In this episode I get to chat with one of my all-time favorite journalists, Frances Horodelski. She was one of the first people to interview me on TV when I was still in my 20s and I don't forget that. She believed in me early on. That's really cool.

We've continued to do interviews together over the years but today I flip the script and ask HER the tough questions. We discuss the role of Technical Analysis in both markets and financial media. As a former Wall Street analyst herself, she brings unique perspective and experience to traditional media. This was really informative and a lot of fun!

Here is the episode in full:

One of our favorite opportunities that was discussed in last week's Under the Hood segment finally triggered our entry today. And continued elevation of options premiums in out-of-the-money calls sets up a great way for us to participate in a bullish move in a limited risk fashion.

Today we're taking a look at a stock in the Consumer Discretionary Sector. Ticker symbol $MCD

They make burgers, fries, chicken and a variety of desserts. The food is okay, I guess. The stock is way better.

This looks like a year-long base trying to break out to new all-time highs.

We only want to be betting on this long if it is above 220. Otherwise, we can't make that breakout argument. Our upside target is 280.

So far today, I’ve ignored what I can only assume are tens of thousands of posts and articles dissecting last night’s debate. I’ve said it before — As market participants, the election doesn’t interest us. It’s the change in seasonal strength this time of year that has our attention. 

But I’m sure they’ll continue pumping out more political gossip than anyone could possibly absorb. After all, it’s 2020. Most folks are stuck at home, anxious, and searching for any meaningless distractions they can find.  

If you’re nervous about the election or the markets, tonight’s your chance to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. September is over and the fourth quarter begins tomorrow. That means we have fresh batch of monthly candles to review! It doesn’t get any better than that… 

If you do one thing this week, it needs to be a thorough review of these longer-term trends. It’s one of my most important rituals that allows me to tune out the noise better than most.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it’s a custom index or inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now. Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

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 Friday October 2nd @ 8AM 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 Friday morning:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and preview some of the things we're watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

Like we discussed last week, Equity Markets are becoming more of a mixed bag, but there are still plenty of strong areas we want to be betting on.

We're back above the risk levels we've outlined in recent weeks for most major indexes and we believe the resumption in relative strength from former leadership groups such as the Nasdaq, Tech, and Growth has given us a heads up that the recent correction low is in.

We packed our latest Under the Hood report with several choice setups displaying strong relative strength, beautiful bases, and even a couple of names making bullish moves at key risk levels. There were a ton of potential long setups with risk skewed to the upside on this week's list. 

The only problem with this is that the direction of the underlying market was (and frankly, still is) largely in question.

Today, the broader market followed through with strong gains to the upside, supporting our view that a tradeable low has been made.

With this as our backdrop, we want to share three more setups from our most recent "Under The Hood" list as additional vehicles to express our thesis more aggressively on the long side.

Here's the table from this past week's report.

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Welcome to this week's edition of Louis' Look, where I walk you through what I'm learning every week as an intern at All Star Charts. Last week I discussed how information is most valuable when it remains hidden; you can read the post here. Today, I want to explore how the market continually reinforces the necessity of a game plan.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to our "Under The Hood" column for the week ended September 25, 2020.

What we do 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.

Whether we're measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers... there is a lot of overlap.

The bottom line is there are a million ways to skin this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data makes us confident that we're producing the best list each week and gives us more optionality in terms of finding the most favorable trade setups for our clients.

I got a last minute invite to pop on BNN Bloomberg yesterday to chat about the ongoing uptrend in the stock market. While we've seen some stocks and sectors correcting this month, others have held up very well. We want to focus on the ones that did NOT correct, or barely corrected, and are already pressing up against new highs.

With most Indexes in more of a messy range, our focus is on the individual equities.

Here's my interview in full:

(Premium Members can download our "2 to 100 Club" Report & Trade Ideas)

Something we've been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small, to mid, to large and ultimately to mega-cap status (over $200B). 

Once they graduate from small-cap and into mid-cap status (over $2B) then they enter our radar.

But the scan doesn’t just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from. Some of the best-performers in recent decades – from the likes of Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, and Salesforce, to a myriad of others… they all would have been on this list at some point.

When you look at the stocks in our table you will notice we are only focused on technology and growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online Retail, Solar, and more.