This has to be one of the world's most important trends right now. How could it not be?
You hear all this nonsense about the S&P493 and how it's only 7 stocks going up.
But those are just lies. That's not how the market works, and that is certainly not what's been happening this year.
The real trend here is in the outperformance of the largest companies, particularly mega-cap growth, relative to other indexes with more diversified sector exposure and market-caps.
This is the Nasdaq100 making new all-time highs relative to the much broader Russell3000 Index:
The most important chart in the world is back in action!
A rising US dollar is generating increased selling pressure for risk assets and global currencies.
US Treasury bonds, stock indexes, and even commodities are catching lower.
Yet it’s nothing new for the top components of the US Dollar Index $DXY (the euro leads at 57.6%, followed by the yen at 13.6% and the pound at 11.9%).
New lows and broken support have become standard for these currencies.
But King Dollar’s command is spreading to the more resilient pockets of the forex market, as fresh breakouts mount.
Here’s the US dollar-Canadian dollar pair breaking above a key retracement level to six-month highs following a litany of missed attempts:
Rising rates have been a worldwide phenomenon for the last two and a half years as yields have climbed non-stop.
Not only are we seeing the curve in the US reach decade-long highs, but the benchmark yields in Germany, France, Spain, and even Japan are also trading at multi-year highs.
Below is the US 10-year Yield reaching its highest level since 2007 after breaking out of a multi-month base three weeks ago.
There's a time to be aggressive and go for big gains, and there's a time to shoot for higher probabilities with smaller payout potentials.
I'm finding it hard to muster any conviction to go either long or short right now, as I can make compelling cases for both the bull and the bear thesis here.
In today's tape, my feeling is we need to err on the side of being too conservative and trade with a margin of safety.
So today, we're putting on what I feel to be a conservative, delta-neutral options trade in the technology sector ETF $XLK.