US T-bonds are sliding to fresh decade lows. The S&P 500 completed a three-month top last week. And the Nasdaq 100 is on the verge of doing the same.
Those summer highs are receding into the collective memory bank, replaced by new lows and growing unease. Sellers are out in full force.
But instead of allowing the near-term selling pressure and overall choppy conditions to throw us off balance, let’s focus on the one underlying trend tying this market together…
These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.
This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Tuesday October 3rd @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.
As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach.
It's really been working for us!
One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth 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 US Dollar Index $DXY hit a new year-to-date high on Monday, punishing other global currencies.
The euro undercut its June pivot lows. The pound dropped for the fourth consecutive session. And the yen is well within reach of its lowest level since the summer of 1990.
Other major currencies don’t stand a chance against USD strength.
If you can’t beat them, join them!
The Swiss franc might be the next to succumb to this old proverb as it prepares to bend the knee.
Check out the US dollar-Swiss franc pair pulling back after posting a new eight-year low:
We've had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.
For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.
That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.
To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts
This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow.
In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish, but not both.
We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients.
Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.
Monday night we held our September Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.
In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.