From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Stocks and bonds look vulnerable right now. 

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…

Rising interest rates!

Check out the commodity-bond ratio overlaid with US 30-year yield $TYX:

I presented this chart yesterday during the Chart Summit – no markups needed.

For whatever reason, I’ve never shared this chart before. Perhaps I thought it...

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.

Here are the details for Tuesday evening:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

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.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

King Dollar is reclaiming its throne.

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:

The price action following those eight-year lows mirrors the failed breakdown in the dollar index – sharply higher.

But the USD/CHF has reached a logical level to pause, marked by a polarity...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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.

And it doesn't have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to new highs in...

This has to be it right?

How is this one not the world's most important chart?

With the US 10-year Yield hitting the highest levels in 15 years, Crude Oil has caught a bid lately hitting the highest levels all year.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The US Dollar Index $DXY has posted its tenth week consecutive in the green. 

And with the dollar off to a solid start Monday morning, an eleventh looks promising.

This is excellent news for dollar bulls.

But it's a gloomy prospect for risk assets, especially precious metals…

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.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.

What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.

And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think...

On the eve of Chart Summit 2023, let's take a look at how some of the most important areas of the market are holding up during what is seasonally the most bearish time of the year.

Technology represents close to 30% of the S&P500 and almost half the entire Nasdaq100. And here it is going out at its lowest weekly close since May:

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

Let’s get right into it!