From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley.
We held our March Monthly Strategy Session last night which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.
In this post, we’ll provide a summary of the call by highlighting three of the most important charts and topics we covered along with commentary on each.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
We think it's time to buy Gold Miners again, specifically the VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF $GDX.
The yellow metal has not been a great place to deploy capital over the last 6 months as the environment has significantly favored stocks over rocks... and risk-assets over defensive ones in general.
Owning Gold or Gold Miners has been nothing more but opportunity cost. However, there is mounting evidence that suggests now might be the time to jump back into this trade.
First, Commodities have really been working as an asset class. We've been pointing this out for months now, from Industrial Metals and Ags to even petroleum-based commodities.
Although through the early innings of this Commodities resurgence, Gold and Gold Miners have taken a back seat as prices peaked all the way back in the summer of last year and have been trending lower since.
We've enjoyed a ton of success with our bottoms-up scans and the columns they've inspired over the past year.
We've already launched four columns around them since last summer, and we have more coming soon.
When we combine these scans with our traditional top-down approach, they make it almost impossible to miss profitable opportunities and key market themes.
Today, we're sharing one of our internal favorites with you. It's called "Fade The Street,"and we introduced it in a report last month which you can read here.
It was a big hit and there's been a lot of change since then, so we thought a follow-up was appropriate.
Our Fade The Street scan leverages buy/sell ratings and price target data from sell-side analysts to identify strong stocks with significant potential tailwinds that can propel prices higher in the future.
In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."
We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist.
We've already had some great trades from this universe and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.
Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.
In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.
Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
Over the last few months, there's been a distinct rotation into Financials and other cyclical areas across equity markets not just in the US, but across the globe.
This topic is nothing new around here as it's been a big theme for us recently. Consider some of our calls from this month:
Intermarket analysis is always an area of focus over here at All Star Charts. Right now, there are a lot of changes taking hold beneath the surface in some key cross-asset relationships.
For the longest time, the alpha has been in the US... it's been in large-caps... and it's been in growth stocks. That's been the playbook. We know because we've been running it back for years now.
Although, we're seeing strong evidence that this is no longer the case...
One of the best things about our approach is that it allows us to be incredibly flexible and adjust our views as new data becomes available.
We pride ourselves on never being dogmatic. Speaking of which, despite how much we've leaned on secular leadership from growth and tech stocks in recent years, the data is suggesting we reposition ourselves in favor of Value (read more about it, here).
The bottom line is breadth has been overwhelmingly bullish and is one of the main reasons we're in the camp that this is likely the early innings of a new cyclical bull market.
Whenever I want to talk about bonds, I always know just who to call. Larry McDonald is a former bond trader at Lehman Brothers and author of the book, Colossal Failure of Common Sense. I highly encourage you to give it a read, especially if you're looking for some perspective on what really happened back in 2007-2008.
It's no coincidence that I reached out to him to come on the podcast. Larry and I had a very timely conversation in February of last year. So with the bond market recently losing 5-6 Trillion dollars in such a short period of time, who better to talk to than by favorite bond trader.
Here we go with our next round of the Top-Down Take post. At All Star Charts, we like to keep things simple and look at the bigger picture. We let the charts speak to us and then decide what to do. Always remember, the Trend is our Friend.
Today we’re taking a look at a sector that has been an outperformer in the recent past despite broader market correction. Nifty Metal is now moving from strength to strength as more constituents break out of long-term bases.
Some of us are old enough to remember a time when Value stocks were the place to be. The kids these days look at me like I'm nuts when I talk to them about banks and energy stocks!
There's a whole world of companies that used to do great. In fact, early in my career these were the names to be in: BTU, WLT, LEH, MER, BSC..... Good times!
Tech and all that other stuff came much later and has been the big driver in the U.S. over the past decade. But the rest of the world has suffered, without that exposure to Tech and Growth, and instead loaded with banks and natural resources, the worse places on earth for some time now.
Fast forward to today and we continue to get more and more evidence suggesting that it's changing.
It's no longer US over International and EM. It's been EM and International over US. It used to be Growth over value for so long.
Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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.