From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

It’s easy to lose sight of how impressive energy has been this year. 

We get it. Sideways action is boring.

But while the rest of the market has been selling off, energy has shown incredible resilience, digesting gains in a continuation pattern since early summer.

After an explosive rally for energy stocks off the 2020 lows, it’s normal to experience an extended period of corrective action. In fact, it’s healthy. 

Now get this...

Many of these stocks haven’t even broken out yet!

We know it sounds crazy, especially when some of these industry groups have more than tripled during the trailing 24 months.

But the charts don’t lie. They’re telling us some of these trends might just be getting started. Let’s take a look.

We can break down oil and gas companies into three main categories: upstream, midstream, and downstream. 

These designations refer to where a particular company operates along the supply chain, from extracting the raw material to selling the refined...

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 Airbnb, Uber, and Paypal.

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 the trailing month. 

Then...

If there's anything that this market has taught me, in almost 20 years of doing this, it's that expecting the unexpected should be a way of life.

I've had a front row seat to watch legendary Wall Street firms disappear practically overnight.

I saw Crude Oil Futures trading below Zero.

Flash Crashes.

Growth stocks going up 100x in price with little or not business activity.

Anything can happen.

I interrupt this bear market to bring you stocks that are going up.

While people are crying about their stocks going down, we're focused on the winners.

You know why? Because winners tend to keep on winning.

And losers? Well, we don't care so much for you. By definition, few people do.

Here's a stock making new 6-month highs this week.

You may have heard of it:

Two years ago tomorrow (October 21st), the social financial community lost one of its shining lights, our friend Jon Boorman.

In the year prior, he’d been diagnosed with Glioblastoma, an incurable form of brain cancer, and was given a prognosis of about one year to live.

We cannot possibly fathom what receiving that type of news feels like and I won’t even dare to attempt to imagine it.

All I can say is that when he called me on the phone and broke the news, I couldn’t keep my composure and cried like a baby. Amazingly, by this time Jon had already come to peace with what was happening. Jon, like me, was a fan of Stoic philosophy, and I can’t even begin to describe the awe I had in Jon as he seemed to face down this impending tragedy with amazing calm and acceptance.

One of the great blessings for Jon and his family was

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as "a market of stocks."

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions. But there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club.

We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports.

Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to the Short Report.

We...

There's only one thing you need to know about Bitcoin miners. That is, they're essentially long Bitcoin's price, short the hash rate, and short electricity prices.

Wonder why publicly traded Bitcoin miners have been laughable? It's because all these three are moving in the completely opposite direction.

One of the things that continues to really stand out to me is the relentless outperformance in Energy stocks, even in the midst of a major correction in Crude Oil.

You can see it perfectly in this chart. Energy stocks today are making new 52-week highs relative to Crude:

The bond market is the biggest and baddest market of them all.

All these crypto currencies can go to zero and no one who matters will care.

The entire pot industry can disappear tomorrow and it won't matter.

Small-cap stocks aren't relevant, from a systemic perspective.

Do you know what matters? The bond market.

And if there's real stress out there in financial markets, you are going to see it show up in bonds.

It's just math.

But a funny thing happened in Q2 this year. High Yield Credit spreads began to tighten.

If there was real stress, you would be seeing them widening.

In this chart below we're looking at lower lows in the S&P500 but higher lows in the ratio between Junk Bonds and US Treasury Bonds:

This is the video recording of the October 2022 Mid-month Conference Call.

We discussed:

• The DJ Industrial Avg at the Pre-Covid Highs
• Fewer Stocks are making New Lows
• Small-caps, Mid-caps & Micro-caps diverging positively
• Sentiment is at a historic bearish extreme
• Credit Spreads tightening the past 4 months
• Negative Correlation Between US Dollar & Stocks intact
• Consumer Discretionary outpacing Staples
• Sector Level trends are improving
• Energy making new 52-week highs relative to Stocks
• Shorting these REITs and Software Stocks
• Industrials & Regional Banks making new 52wk relative highs
• More Bullish Options Activity in Occidental Petroleum
• Coal Stocks Setting Up For Breakouts
• Industrial Stocks ready to bounce
• Financials holding Support
• Copper/Gold ratio not confirming new highs in Yields
• 5 & 10/yr Breakevens peaked quarters ago
• Emerging Markets down near critical levels
• Seasonally the best time to buy stocks
• List of my favorite stocks to...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I don’t care what your favorite TikTok financial guru says: Trading isn’t easy.

The market has made this point again and again this year.

The market has also driven home another essential truth: Trends persist.

I talk about this approach quite a bit because I’m a trend-follower. It’s my favorite Dow Theory Tenet, and it's the foundation of my approach to the markets.

Trend-following might sound simple. But it’s far from effortless. Like any worthwhile philosophy, real-world applications can sometimes be a struggle. 

In fact, no other market has tested my trend-following resolve quite like this year’s unstoppable dollar. And I’m still looking for opportunities to get long…

It's that time of the quarter where we options swing traders need to be extra mindful of pending earnings releases. The last thing we want to do is place a directional bet in a stock or it's options heading into a binary event that could decapitate us in a heartbeat.

This is frustrating us right now because most of the charts we like best (both the bullish and bearish ones) are in stocks with earnings slated to be released in the next week or two.

During our morning Analyst meeting today, we discussed the fact that many of the banking/financial sector stocks have already reported earnings by now, therefore, this is a place we should look.

Specifically, we like the big money center mega/multinational banks that are represented best by the $KBE ETF. Here is a chart that paints a pretty good picture of why we like it: