Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley
It doesn’t matter which way you slice it. The current market environment is a US dollar story.
Whether you’re talking about stocks or commodities, a rally in risk assets isn’t happening against a rising dollar.
It’s that simple.
You probably think I say the same thing every week. That’s because I do.
Of course, I throw in a well-defined trade setup here and there, but always within the context of the dollar and its impact on the major asset classes.
It’s that important.
As the US Dollar Index rally is well underway, it’s interesting some individual USD crosses are finding resistance at historical levels of interest to both the currencies involved and risk assets!
This is the video recording of our August 1st Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.
We’ve had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.
For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.
That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.
We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.
To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
And it doesn’t have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.
The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to new highs in order to focus on the best players.
But, instead of all-time highs, we’re sorting by 52-week highs these days, as we don’t want to discriminate against energy or other cyclical stocks.
The goal is still to catch the strongest names while they’re small and have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climb the ranks to the big leagues, the returns could be huge.
We’re looking at up to 10x moves just to break into large-cap land!
Let’s dive into this week’s report and see what’s happening in some of the hottest stocks in the Minor Leagues.
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.
What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.
And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think the stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny.
Then we flip through our list of stocks flashing unusual activity and pick the best setups using many of the same technical filters we do for our other scans.
And, just like that, we’ll follow the money flow and fatten our own pockets along with some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.
While I prefer to let stocks prove themselves to me before taking a position, sometimes a situation sets up where the stars are aligning for a low risk bet that makes it worth the effort to get ahead of the crowd.
One such situation has developed in a name discussed recently in our Hall of Famers report.
