the methods used to transport modern-day goods and services are very different than they were almost a century ago when Dow Theory was first introduced.