From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key takeaway: Despite the decreasing exposure of active equity managers, the weight of the evidence continues to lean toward a neutral sentiment backdrop that supports a much needed reset, allowing optimism to rebuild moving forward. Investment managers may be pulling back from the market, but equity ETF inflows have reached record levels. This past month inflows reached over $80 billion, the highest level over a one month period. This may suggest excessive investor positioning but inflows can remain high for extended periods of time before negatively impacting the market. Another piece of information that points to growing optimism is The Consensus Inc. Bullish Sentiment Index as it reached 74% last week, it’s highest level since early 2018. These pockets of investor optimism, within the broader neutral setting, allude to the nature of the recent unwind.

Sentiment Chart of the Week: Sentiment Reset

...

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

Check out our latest Mystery Chart!

What we do here is take a chart that’s captured our attention, and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.

This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it’s an absolute price chart, other times it’s on a relative basis.

It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!

The point is, when we aren’t able to recognize what’s in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize it objectively.

While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision…

So let us know what it is… Buy, Sell, or Do Nothing?

In a market environment where Financials and Natural Resources have become leadership groups, how do we not have a conversation about Canada? Taking that one step further, we need to talk about how any investor, whether living in Canada or not, can take advantage of a potential structural swing in the trend for Canadian Equities.

David Cox is someone who I've discussed markets with for many years. We usually hook up every Spring in New York City at the annual CMT Symposium. It's only fair that I let the rest of the world eavesdrop on our chats. He's a bright guy with good perspective on all things stocks, interest rates, forex markets and...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In our continued effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from this universe of stocks.

We've already had some great trades come out of this column and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.

The idea is to catch the strongest names while they're still small and have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climb up the ranks...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaway: New highs bring out the bulls. Excessive optimism offset by broad market strength in the US & around the world. Despite Fed assurances of patience, rising bond yields will soon put pressure on the liquidity backdrop.

Their short-term performance has been mixed, but our relative strength rankings still have Financials, Industrials and Energy holding down the top spots. The still unanswered question from the past few weeks is whether the short-term trends (e.g., Technology in the top spot, Energy in the last spot) represent the beginning of sustainable shifts in leadership or are part of the process of digestion after longer-term trends moved too far in the other direction. A similar question presents itself when looking at the industry group heat map. Small & mid-cap groups dominate the top of the rankings, but large-cap groups appear to be on something of an upswing. 

We have been discussing how the market has been moving in a sideways range for almost two months now. With a trading range comes a lot of confusion. The sharp decline in the market today took the index towards the lower end of its trading range.

Should we be worried about the ensuing move? Let's find out.

During our latest Options Conference call, me and JC riffed on a couple potential trades -- one of which I wanted to wait a bit on, since it's not a type of play I do with great frequency.

Well, on Friday, the stock had a nice little pullback nearer to recent IPO support which offers us a nice opportunity to get positioned at a bit of a discount, so I'm going to pull the trigger today.

Dow Theory is one of my favorite topics. It's fascinating how much these lessons from over 130 years ago still help in today's times.

Think about this, we're using Charlie Dow's principles to analyze assets that never even existed back then. The key to remember here is that we don't change. Humans are the constant in this equation. And that's what we're analyzing, at the end of the day: Human behavior.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Top 10 report was just published. In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.

Bifurcation Looms In The Currency Complex

As the US Dollar has caught a bid in recent weeks, our custom equal-weight index of the G-10 currencies is finding resistance at a perfectly logical level. We’re receiving bifurcated signals from the currency complex all-in-all, as many risk-on currencies are approaching key inflection points. In saying this, the currencies that have held up the best during the Dollar’s recent bout in strength have been those more closely tied with commodity-rich economies. This adds credence to our global growth and Commodity Supercycle thesis.   

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Check out this week's Momentum Report, our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector, and Industry Group level. By analyzing the short-term data in these reports we can take a more tactical view in order to better understand and gain insight into the structural trends at play.

Let's jump right into it with some of the major takeaways from this week's report:

* ASC Plus Members can access the Momentum Report by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.

Macro

• Just about all of the major diversified equity indexes in our macro universe - both US and International, were higher this week. The only exceptions were Small and Micro-Caps, as well as Emerging Markets.
  • Here is the S&P Global 100 $IOO, which just tacked on an additional 3.5% and closed at fresh all-time highs for the third consecutive week... and it did so in about as bullish fashion as possible with a marubozu candlestick. As you can see, this candle opens at the lows and closes at the highs, illustrating the strong and steady...

This week we're looking at a long setup in the Chemicals sector. When more analysis processes point in the same direction, that direction becomes hard to ignore.

We have one such stock for this week's actionable idea.

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July 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.

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

Commodities continue to churn as they digest recent gains. This has been a recurring theme over the past several weeks.

However, there are signs that this might be changing.

For instance, Lumber pushes to new all-time highs, Steel futures hit new highs, and Platinum is back above a key level of resistance.

Pockets of renewed strength have started to pop up across various groupings within the Commodities space. That's valuable information.

Consider Rebar Futures forcefully breaking out of a 3-year consolidation while most of the market chops sideways.

Both Lumber and Rebar futures hitting new highs screams global growth.  Strength from these markets bodes well for other procyclical areas such as...

This is our ASC Research Q2 2021 Playbook.

This is one of my favorite things to do: Forget everything that happened last year, or even in the first quarter of this year. Start from scratch. And approach the market with an open mind.

That's exactly why we put together these quarterly reports. It's self-serving. It helps us organize our thoughts, and identify which areas we want to attack, and which ones we want to avoid, on all time frames: both long-term and short-term.

Make sure to check out our New Table of Contents on Page 2, which will help you navigate through the full report:

As the pandemic raged on March 23, 2020, the S&P 500 was bottoming out following the quickest crash from its highs in history.

Of course, we didn’t know it was THE bottom in real-time. How could we?

Yet just five days later, we were able to hold our 4th Annual Chart Summit virtually. No, we didn’t get a chance to meet in person or enjoy any amazing skiing in Colorado like we did in year’s past. But we were able to pick the brains of the best analysts I know at what turned out to be a critical moment for the markets.

And I’m so glad we did…

While the world felt like it was falling apart, traders just like you had the chance to soak in the wisdom of some of the top minds in finance. Instead of panic, we were treated to process and analysis. And a ton of hot charts!

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

We have some good news! We are debuting another new scan for Premium Members of All Star Charts India. As we go forward, we will introduce several new features for our members, but for now, the second scan has just dropped!

Introducing the new scan- All Star Momentum.

All Star Momentum is a brand new scan that pinpoints the very best stocks in the market. This time around, we have incorporated our stock universe of Nifty 500 as the base. Among the 500 stocks that we follow, this scan will pump out names that are most likely to generate great returns.

While we go through our lists of sectors and stocks on a weekly basis, we thought of launching a product that would highlight the names that are the strongest performers in our universe and those that are primed for an explosive move.

Just like The Outperformers scan, this is a list of stocks belonging to the sectors that display relative strength in the market at any given point in time. Since sector rotation is the lifeblood of a bull market, we will be ahead of the curve before the gears keep shifting.