It's nearly impossible to switch off when you're invested in crypto.
I'm a little jealous of those solely involved with legacy markets; it must be nice to have an off-switch. In this part of the financial world, there's always something happening.
And my passion for the space often makes it difficult for me to let go.
But, last weekend, my hand -- indeed, my whole body -- was forced. A night in the ER and a few days bedridden with a gnarly viral infection overwhelmed my ardor for fake internet coins.
Happy to report I'm recovering. And here's me after I stumbled to my computer to catch up on the action:
It certainly helped get me in touch with all the confused people out there who aren't involved in this ecosystem. Much of crypto's comings and goings can often seem unworldly and completely foreign.
"This must be how normies feel..." I said to myself.
And now we can turn to the substance of this exchange war between Binance and FTX. It's so entertaining...
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 Trade Exchange. 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...
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...
Metals have been one of the weakest areas of the market this year.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the materials sector, commodity space, base and industrial metals, or gold. These assets have carried nothing but downside risk.
But mix in a little dollar weakness, and we see an impressive display of strength. Metals are finally looking like they have something to prove.
Yes, it’s only one day of action. But it’s a day worth noting…
Check out the breakout in copper futures, posting its largest single-day return since 2009:
This is a big development for commodities and risk assets in general.
Copper has found support at its prior cycle peak and is now resolving higher from a three-month consolidation. One of the most-watched leading economic indicators is signaling all is well.
Based on Dr. Copper's bullish breakout, we would expect metal and mining stocks to join the party. ...
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. Click here to check out the International Hall of Famers.
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 the...