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

The outperformance from commodities this year has been hard to ignore.

Over the trailing 52 weeks, the CRB index is up over 56% and our equal-weight commodity index is up over 37%. The entire space has been participating -- energy, base metals, grains, and softs. 

And even though precious metals have been trending lower since last summer, we can’t forget that gold kicked off the commodities rally by hitting new all-time highs last year.

If we’re only looking at stocks and bonds we’re cutting ourselves off from what is currently the top-performing asset class. It doesn’t matter whether we trade the markets on a more tactical timeframe or if we have a long-term investing approach. There is alpha in commodities right now and we want to have exposure. 

But how do we take advantage of this space if we don’t have the ability to buy December futures contracts of Crude Oil or the March ‘22 futures contracts of Corn?

That's where our commodity ETF/ETN list comes into play. 

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

Last week, we pointed out some mixed signals in our breadth indicators. 

Despite the new highs from almost all the large-cap major averages, we had yet to see new highs in their corresponding advance-decline lines.

We also hadn’t experienced the kind of expansion in participation that we’d expect to accompany the indexes to new price highs.

Our new high indicators were still muted, even on shorter timeframes.

But that was last week. This week, mid-caps and small-caps have joined their large-cap peers at new record highs after making decisive upside resolutions from their year-to-date ranges.

And guess what? We’re finally getting that breadth confirmation we were missing.

Let’s talk about it.

First, here’s a quick update on the advance-decline lines that we covered in last week's column:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as a market of stocks.

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions... but there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club. We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports. But we don’t highlight lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Until now… 

In Part 2 of our Fibonacci Series we dive into Frequencies with Jim Bartelloni.

If you're already familiar with my others videos with Bart, you know this is all math. No fundamentals to see here!

In this video we look at the similarities between the shapes made by vibrating grains of sand and the ups and downs of the stock market, particularly the Small-cap Russell2000 ETF $IWM.

This was really cool. Hope you enjoy!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza 

The January Effect posits that financial markets experience a seasonal anomaly in the beginning of each year whereby stock prices tend to rise more than in any other month.

But this bullish period extends beyond a single month. In fact, our data show that buyers come out in full force starting in the late fall/early winter.

According to historic seasonal trends, the best time of the year for the stock market is from November to January. Smaller stocks are known to outperform during this period.

And if we’re focusing on small-caps, November is by far the single best month. So it should come as no surprise that the Russell 2000 and S&P Mid-Cap 400 are breaking out to fresh all-time highs this week. They did the same thing last November. In fact, November of 2020 was the best month ever for these small- and mid-cap indexes.

Let’s dive in and discuss some of the seasonal tailwinds supporting these new highs from SMIDs.

We debuted a new scan recently- The Outperformers.

The Outperformers is our newest scan that pinpoints the very best stocks in the market. It’s the fastest, easiest way to find quality names that are primed for major moves.

The goal is that as the market rally progresses, the sector rotation within the market will reflect in this scan. So while our Top/Down Analysis helps us with the broader view of the market, this Bottom/Up scan makes sure that we catch the slightest change in sentiment.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza 

We held our November 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.

Let’s dive in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

Monthly Charts are very important to us. As a team, we regroup several times, but monthly charts put us on the same page, without having to discuss it.

Process is an important aspect of any activity. And so, Monthly Charts analysis is an important aspect of our research. Without this, it is easy to get swayed in the short-term moves and get carried away by them.

You can sign up for our Monthly Strategy Call and get the whole update of the market. We're here to provide a glimpse of what's going on.

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 29, 2021. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off 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.

This is the video recording of our November 1, 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.

This week we’re looking at a long setup in the Infrastructure sector. The market has been quite selective over the past two weeks but we saw strength come through in pockets. Here is one such example.

Let's take a look at this stock.