From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, July 10, 2020:

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

This week we're going to highlight our US Index and Sector ETF tables, and focus on the laggards as they are giving us the most important information for the current market environment. Let's dive into it.

No surprises here... The Nasdaq $QQQ outperformed aggressively once again last week, booking a +4.7% gain while Mid, Small, and Micro-Caps were all lower. The Nasdaq is the only US Index that is higher over the trailing month.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Responses to this week's Mystery Chart were mixed. Some were betting on a breakout and buying while others wanted to fade this against the prior highs.

Others were waiting for more information, which is likely what we'd be doing. Thanks to everyone for participating.

But this chart is already packed with information. Let's dive in and talk about what it is.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Thursday, July 2, 2020:

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

Being Independence Day weekend, we're going to highlight the continued structural outperformance from the US vs rest of the world in this week's post. As a good patriot and technician, I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to reflect on how grateful US investors should be.

Here are our US Index ETF and Global Index tables.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We haven't talked much about Real Estate $XLRE lately because there really hasn't been much to say. Over just about any timeframe, it's underperformed the S&P 500 $SPY, which we'll illustrate with a ratio chart below.

Price is basically unchanged over the trailing year. The only sectors that have performed worse are Industrials $XLI, Financials $XLF, and Energy $XLE. This is not a group you want to be associated with.

Looking at the chart, you'll notice it's gone nowhere for much longer than just the past year. XLRE has actually been chopping around in a messy range for the better part of four years now!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

This is the third edition of our new "Under The Hood" column. Read more about it here.

We are already getting positive feedback on this new strategy from "Mr. Market" as both of our trade ideas from last week's post are now in the top 5 of this week's most popular stocks (measured by the net increase in ownership, week-over-week).

In other words, Robinhood investors have been buying these names hand-over-fist since we wrote about them last week. They've been rewarded for it too as they've both performed very well.

Workhorse $WKHS has really lived up to its name as it hit our price target in a matter of days, and then went on to double again from there. The stock is up about 4-fold since it broke above our risk level near 5 early last week.

Here is a look at the updated chart, with the same exact annotations from last week's post.

Click chart to enlarge view.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

What's with all this talk about weak breadth lately?

A lot of market participants have been pointing out the divergences or lower highs in popular breadth indicators such as the percent of S&P 500 stocks at new 52-week highs or the percent above their 200-day moving average.

In many cases, these actually aren't divergences at all as the S&P is yet to make a new year-to-date high itself.

Just like we look at different breadth indicators to identify market tops than the ones we look at to signal bottoms, we should use different items in our breadth toolkit depending on the market environment we're in.

Using the current rally as an example, it makes little sense to give weight to the percent of stocks making new 52-week highs considering most indexes and sectors haven't been able to achieve the same.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For the week ended Friday, June 26, 2020:

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

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness."

It sounds like Charles Dickens could have been writing about today's market in his famous passage from A Tale of Two Cities.

Many areas of Growth and Technology are trading at or near record highs, and it's sure felt like the "best of times" for anyone who's been overweight these stocks in recent years.

On the other hand, cyclicals and Value were already hurting coming into the year and then endured serious structural damage during the Q1 crash. If you've been invested in these areas, particularly those groups directly impacted by Covid-19, it might just seem like the "worst of times."

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When going over some of this week's content ideas with JC, I told him "I can't possibly write another post about Tech stocks, but I want to."

His response was simple: "That's information."

In other words, based on the thousands of US Equities charts I'm looking at each week, the strongest uptrends continue to be in Technology $XLK. The fact that it almost seems too good to be true, or that I feel like I'm beating a dead horse about "tech, tech, and more tech" - is all the more reason to remain bullish.

We can't change the fact that there's a lot of good stuff going on in the space right now. We can only interpret the data in front of us, and right now, it's saying we should keep buying Tech.

So is this.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Last week, we introduced our new weekly column called "Under The Hood." You can read more about it here.

Basically, we are looking at a universe of the most popular stocks on Robinhood measured by the net increase in accounts holding them week-over-week. Then we're drilling into the charts to find opportunities to either join in and ride the momentum in these names higher, or bet against those that get too frothy.

Here is this week's list. It represents the top 60 stocks that experienced net increases in ownership among Robinhood users last week. We've also included their weekly performance.

Click table to enlarge view.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?