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.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley

Downside pressure on long-duration rates and a flattening yield curve was the story of the bond market for the latter part of 2021. 

But we started to see signs that downside risks were easing in the final weeks of December. The 10- and 30-year yields made a nice kick save after undercutting their summer lows, and high yield bonds $HYG began to outperform safer alternatives like the Treasury bond ETF $IEI.

It seemed like the bond market was heading in the right direction – except for Treasury spreads. The 2s/10s spread was the missing piece of the puzzle, continuing to push toward new 52-week lows… 

Until now!

Only a couple of trading sessions into the new year, the bond market is providing plenty of fireworks. Rates are jumping higher across the curve, and critical treasury spreads such as 2s/10s, are following higher: 

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our January Monthly Strategy Session Monday night. Premium Members can access and re-watch it here.

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 easily one of our most valuable exercises 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.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley

The rally in the US Dollar Index $DXY is stalling out.

With each passing day, dollar internals are weakening, and the prospect of a bullish resolution from the current continuation pattern in DXY is diminishing. We expect these patterns to resolve quickly. And when they don’t, that’s information.

Some other things worth noting are that commercial hedgers hold a large short position in DXY futures and the near-term bearish trend for individual dollar crosses is expanding (up 20% from last week to a staggering 80%).

The bottom line is evidence continues to stack against the USD.

With that as our backdrop, let’s check in on a long USD trade that was triggered in November and outline how we want to navigate the coming days and weeks.

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 in 2020 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…

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Top 10 Charts Report was just published.

In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.

Continuation Patterns And Primary Uptrends

As we enter the new year, let’s take a step back and discuss where we’ve come from. The following chart is an excellent illustration of the price action for risk assets in 2021. As you can see, both stocks and commodities went through a corrective phase for much of the year and remain stuck in their ranges as we head into 2022. Markets can't go sideways forever, so we expect resolutions sooner rather than later. And because the vast majority of these consolidations are simply continuation patterns within the context of primary uptrends, we’re expecting upside resolutions. The question simply remains “when?”

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Check out this week's Momentum Report, our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector, and Industry Group level.

By analyzing the short-term data in these reports, we get a more tactical view of the current state of markets. This information then helps us put near-term developments into the big picture context and provides insights regarding the structural trends at play.

Let's jump right into it with some of the major takeaways from this week's report:

* ASC Plus Members can access the Momentum Report by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.

Macro Universe:

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

In recent weeks, we’ve been diving into individual commodity groups to size up the structural trend and to get a better idea of where we’re likely headed in the new year.

Last week, we highlighted energy contracts and the fact that many are still grappling with overhead supply. And earlier in the month we covered the worst-performing area of the commodity markets - precious metals.

Today, we’re going to turn our attention back to metals and review the base metals group.

Even with the S&P 500 printing record highs, trading ranges and overhead supply stole the show in 2021 and those dominant themes are evident when we look at base metals.

Notice the strong relationship between our equal-weight base metals index and blue-chip international equities in the Global Dow Index $DGT.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Yesterday, we wrote a post about scanning for new lows, putting our own spin on a strategy called "Wall Street's only free lunch."

I was joking with JC that it felt a bit uncomfortable to search through such a weak list of stocks. After all, we’re used to scanning for strength.

But the scan was a fun exercise, and we found some weakness we want to be buying in secular leaders. 

The universe wasn’t exactly full of strong stocks, as we were scanning for new 52-week lows. But that’s OK; we have plenty others for that.

In this post, we’re going to walk through another scan we did internally this week. Unlike the "free lunch," this one is more in line with our top-down approach of finding the strongest stocks in the strongest groups.

While we're still scanning for new lows, we’re doing so on a much shorter time frame, and we're adding additional filters to ensure all the stocks on our list are leaders.

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:

And here’s how we arrived at it:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

"There's no such thing as a free lunch."

Many of you are already familiar with this popular market adage as it is a commonly used quip in our industry.

All it really means is that you can't get something for nothing from the market.

Have you ever bought a high-yielding stock for the dividend and rode it into a big drawdown just for them to announce they're cutting the payout?

Did you listen to a friend about a biotech stock that was supposed to rip higher on positive FDA results... but it actually gapped lower?

How about following the analyst community into a stock that was a consensus buy... until it turned out not to be?

In all of these scenarios, the investor is simply looking for a free lunch. And 9 times out of 10, these situations don't work out. There are no easy investments or get-rich-quick tricks on wall street. At least not sustainable ones. You have to put in the work.

One rule that I live by for my own investing is this: "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is."