Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
US dollar strength is broadening as global currencies lose critical levels against it.
Last week, we outlined crucial support levels in the EUR/USD pair. Those levels have since given way, as sellers have taken control of this major forex cross.
Today, we’re going to highlight two other USD pairs that recently sliced through key levels, further paving a path of least resistance that favors the US dollar.
We don’t typically track small transactions by members of Congress, those in the $1,000-to-$15,000 range.
But a recent move by Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a Republican from Georgia, is worth noting.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.
Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column, where we’ll cover all the action for the week ended March 4, 2022. This report is published biweekly and rotated with our Minor Leaguers column.
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.
Watch this video for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.
Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers, there’s a lot of overlap.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
We held our March Monthly Strategy Session last Tuesday. Premium Members can click here to review the video recording and download the slide deck.
Non-members can see some highlights from the call by reading this post each month.
By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends.
This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.
With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.
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
Our Top 10 Charts 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.
Is This The Beginning Or The End?
Not only did commodities have their best week in more than fifty years, but Copper and Gold broke to new highs – Copper to new all-time highs and Gold to fresh 52-week highs. And similar to the bullish momentum thrust in the BCOM index, when we zoom out on these charts we get the sense we’re at the beginning of a major trend — not the end of one. Both Copper and Gold are just beginning to break out of decade-long bases. The last time they broke out of similar basing patterns these metals, and commodities as a whole rallied for almost a decade. If these breakouts are valid and we continue to see broad strength among commodity contracts, these raw materials could provide monster returns for years to come.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
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 big picture context 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.
Warren Buffett is making his first appearance on The Hot List, as Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.A purchased more than 90,000,000 shares of Occidental Petroleum $OXY last week.
OXY explores for and produces crude oil and natural gas. It’s actually the largest producer of natural gas liquids in the United States.
