Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
I had a nice chat this week with Aaron Task and Stephen Alpher over at Seeking Alpha.
We talked about why price matters most and how come media outlets choose to ignore it in favor of other things.
What’s going on with US Stocks, Interest Rates, Crypto and which stocks are we buying?
We go over all of this and much more throughout our conversation.
This was a lot of fun. Check it out.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
Last week, we pointed out that commodity-centric currencies were beginning to slide.
Our petrocurrency index was making new 52-week lows, and the Australian dollar was on the verge of breaking down. By Friday’s close, the AUD/USD cross looked to have completed a topping pattern and was trading at its lowest level since the summer of 2020.
Seeing one of the world’s leading commodity currencies break down from a major distribution pattern would not bode well for commodities and other risk assets.
But the bulls aren’t ready to roll over yet. Investors are back on offense this week, as buyers have already repaired all or most of the damage that was done to stocks and commodities last week.
They needed to come out swinging after the latest flurry of selling pressure… And that’s exactly what they did!
We’re also seeing very strong bounces in risk-on currencies like the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar. What started out as a nasty resolution lower in the Aussie has morphed into a potential failed breakdown.
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.
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 late last year 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…
To make the cut for our new 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.
Investing is hard.
If it was easy, then everyone would be good at it.
It takes discipline. It takes overcoming human emotions. It takes consistency and mental toughness.
Sorry to tell you, but chances are you don’t have any of those, yet alone all of them. [Read more…]
This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.
