On this episode of the podcast, Steve Strazza and I sit down with Brian G, who many of you will recognize as @AlphaCharts on Twitter.

I've been following Brian for many years and love a lot of the work he puts out. It was really fun hearing his story about how he became a technician.

It isn't something that happens overnight, that's for sure. It's a process.

First we get into the evolution of become a Technical Analyst, and then we dive into what we're doing about it in the current environment.

Hope you enjoy!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

We held our October Monthly Strategy Session last night. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month. 

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

The US dollar marches to the beat of its own drum.

Interest rates are rising across the curve, sparking strength out of economically sensitive areas within stocks and commodities.

Crude oil and the energy-heavy CRB Index are breaking to new six-year highs and the energy sector SPDR is testing a crucial area of former support turned resistance -- all while the US Dollar Index is catching a bid. 

It’s not every day we see the dollar and commodities rally in tandem.

This environment suggests the dollar should be rolling over or chopping sideways at best. Yet it continues to show strength!

When markets don’t do "what they should,” that’s valuable information. And in this case, it raises some important questions.

How often does the historically inverse correlation between the dollar...

My favorite Head & Shoulders Patterns are the ones that aren't that at all.

Markets trend. We know that for a fact. That's why Technical Analysis works. Because as Technicians, we're identifying primary trends.

And since we know that market returns do not fall under a normal distribution, and in fact, prices actually trend, it gives us a huge advantage over those who purposely choose to ignore price.

Funny how people like to ignore the only thing that actually pays anybody.

I always thought that was so strange.

Anyway, in today's example of "Not a Head & Shoulders Top", we take a look at Copper Prices. If you have any exposure whatsoever in the market, stocks, bonds or otherwise, then this is a resolution that will interest you and most certainly impact the value of your portfolio.

This is the video recording of our October 4, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

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 their direction and make them a pretty penny...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended October 1, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with our "Minor Leaguers" column.

What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names. There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

Watch this video for a "behind the scenes" look at our process.

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To quote the great philosopher Tupac Shakur, "All Eyez On Me". 

Makaveli - The Don would agree, if he were here, that the focus needs to be on the US Dollar and Interest Rates.

The implications will most likely impact every single asset class you've ever heard of.

Here's the recent US Dollar strength as it runs into former resistance and key Fibonacci retracement:

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

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.

You can find the whole list of trades here.

Below you'll find the full PDF of this week's charts:

The stock market had a good day. But Commodities have had a great year.

The relentless bid for commodities doesn't stop.

Here is the CRB Commodities Index going out at new 6-year highs:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Energy is the clear leader in the commodity markets right now. Our equally-weighted energy index is up 13.76% over the trailing month and 6.58% in the last five days.

The emerging strength from this group is supported by a rising rate environment that could be just getting started.

So, crude oil to 100 dollars and natural gas to 9?

Maybe! But before we get ahead of ourselves, there are still plenty of mixed signals and divergences that need to be resolved.

One that stands out is the lack of confirming price action between economically sensitive commodities. Let’s take a look!

Here’s a chart of Crude Oil futures, Copper futures, and Copper Miners $COPX:

All three are consolidating within an underlying uptrend. But there’s one major difference.

...

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 October 4th @ 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: