Several areas of the market have reached key levels of support or resistance. 

Crude Oil continues to digest recent gains just below overhead supply near its former 2019 highs. 

The Euro/Dollar is finding support at the recently violated 12-year downtrend line. 

And the Emerging Markets ETF $EEM continues to consolidate near its 2007 highs.

Meanwhile, the US Dollar is also testing key levels. 

USD strength has become a major market theme over the last couple of months -- along with the potential effects it could have on global risk assets. A strong US Dollar could apply pressure to Emerging Markets, Commodities, and cyclical assets in general. This would challenge the global growth thesis and the rotation into cyclical areas we have seen play out over recent months.

On the flip side, there are areas of the Currency Market that continue to...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to longer-term minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we’re turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we’re curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for 5-9 years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are “stocks that pay you to make money”. Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum & relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

By adding our technical analysis to...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key takeaway: Despite the decreasing exposure of active equity managers, the weight of the evidence continues to lean toward a neutral sentiment backdrop that supports a much needed reset, allowing optimism to rebuild moving forward. Investment managers may be pulling back from the market, but equity ETF inflows have reached record levels. This past month inflows reached over $80 billion, the highest level over a one month period. This may suggest excessive investor positioning but inflows can remain high for extended periods of time before negatively impacting the market. Another piece of information that points to growing optimism is The Consensus Inc. Bullish Sentiment Index as it reached 74% last week, it’s highest level since early 2018. These pockets of investor optimism, within the broader neutral setting, allude to the nature of the recent unwind.

Sentiment Chart of the Week: Sentiment Reset

...

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

Check out our latest Mystery Chart!

What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention, and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.

This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it’s an absolute price chart, other times it’s on a relative basis.

It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!

The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize it objectively.

While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…

So let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

In a market environment where Financials and Natural Resources have become leadership groups, how do we not have a conversation about Canada? Taking that one step further, we need to talk about how any investor, whether living in Canada or not, can take advantage of a potential structural swing in the trend for Canadian Equities.

David Cox is someone who I've discussed markets with for many years. We usually hook up every Spring in New York City at the annual CMT Symposium. It's only fair that I let the rest of the world eavesdrop on our chats. He's a bright guy with good perspective on all things stocks, interest rates, forex markets and...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In our continued effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from this universe of stocks.

We've already had some great trades come out of this column and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.

The idea is to catch the strongest names while they're still small and have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climb up the ranks...

Dow Theory is one of my favorite topics. It's fascinating how much these lessons from over 130 years ago still help in today's times.

Think about this, we're using Charlie Dow's principles to analyze assets that never even existed back then. The key to remember here is that we don't change. Humans are the constant in this equation. And that's what we're analyzing, at the end of the day: Human behavior.

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

Commodities continue to churn as they digest recent gains. This has been a recurring theme over the past several weeks.

However, there are signs that this might be changing.

For instance, Lumber pushes to new all-time highs, Steel futures hit new highs, and Platinum is back above a key level of resistance.

Pockets of renewed strength have started to pop up across various groupings within the Commodities space. That's valuable information.

Consider Rebar Futures forcefully breaking out of a 3-year consolidation while most of the market chops sideways.

Both Lumber and Rebar futures hitting new highs screams global growth.  Strength from these markets bodes well for other procyclical areas such as...

This is our ASC Research Q2 2021 Playbook.

This is one of my favorite things to do: Forget everything that happened last year, or even in the first quarter of this year. Start from scratch. And approach the market with an open mind.

That's exactly why we put together these quarterly reports. It's self-serving. It helps us organize our thoughts, and identify which areas we want to attack, and which ones we want to avoid, on all time frames: both long-term and short-term.

Make sure to check out our New Table of Contents on Page 2, which will help you navigate through the full report:

As the pandemic raged on March 23, 2020, the S&P 500 was bottoming out following the quickest crash from its highs in history.

Of course, we didn’t know it was THE bottom in real-time. How could we?

Yet just five days later, we were able to hold our 4th Annual Chart Summit virtually. No, we didn’t get a chance to meet in person or enjoy any amazing skiing in Colorado like we did in year’s past. But we were able to pick the brains of the best analysts I know at what turned out to be a critical moment for the markets.

And I’m so glad we did…

While the world felt like it was falling apart, traders just like you had the chance to soak in the wisdom of some of the top minds in finance. Instead of panic, we were treated to process and analysis. And a ton of hot charts!

JC and I recorded our latest options conference call last night (subscribers can access it here). We discussed some trades that were exited last month, updated some current positions, and discussed a couple new ideas.

One of the new ideas discussed was a bullish breakout in United Therapeutics $UTHR. And I'm ready to pull the trigger today.

There's always information in the Currency markets, even if trading currencies isn't something you do.

There is wisdom in some of the world's largest markets like forex and fixed income. To ignore it would be irresponsible.

One thing that's been hard to ignore is the strength in the US Dollar Index throughout the first quarter of 2021. This could be a potential wrecking ball to the global growth, rotation into cyclical and commodity supercycle themes.

But is it?

When we look at several G-10 Currencies relative to the Dollar, the Commodity-centric currencies have held up the best, which is interesting, isn't it?