I'm an amateur chartist, at best. If you want charting experts, I'll refer you to my team here at All Star Charts.
That said, I've got my eye on what appears to be a bullish flag forming in a hot Chinese stock and it looks ready for liftoff. Coupled with cheap options pricing, we can neatly define our risks and position ourselves for a big win.
After Tuesday’s 9-to-1 upside volume day, our Bull Market Re-Birth Checklist is now five out of five.
Why It Matters: The conditions for a new bull market have been met. It’s hard to argue otherwise from a market perspective. Large-cap and mid-cap value indexes reached new all-time highs this week, and small-cap value is not too far behind. The trend for the market for the market is higher, even if not all the indexes (including the popular benchmarks) are trending higher. But when the trend is higher, leadership is evidence of opportunity.
Our Bull Market Re-Birth Checklist has served its purpose well. But it is now time to put it aside and now turn our attention to questions of sustainability and leadership. These will be best answered by price and breadth trends and not one-off surges and thrusts. We will be aggregating some of the key indicators in this regard and introducing a new bull market sustainability checklist next week. Stay tuned.
To be clear, I don’t care what he said. Instead of hanging on the Fed Chair's words, I prefer to focus on the markets. I find it more enjoyable.
But, boy, did markets respond!
The most striking aspect of yesterday’s reaction was highlighted by the relative strength of growth stocks.
Check out the overlay chart of the US T-Bond ETF $TLT and the ARK Innovation ETF $ARKK: These charts tend to move tick-for-tick, as long-duration assets benefit from the same market environment.
It doesn’t matter that one ETF holds the largest tech names across the market while the other a basket of long-term US Treasury bonds.
Whatever Powell said in addition to “disinflationary,” investors heard...
Excluding price action itself, relative strength has to be the most underappreciated indicator.
It's impossible to outperform if you own assets exhibiting relative weakness.
If a stock is underperforming, there's a reason why. It's not until months after the fact do investors discover the "fundamental" drivers anchoring that stock.
The same can be said for when a stock is outperforming.
Look at it like holding a beach ball underwater. You can feel the pressure on your arms, and when that pressure is released, the ball explodes into the air.
Think about the selling pressure in the market: When the selling pressure alleviates, the stocks showing relative strength tend to be the first ones that shoot higher.
These principles are universal across every market.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!
One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth 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 to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
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 – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their...
In case I haven't been obnoxious enough, we are in the early stages of a new bull market.
I cannot be more clear about this. I feel it in my bones.
Today, the Fed had their first meeting of the year, and did exactly what everyone thought they would do. The market flew straight into rally mode as soon as the press conference began. There were no surprises.
This is because, very much unlike 2022, the path of least resistance for risk assets is now higher.
We're seeing risk-on action characterize the tape on a regular basis.
Breakouts are sticking. The list of new highs is growing longer and longer. Meanwhile, new lows are almost non-existent, and the breakdowns from December have failed and followed through higher.
It's all bull market stuff.
Along the same lines, we're seeing more and more stocks offer bullish chart setups that we want to be buying. And we're entertaining all of them.