From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Petrocurrencies and crude oil futures are diverging.

The currencies that benefit most from higher oil prices refuse to roll with crude’s steady decline. 

Perhaps it’s more about the US dollar than a handful of currencies tied to oil’s supply and demand dynamic.

But with OPEC up to its old tricks again – Saudi Arabia announced deeper production cuts last weekend – the question arises…

Is crude oil due for a bounce?

Check out the overlay chart of our petrocurrency index and crude oil futures:

Crude oil posted a key pivot high a week after our index bottomed in late September. Since then, these markets have taken separate paths.

Yes, correlations tend to come and go. It’s the natural rhythm of the markets. Yet past divergences have ultimately corrected over time. 

Our currency index led crude off the bottom in early 2016. It also peaked well before the 2018 and 2022 tops in...

This is the video recording of our June 5th Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

What will it take for gold to make new all-time highs?

A weaker US dollar and falling real yields are likely candidates for leading catalysts.

We can also add a significant unwind in commercial positioning to the list. 

Meanwhile, it’s a range-bound mess.

Let's stick to the basics. Uptrends – at the core – come down to more buyers than sellers. And risk-on/risk-off intermarket ratios provide excellent tools for tracking whether bulls or bears dominate a particular market.

After the recent bout of selling pressure, one precious metal risk ratio is approaching a potential inflection point…

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

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...

Thursday morning I was in New York City chatting with Maria Bartiromo about the ongoing Bull Market in Stocks.

Maria and I have been talking about this topic pretty regularly since she looked at me like I was crazy last October.

A lot has happened since then as both the Nasdaq and S&P500 just closed out back to back months at the highest levels in a year.

The market got the sector rotation it needed as we entered 2023.

And now we're looking for that rotation back into those original leading sectors off the lows last summer.

I believe we already started to see it get going right after we finished up our conversation Thursday morning.

Here's the interview in full:

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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that which you can check out here.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over...

Last year they would complain that the biggest growth stocks were not participating in the stock market rally.

This year they're complaining that the biggest growth stocks are participating too much in the stock market rally.

It's quite obvious that people just like to complain.

We've already addressed the fact that this is perfectly normal, healthy sector rotation, and NOT a weakening breadth issue.

See here.

Periods of concentrated leadership do not necessarily mean widespread distribution.

Besides, it hasn't just been 5 stocks that have been going up. Or 7 stocks, or even 10.

A lot of stocks, in both the U.S. and around the world, have already been going up for some time.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Commodities are on the rocks.

Our Equal-Weight 33 Commodity Index is printing fresh two-year lows. Crude oil is hanging around the lower bounds of a multi-month consolidation. And Dr. Copper is loitering below former support.

This isn’t bull market behavior.

But just as the stock market is a market of stocks, the commodity market is a market of, well, a diverse set of commodities.  

So, while I don’t want to buy many high-profile procyclical contracts – and certainly not the commodity indexes – I do like the more obscure areas showing strength…

Areas such as uranium!

I outlined my case for uranium stocks at the start of the year. It was pretty simple: If gold and copper are printing fresh highs, peripheral areas likely enjoy a bid. That includes uranium.

Perhaps copper hasn’t had the best first half, but gold and other precious metals...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

US interest rates have churned within a tight range for months. 

Remember: Sideways is a trend. 

While intermarket evidence suggests a breakdown in yields, they simply refuse to roll over.

It makes perfect sense when we zoom out…

Rates are in a well-defined structural uptrend!

Check out the US 30-year Treasury yield overlaid with live cattle futures:

They look almost identical as both exhibit the classic base-on-base formation – one upside resolution followed by another.

To be clear, I’m not proposing a grand thesis regarding a strong positive correlation between long-duration rates and live cattle futures, or what the next directional move in live cattle and rates mean for AI stocks (though I haven’t dismissed the idea).

Instead, I’m simply observing the trend that began in early 2020. 

I chose to place live cattle futures on the chart for effect – a...

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Monday June 5th @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Monday evening: