Years ago, early in our marriage, my wife and I went to a car dealership with her dad to make one of those all important, young couple purchases: a new car.

While my wife and her father were chatting with the salesman, I was all over the car pushing every button, pulling every lever and opening every compartment. I wanted to know what was what, where things were, and how it all fit together. The three of them were a bit taken aback as I moved from the front seat to the back, methodically finding knobs and uncovering compartments that the salesman didn’t even know existed.

Our marriage survived that episode and I've got a great relationship with my father-in-law but we didn't buy the car.

I am a tinkerer by nature. My dad once rebuilt a motorcycle engine in the living room of the small apartment he shared with my mom shortly after they were married. The point is, I like to know how things work. I'm not afraid to pull something apart, look at the insides, and then put it back together. I always use all the screws and only rarely does a spring or ball bearing go missing.

So when it comes to the markets, I’m also interested in pulling indexes apart...

We noticed a weakening momentum in several indices across the globe even as big talk of 'Budget correction' started to gain traction. In order to benefit from the short-term negative move, we identified strong and weak sectors over a short-term time frame. For the first time in a long time, we also shared a bearish trade idea in our Trade of The Week post.

Today we're going to look at some more short setups that are on our radar, in order to benefit from the dip in momentum we're witnessing.

Read on to know more.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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, and Salesforce, to a myriad of others… all would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table you will notice we are only...

Things are getting crazy out there. But this post isn't going to be about all the deadwood companies whose stocks are getting short squeezed. I'm looking at some of the biggest names showing signs of breaking out and this is something investors should not ignore. We got into Google (Alphabet) recently, and this might be a double-down of sorts, but now we're eyeing another mega cap.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We updated our Breadth chartbook a few days ago which Premium Members can check out here.

There are literally hundreds of charts with various breadth indicators from new high/low and overbought/oversold percentages to A/D lines, and more for not only the major averages and indexes but also each Large-Cap Sector SPDR.

What's this month's takeaway after spending a morning digging through our expanded workbook (that's right, there's more)?

Market internals continue to be a tailwind for stocks as we saw an improvement in the vast majority of our metrics again this month.

The Percent of global markets trading above their 50-day average is faltering. It's dropped to 78% (83% for Developed Markets & 74% for Emerging Markets). Below 70% is a warning for the market, below 40% is usually bad news.

Check out the Chart:

You can download this week's full Sentiment here:

Please let me know if you have any questions.

JC

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

We continue to experience a bullish expansion in participation from stock markets around the world.

Just a few days ago we discussed buying Israeli stocks and explained how their strength at the index level was being driven by their heavy exposure to Technology.

Mega-Cap Growth and Tech stocks (we're including Communications and Discretionary here -- "Tech but not Tech" names such as Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, JD.Com, etc.) are also a dominant market force in China.

We wrote about this exact topic in November, and how strength from these names would likely continue to propel these Large-Cap Chinese Indexes and ETFs higher. The Chinese Tech ETF $CQQQ and iShares Large-Cap China ETF $FXI tacked on an additional 24% and 12%, respectively in the time since.

Now, we're seeing FXI back to its key former highs and attempting to break out of a decade-plus base. ...

This week on the podcast, Jonathan Krinsky joins me for a chat about Sector Rotation. While the Mega-cap names like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft grinded sideways, or even down, since August, the Small-caps, Mid-caps and Micro-cap names have been the leaders. What happens if the Mega-caps break out of these bases to new all-time highs? Does the sector rotation continue? Or do we then rotate into the more defensive areas like Staples, Utilities and REITs, which currently keep making new relative lows?

Where does the US Dollar fit into all this? Will a Dollar rally bust the party and end the rotation into International equities and Commodities? We discussed all of this and so much more in a very short period of time. Jonathan Krinsky is the Chief Market Technician at Bay Crest Partners and puts out research for many long/short equity fund managers. He's a CMT like me and we've known each other for many...

The market had given us an indication of a weakening short-term momentum at the end of last week. We thought this would be a good time to go through the sectoral indices to identify strengths and weaknesses.

Read on to know more.

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Monday February 1st @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Monday evening:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Last week's Mystery Chart was the Israeli Tel Aviv 125 Index zoomed all the way back to the start of this century.

You might be wondering why we're discussing Israeli equities of all things...

The short answer: They're making new all-time highs.

In this post, we explore the sector that is mainly responsible for these gains, dive into its strongest components, and outline some long ideas with risk/reward setups skewed in our favor.

Not only is this yet another group of stocks we can use to express our bullish thesis on risk assets -- it is also excellent information. Once again, we're seeing another development pointing to the increasing participation and improving breadth across international equity markets.

This move in Israeli equities also fits into a larger theme that is taking place beneath the surface for stocks all around the world. It's difficult to overstate the significance of these moves.

In short, we believe this is one of the...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts

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 absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

As we discussed in last week's report, bears have a lot of work cut out for them.

With all this rotation into offensive groups and cyclical areas of the market, they are really running out of talking points. We literally can't find a meaningful group of stocks in the US or even abroad that we would want to short at this point.

This is excellent information as it's not something we can say very often... and it's bullish, just to be clear.

The move higher in equities is being supported by significant cap-rotation at the index level as well as broad participation among sectors, and most recently, even international stock markets.

Basically, it's hard to find stocks that...

I'm getting trolled more than I have in a long time. It's almost like people are mad at me for being as bullish of equities as we've been, and continue to be...

What's everyone so angry about? I don't understand.

Anyway, yes there are stocks we want to buy. Can some stocks go down? Sure. Does that change the fact that there are stocks we want to buy or own? No.

As far as potential headwinds for stocks go, I've got 3 pretty simple ones today.

One of our biggest winning trades of 2020 has been consolidating over the past month and is setting up for what looks like another high-intensity workout. While it would be wishful thinking to expect another complementary ride like the last one, I do think there is a way to capture some gains without having to push all out again!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ending January 25, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.

In this column, we 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.

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 this cat. Relying on our entire arsenal of data...

In the week gone by, we saw a weakening sentiment develop on the Nifty 50 daily chart. We looked at this through a lens of caution and continue looking for signals that either strengthen or negate this thesis.

At All Star Charts we follow a top-down research approach whereby we track all the asset classes and global markets in order to arrive at our view. In our weekly analysis, we carried out the same process and saw a pattern worth mentioning.

Let's take a look at some charts!

It's late-January. We've rung in the New Year. Christmas decorations are put away. We're settling into the late winter slog of cold & snow.

In my reading on this morning (a cold & snowy one in Milwaukee), I came across the following passage:

"You see, Rodya, to make a career in the world , it's enough, in my opinion, if you always observe the season; don't ask for asparagus in January, and you'll have a few more bills in your purse; the same goes for this purchase. The season now is summer, so I made a summer purchase. . ."

It's from "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky. Since it's a Russian novel, explaining exactly who is talking, who is being spoken to, and the overall context would take too much time. But I'm quite sure that we can look at what is being said on its own and glean some wisdom.

This week we're looking at one long setup and one short setup. The sectors we've identified are Consumer Durables for a bullish trade and Financial Services for a bearish trade.