From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge
In today's post, we’ll discuss some of our favorite and most important intermarket ratios and see what they’re suggesting for markets and risk appetite around the globe.
One thing we found interesting when digging through these charts is that many of them look a lot like stocks do right now.
Sideways. Range-bound. Messy. But, within the context of underlying uptrends.
So these are basically just continuation patterns on shorter timeframes.
But, after consolidating for months and even quarters now, we are beginning to see some resolve higher… kind of like we’re seeing from stocks on an absolute basis.
Coincidence? Probably not.
We think this makes a lot of sense and bodes well for risk assets. Let’s take a look at some of these charts now.
Here’s one of the most important cross-asset ratios we track, and it’s a great example of exactly what we’re talking about.
Financials have made quite the comeback in recent weeks, with the Large-Cap Financial SPDR $XLF trading back to record highs as bank stocks around the world have fought to repair some of the damage endured during Q2.
We even saw regional banks break back above a major level of interest last week. The importance of this can't be overstated.
But that's just the US. What are financials doing in the rest of the world? Are they confirming this strength we're seeing from the US?
In this post, we’ll provide an in-depth rundown of what’s going on with this critically important sector--not just in the US, but around the globe.
Let’s kick things off with last week’s mystery chart. As always, thanks to everyone who participated.
We asked whether the recent highs were a false start or a failed breakout. The answers were skewed in favor of the bulls, as most of you said it was merely a retest of the previous highs. And it looks like you were right!
Here it is... the S&P Global Financials Index $IXG:
In this week's Three Charts For The Week Ahead, we discussed the strength in Top 10 largecap stocks and a critical resistance level in the midcap index.
Welcome to our latest RPP Report, where we publish return 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 absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
We consider this our weekly state of the union address as we break down and reiterate both our tactical and structural outlook on various asset classes and discuss the most important themes and developments currently playing out in markets all around the world.
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.
Welcome back to our latest "Under The Hood" column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended August 6, 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.