You'd be forgiven if you read this headline and completely discarded this blog post to the trash heap. I feel you. But assuming you're reading these words, you seem to be willing to entertain the possibility of "unpopular" ideas.

In my experience, when getting bearish on a stock or an index, it is rarely a smart play (statistically speaking) to purchase straight long puts. The reason being that if I'm spotting a bearish opportunity, then likely the rest of the world sees it too and therefore people are probably getting nervous and beginning to hedge their long positions with puts or are starting to bid up speculative downside bets. In either case, it usually inflates the implied volatility in the options pricing, making puts an unfavorable purchase.

But every so often, we find a case where a stock or an index has really just worn people out and people have just lost interest. And when the security starts to show signs of losing support, the opportunistic speculator can get ahead of the crowd before the opportunity becomes obvious to everyone else.

This appears to be the situation in the Energy Sector ETF $XLE.

This week on the show, Howard and I talk about the value in finding people to synthesize information for you. Howard is one of the best people I know at doing this, and I've picked up a few tricks from him over the years.

We can't be experts in everything. But with new tools and technology, we now have the ability to rely on other subject matter experts to point us in the right direction and give us perspective on how they see the world. I've found this process to be incredibly valuable. I encourage you to try it!

Here is our conversation in full:

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.

Last week, we followed up on some of the charts we recently cautioned were approaching overhead supply to see how they reacted to these critical levels.

Since we experienced a bit of a selloff on Thursday and Friday, this week we’re going to keep it simple and take a high-level look at some of the most important assets in the world and assess any damage that was endured...

...Spoiler alert: there wasn't much.

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Welcome to this week’s edition of Louis’ Look, where I write a brief note for the blog to document the lessons I’m learning every week. You can read the previous post here. This week, I want to focus on how market leadership is always in flux, and the best way to identify these changes is through, you guessed it, price.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to this week's edition of "Under The Hood."

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

We are using a variety of new 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 the 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.

What's the bear case for equities if Financials start to outperform for the first time in, what feels like, forever?

A funny thing happened this week. The Nasdaq, as well as some of the major Large-Cap US Indexes, were under pressure for a couple of days. But did you realize which which sector was the best performer during that selling?

Financials.

Wait, what? Relative strength in Financials?

Looking at this a little deeper, if Financials were ever going to start to outperform, this would be a perfectly logical place for that to start. In fact, this is exactly where they started to outperform after the Financial crisis:

Click on Charts to Zoom In

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The Fixed Income, Commodity, and Currency markets are near and dear to my heart. Ever since I began learning Technical Analysis, I've always loved analyzing things that are "off the beaten path." This included everything from Interest Rates to Soybeans to the Norwegian Krone. Equities are great and all, but this is the stuff that gets me up in the morning.

In addition to the blog posts we do on the site, I've wanted to explore new ways to share that passion with you all and show why even if you're not investing in these markets directly, they're worth paying attention to.

That brings us to my weekly show, "What The FICC?"

In this weekly video series, I'll be highlighting the most important chart or theme from these three asset classes while doing my best to tie that analysis back to Equities through an intermarket signal or a trade idea.

This week's episode is linked below, enjoy!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Energy stocks and Crude Oil have been trending in opposite directions over the trailing three months.

We know these kinds of intermarket relationships can dislocate for extended periods of time, but some recent developments in the space have us thinking it may be time for this divergence to correct itself... and it's likely to come in the form of Crude catching down as opposed to stocks catching up.

In this post, we'll reveal this week's Mystery Chart and discuss what the recent action in Oil could mean for Energy stocks in the weeks/months ahead.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Two weeks ago on "What The FICC?" I discussed the potential long-term trend change in Agricultural Commodities and the vehicles to take advantage of it.

It's true that August was a good month for Lean Hogs, Corn, Cocoa, Soybean Oil, and others, but in this post, I want to temper expectations about what we should expect going further.

It's been a monster run since March for equities, especially in the United States. Rotation, breadth expansion, momentum thrusts, all the works.

So what's going to stop this train? The opposite of those things, most likely.

I think the bear case starts with small-caps. I was taught to dance with the girl who brought me to the dance. Small-caps were one of the key reasons why we got so bearish in early October 2018 and then again this year in early February 2020.

So why ignore them now? I say stick with that.

As we discussed last night on our Monthly Charts Strategy Session (Premium), if you're going to be shorting stocks and betting on the end, I think both Small-caps and Micro-caps need to be below their June highs:

This is the video recording of our September 2, 2020 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

If I was a long holder of big positions in $AAPL, $AMZN, $TSLA, $FB, $GOOG — any of the teracaps…. I’d be selling way OTM covered calls like a wild man here.#SKEW

— Sean McLaughlin, NLD 📈 (@chicagosean) September 1, 2020

Covered Calls is not a strategy we employ often at All Star Options, as there are better more efficient ways to use our capital to express similar bets.