From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
As May just came to a close, many spent the weekend celebrating the kick-off to the Summer season at Memorial day barbeques. We did that too. BUT... being the nerds we are, we also spent much of the weekend pouring over some fresh monthly candles now that yet another one is in the books.
We only get this incredibly valuable information ONCE a month. That's right. Just TWELVE times a year. As such, we really cherish weeks like these.
So, let's dive right in and talk about one of the charts that really stuck out this month: None other than the good old Thomson Reuters $CRB Index, arguably the broadest barometer for the asset class as a whole.
What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.
We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names. There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: A list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
The US Dollar remains at crucial inflection points versus both emerging and developed currencies.
In last week’s note, we pointed out the critical 19 level in the WisdomTree Emerging Currency Fund $CEW, along with the numerous tests of support in our custom USD vs. BRICS Currency Index.
Not only is the USD looking increasingly vulnerable against emerging and developed currencies, but we’re now starting to see some of the major Dollar crosses break down or resolve lower.
In many cases, these moves are confirming long-term reversal patterns with USD/CAD. For example, the Dollar just broke to fresh multi-year lows relative to the Canadian Dollar.
We reviewed the chart in this column a few weeks back, highlighting the possibility of an impending double top.
Our Top 10 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.
A Big Retest For Small Caps
Since the March lows last year, SMIDs have been the clear leadership group with higher yields as a tailwind. However, this entire relative theme has cooled off as risk assets have consolidated along with interest rates. Considering last year’s major breakdown in Small-Caps relative to Large-Caps signaled lower rates, this is a critical time and place to witness a resolution either way.
From an intermarket perspective, we’ve seen our crucial stock and commodity ratios signal lower rates in the near future. Is this signaling a relative breakdown in Small-Caps? As always with markets, we need to play the cards we’re dealt. So while the longer-term outlook favors higher yields, we’re paying close attention to this resolution to signal a more immediate directional bias for these relative themes.
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 context of the big picture 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.
This is one of our favorite bottoms-up scans: Follow The Flow. In this note, what we do is simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity - either bullish or bearish... but NOT both.
What we mean by this is that we have options experts, both internally and through our partnerships with TheTradeXchange, whereby we do all the digging through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients, in order to isolateonlythose options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.
And then of course there's Dr. Copper which appears to have successfully defended former resistance turned support at its all-time highs from 2011. It's impossible to overstate the importance of how this massive base in Copper resolves.
Bulls definitely don't want this move to evolve into a failed breakout... The 4.50-4.60 zone is the line in the sand.
As for Energy Markets... Crude Oil making its highest daily close since October 2018 might be the biggest development of all.
Earlier in the week, we held our May Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.
In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting 5 of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.
What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention, and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.
This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it’s an absolute price chart, other times it’s on a relative basis.
It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!
The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize the price behavior objectively.
While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…
So let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?
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.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
We’ve recently pointed out the possible double tops in the Dollar index and the USD/CAD, along with our overall outlook for further weakness from king dollar.
But can we find other areas of the market that could provide further insight into the US Dollar’s direction?
After all, many market participants are fixated on the direction of the US Dollar right now as it approaches its key mutlti-year lows.
Why does the Dollar matter so much to investors?
Firs of all, USD and risk assets have had a very strong negative correlation over the last several years. The USD Index bottomed in early 2018 as stock markets around the world peaked. Conversely, the dollar topped during the Covid sell-off when stocks bottomed out at their March 2020 lows.
To gain a clearer picture of the USD, we need to go beyond the Dollar Index and developed currencies.
We've already had some great trades come out of this Small-Cap focused column since we launched it late last year and began rotating it with our flagship bottoms-up scan, "Under The Hood."
To make the cut for our Minor Leagues list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. After applying price and liquidity filters, we simply sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus on the best players.
