From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

It doesn’t matter which way you slice it. The current market environment is a US dollar story.

Whether you’re talking about stocks or commodities, a rally in risk assets isn’t happening against a rising dollar.

It’s that simple.

You probably think I say the same thing every week. That’s because I do.

Of course, I throw in a well-defined trade setup here and there, but always within the context of the dollar and its impact on the major asset classes.

It’s that important. 

As the US Dollar Index rally is well underway, it’s interesting some individual USD crosses are finding resistance at historical levels of interest to both the currencies involved and risk assets!

Here’s a chart of the US dollar/Swedish krona cross zoomed out to the late 1990s: 

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This is the video recording of our August 1st Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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...

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...

Did you see what just happened last month?

Financials went back and kissed the same prices they hit at their peak just before the Great Financial Crisis.

This is easily one of the most important price levels in stock market history. And I heard no one talking about it.

Meanwhile, the Home Construction Index did the exact same thing. In this case, even more special. The peak in Home Construction was when the fund launched, which is both classic and hilarious.

Here's what these retests look like:

Last week I jumped on to Fox Business to talk markets with Charles.

He asked me about S&Ps, Russell2000 Small-caps, US 10yr Yield and Bitcoin.

It's funny, I don't think I've ever agreed this much with a TV anchor in my life.

His Technical Analysis was spot on.

So the setups are certainly there. But I think the catalysts are where we focus. And I believe that continues to be the Dollar and Rates.

Here's the full clip:

Are you watching?

Look what stocks and Crypto do with just a little tiny bit of Dollar weakness.

In fact, US Dollar Index Futures are only down 3.0% off the highs.

And look how stocks have done since the Dollar stopped going up a couple of weeks ago:

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

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 the trailing month. 

Then, we sort the remaining names by...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The past two years of sideways chop on the gold chart has been a game of perseverance and pain. 

Gold is a honey badger, attacking a beehive face-first, digging for larvae, and somehow persevering through a thousand bee stings.

That can’t be fun, especially as other areas of the market have experienced explosive trends. But it works for the honey badger.

And it's worked for gold.

Now that commodities and stocks have come under increased selling pressure, the data continues to mount in favor of declining gold prices. 

Precious metals are looking weak. Gold stocks are breaking down on absolute and relative bases. And signs of risk appetite are nowhere to be seen.

But gold doesn’t care.

Before we get into the absolute weakness in gold and other precious metals, let’s review the relative weakness in the mining space.

Here’s a dual-pane chart of the Gold Miners ETF $GDX versus the Gold ETF $GLD and...

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 August 1st @ 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:

From the desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

It’s the day after the FOMC announcement, and markets are mixed. They’ve already moved past yesterday’s 75-basis-point hike and are now in the process of pricing in all available data, including the prospects of future Fed policy.    

Instead of getting caught up in the recession chatter and what the Fed might do next, let’s focus on one undeniable fact: The 10-year US Treasury yield $TNX is still at a key inflection point.

I know we’ve been obnoxious about the US dollar and rates. They continue to be two of the most important charts out there. That’s the environment we’re in – plain and simple.

And with the 10-year yield stuck just below a critical shelf of former highs, there’s no better time to remind ourselves of some classic intermarket relationships.

Here’s a chart of the US 10-year yield overlaid with the Metals and Mining ETF $XME with the ARK Innovation ETF $ARKK in the lower pane:

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