From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest “Minor Leaguers” report.

We’ve already had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it late last year and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, “Under The Hood.”

We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…

For about a year now, we’ve focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B. That was fun, but it’s time we branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.

The way we’re doing this is simple…

It's an ongoing joke among many of us because we oftentimes catch ourselves thinking, and saying, that the upcoming week will be a big one.

"We'll get a lot more information this week" - is said at the beginning of every week.

Start noticing. You'll see.

But seriously, can we all agree that THIS particular week is extra important?

This week we’re looking at a long setup in the crowd favourite IT sector. In the week gone by, we saw some strength come through and a particularly interesting breakout too!

Let's take a look at what we have today!

I can't help but notice the similarities between the Bitcoin Crash we just saw and what happened to stocks in 1987.

You guys following me for a while know I'm not big on analogs. Every market environment is different.

But history does help us put together a roadmap. We're all humans in this endeavor after all. And that certainly doesn't change, even if we are talking about Crypto and not stocks, 2021 and not 1987.

For you guys who are new to markets I encourage you to study the past. Learn about prior cycles and what happened.

These are great lessons. I promise you.

The US Stock market was booming in the 1980s, after doing nothing for decades since topping out in the mid-1960s.

Stocks were rolling. They had meme stocks and reddit back then too. They were just called other things like Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders.

Those were some good times.

Then came Black Monday in October of 1987.

The S&P500 fell 20.4% in a single day.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that which you can check out here.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 100 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza

It's been about a month since small- and mid-caps resolved to the upside and made fresh highs.

As we all are aware, these were simply massive head-fakes. We're right back to where we started--stuck in the middle of the same range we've been in all year.

There was also plenty of evidence from our intermarket relationships and ratios to support these moves. Discretionary-versus-staples ratios broke to fresh highs. Copper versus gold. Stocks versus bonds. Inflation expectations. They all made new highs recently. But, just like most stocks on an absolute basis, many of these breakouts have since failed.

Of all these developments, it's hard to argue that any is more important than the stocks-versus-bonds ratio retracing back beneath its Q1 highs. With long rates making new lows and stocks selling off, let's talk about how we are approaching both of these asset classes right now.

Here's the S&P 500 $SPY relative to long-term Treasury bonds $TLT, zoomed out to the early 2000s.

If the world was coming to an end, would Homebuilders be breaking out of 6-month bases to new all-time highs?

I would argue no.

The Homies are one of those groups we look to for leadership in strong markets, not in weak ones.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

Breakouts and breadth expansion kicked off the month of November. 

But the market had other ideas... 

Instead of fresh legs higher, investors were dealt a handful of downside reversals and failed moves. Last week, we went from discussing breakouts and new highs for stocks... to throwbacks and retests of old ranges. This all happened in the matter of a few trading sessions.

A lot has changed in a short period. In times like these, it’s important to take a good look under the hood to see what market internals are suggesting.

As we reviewed our breadth chartbook today, we asked ourselves the following questions: 

Are we seeing a notable expansion in new lows? Is it enough that we should be worried?

Let’s take a look beneath the surface and see if we can find some answers!

First, let’s check in on the 21-day and 63-day lows for the S&P 500:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza 

We held our December Monthly Strategy Session last night. Premium Members can click here to review the recording and the accompanying slides.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month. 

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is a valuable exercise, as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

We have a new Options trade up this week.

We're selling an $IWM December 31 (weekly) Iron Condor. We’ll be short the 210 puts and 235 calls, while protecting the position $5 away in both direction with long 205 puts and 240 calls. This entire spread can be put on for about a $1.70 credit.

Check out our short video with the thought process behind these trades:

This is the video recording of our December 1, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session