From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Markets never operate in a static manner. Instead, markets are dynamic and remain in a natural and constant state of flux.

In knowing this, we must always remain flexible and aware of the changing conditions and developments taking place around us. We pride ourselves on our ability to evolve and adapt to these changes in market structure and are never dogmatic in our approach.

For the last decade, US large-cap growth has been where the alpha is, and derivatives of this theme like large over small, stocks over commodities, and US over international have been very powerful relative trends. We know this well because we've been leaning on them for a long time...

But that's all changed recently, as we've been vocal about the importance of repositioning and decreasing exposure to growth in favor of more cyclical, value-oriented stocks.

If history is any guide, Emerging Markets should be a major beneficiary...

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

In this week’s Commodity Report, we saw a continuance of many of the same themes that we've been pounding the table on for months now.

Mainly, strength in the procyclical areas of the market like Energy and Base Metals. This fits with what we’re seeing in Equity Markets as the rotation out of Mega-cap growth and into more cyclical sectors takes hold.

However, Crude Oil and Copper aren’t the only Commodities catching a bid right now. We’re also seeing strength in the grain markets. 

One of the charts that caught our attention this week was Palm Oil Futures.

Palm Oil is one of the most important Commodities in Asia and combined with Soybean Oil it accounts for roughly 63% of the global production of vegetable oils. Its uses vary from cooking and producing processed foods to personal care products like soaps and fragrances. It also plays a key role as feedstock for biofuel production.

While it's important to understand what we're...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

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.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, and Salesforce, to a myriad of others… all would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table you will notice we...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Ian Culley @ianculley

Check out our latest Mystery Chart!

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 it 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?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Last week's mystery chart was a popular one, so we inverted it to make things a bit more challenging. Someone still guessed it... Nice work.

It was the iShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond ETF $IEF. The issue with inverting Bond charts is that when you do they look identical to yields. In the case of IEF, we're basically dealing with the US 10-Year Yield $TNX.

Rising rates has been one of the main themes early this year as developed market yields have accelerated higher and hit the pockets of bond investors all over the world.

In this post, we'll check in on some of the most important and most telling credit instruments on both absolute and relative terms in order to piece together the message the bond market is sending investors.

Read our post from last month for our take on what cross-asset ratios outside of the Bond Market are indicating. Many of these trends have confirmed their reversals and accelerated to the upside over the...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

Rotation into value is dominating the narrative right now as money continues to pour out of the former leaders and into long-term secular laggards like Financials and Energy.

In line with this trend, we continue to focus less on US Large-Caps and Growth, and instead look for opportunities in SMIDs, Cyclicals, and International stocks.

Overall, the global equity market remains healthy, supported by strong breadth and rotation. Meanwhile, defensive assets like Gold and Bonds continue to underperform.

We've really been hitting on these themes a lot recently. Here's a quick recap of what we're seeing out there:

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From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to longer-term minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we’re turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we’re curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for 5-9 years.

Introducing the Young Aristocrats. We like to say these are “stocks that pay you to make money”. Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum & relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

By adding our technical analysis to the mix...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ending March 5, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.

In this column, we 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.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers… there is a lot of overlap.

The bottom line is there are a million ways to skin this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data makes us...

The Canadian economy is dominated by Financials and has a diverse and abundant exposure to natural resources. Despite the close proximity, the composition of the country's stock market couldn't be more different from that of the US.

They have a much higher relative exposure to areas like Financials, Energy, and Materials... Basically, all the things that are working.

On the other hand, they have significantly lower exposure to areas like Technology, Health Care, and Discretionary... Basically, all the areas that are NOT currently working.

Long story short, considering the current backdrop of global economic growth and reflation, rising rates and commodity prices, and rotation into cyclical areas and...

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

When reviewing our chartbook this week, one major theme that stood out is the relentless bid we continue to see in Crude Oil.

Most risk-on commodities have consolidated or pulled back recently as the dollar has rebounded back to its highest level in over three months.

But, not oil...

Crude has completely ignored this action from the US Dollar and tacked on an additional 12% gain since DXY bottomed about two weeks ago.

Ever since trading at negative prices last spring, Crude has been on an absolute tear.

Price just broke above its key prior highs and closed the week at its highest level since 2018. As long as Crude is above this key former resistance around 65 the bias is higher and we're targeting the 2018 highs just above 75 over the near-term.

If and when price takes this level out, we think Crude Oil heads back toward 100.

That's right. The next stop after 75 would be the 2011-2014 highs in the low...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley.

The US Dollar is one of the most important pieces of the intermarket puzzle.

It affects all the major asset classes, and a rising dollar could impact the current market environment by creating a headwind for stocks and suppressing commodity-centric and cyclical areas of the market.

This could put pressure on our current market thesis as US Dollar strength has the potential to put a damper on the recent rally in risk assets.

In this post, we'll take a look at what's going on underneath the surface in the US Dollar Index by running through some of it's largest components.

We'll then weigh the evidence in front of us in an effort to determine a directional bias for King Dollar.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

I want to elaborate on a big theme of late that's been on my mind. We've written about it, discussed it internally - as well as on Clubhouse, and just this morning JC and Willie were both tweeting about it.

One major implication of the impending trend reversal in growth vs value is its potential effect on passive investment vehicles.

Considering what a mega-trend passive investing has become with the ETF boom over the past decade-plus, this is likely to impact investors far and wide... If they don't reposition themselves appropriately.

The reason for this is nuanced but in my opinion, it boils down to the argument that passive is really just active and there have been significant changes in market structure since the financial crisis that have resulted in the major averages being dominated by just a small handful of...