The stocks that worked well in the second quarter should continue to lead the market higher. We still want to be buyers.

On Tuesday afternoon I had a chat with Catherine Murray over at BNN Bloomberg about which stocks we're most focused on. As it turns out, the same stocks and sectors showing up on our buy scans in early to mid-March are the same ones showing the most positive momentum and relative strength now.

It's working. We're sticking with it. Here's the interview in full: 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

What's with all this talk about weak breadth lately?

A lot of market participants have been pointing out the divergences or lower highs in popular breadth indicators such as the percent of S&P 500 stocks at new 52-week highs or the percent above their 200-day moving average.

In many cases, these actually aren't divergences at all as the S&P is yet to make a new year-to-date high itself.

Just like we look at different breadth indicators to identify market tops than the ones we look at to signal bottoms, we should use different items in our breadth toolkit depending on the market environment we're in.

Using the current rally as an example, it makes little sense to give weight to the percent of stocks making new 52-week highs considering most indexes and sectors haven't been able to achieve the same.

What do we know about all-time highs? We know we don't usually see them happen in downtrends. As obvious as this might seem to some, you'd be surprised how many people don't realize that new all-time highs are a classic characteristic of uptrends.

I encourage you to go back and study the greatest uptrends of all-time. Along the way, do you see new lows being made? Or do you see a lot of new highs in those uptrends?

Well, here is the Nasdaq Composite closing at new all-time highs for the second consecutive month. I've done the work, these are things we usually find in uptrends:

It's my favorite time of the month! We have a fresh batch of Monthly Candles to analyze, help us identify trends and find profitable ideas. It takes me no more than 30-60 minutes and I only have to do this exercise once each month. That's just 12 times a year and BY FAR the most valuable 6-12 hours of work I put in each year, and it's not even close!

I'd like to invite you to join be this evening for a live Strategy Session. We'll be going through all the most important Monthly Charts and talk about what we want to do as we enter the 3rd quarter!

I will be hosting this Live Call tonight, Wednesday July 1 @ 7PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with all the other live calls since 2015.

Here are the details for tonight:

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?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, June 26, 2020:

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

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness."

It sounds like Charles Dickens could have been writing about today's market in his famous passage from A Tale of Two Cities.

Many areas of Growth and Technology are trading at or near record highs, and it's sure felt like the "best of times" for anyone who's been overweight these stocks in recent years.

On the other hand, cyclicals and Value were already hurting coming into the year and then endured serious structural damage during the Q1 crash. If you've been invested in these areas, particularly those groups directly impacted by Covid-19, it might just seem like the "worst of times."

We take a consistent intermarket approach to stocks. Not only do we analyze all the Stock indexes, both domestically and around the globe, but we also compare stocks to other asset classes. This is historically very helpful information to determine the direction of the primary trend for stocks.

Today, we're taking a look at stocks running into major resistance relative to its alternatives. More specifically, stocks are failing relative to both Bonds and Gold.

As you can see in this chart, we saw significant support near this gray shaded area in late 2018 and then once again in August of last year. This "Support" finally gave way and broke in early March, almost 4 months ago. This former "Support" has now turned into "Resistance" throughout June:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When going over some of this week's content ideas with JC, I told him "I can't possibly write another post about Tech stocks, but I want to."

His response was simple: "That's information."

In other words, based on the thousands of US Equities charts I'm looking at each week, the strongest uptrends continue to be in Technology $XLK. The fact that it almost seems too good to be true, or that I feel like I'm beating a dead horse about "tech, tech, and more tech" - is all the more reason to remain bullish.

We can't change the fact that there's a lot of good stuff going on in the space right now. We can only interpret the data in front of us, and right now, it's saying we should keep buying Tech.

So is this.

Financials are what we're watching very closely this week as a warning of a more substantial stock market correction throughout the summer.

Our strategy has been to buy stocks that are going up. That's worked well. But if you noticed, that has NOT included financials. It's been mostly in the Technology, Internet, Social Media, Biotech & Mobile Payments sectors. That has been our go-to universe during this multi-month rally in stocks.

However, even though we haven't been buying bank stocks, that doesn't mean we just ignore them. Quite the opposite, in fact. If you recall, it was the bank stocks that helped us get so bearish in early February, well before any market crash. We are focused on this group again today for the exact same reasons: Risk Management.

Here is a chart of Financials flirting with that 23 level. That represents the former highs from April. If we're below that, the risk in here is down, and not up:

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

When it comes to the analysis of Precious Metals, we can make it as simple or as complex as possible. There's no shortage of ratios, risk appetite measures, individual stocks to analyze, etc.

In this post, we're going to take a step back and focus on the assets we're trading rather than all of the other junk.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Last week, we introduced our new weekly column called "Under The Hood." You can read more about it here.

Basically, we are looking at a universe of the most popular stocks on Robinhood measured by the net increase in accounts holding them week-over-week. Then we're drilling into the charts to find opportunities to either join in and ride the momentum in these names higher, or bet against those that get too frothy.

Here is this week's list. It represents the top 60 stocks that experienced net increases in ownership among Robinhood users last week. We've also included their weekly performance.

Click table to enlarge view.

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?