We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

Stocks have been under pressure consistently since Q1 last year. That was 20 months ago.

That's precisely when the United States Dollar stopped falling and started to rise.

And this wasn't just against the Euro, which represents 58% of the Dollar Index, we saw Dollar strength across currencies from all over the world.

The US Dollar was the only safe haven asset this year. It wasn't US Treasury Bonds, it wasn't Japanese Yen and it certainly was not Gold.

The only safe haven was the US Dollar.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We're seeing a nice pullback in the indices this morning, which is actually healthy after the two-day rally we just had.

For today, I'm watching $SPY support at 372 and $QQQ support at 277.

Elon Musk and Twitter $TWTR are back in business!

In a letter filed with the SEC on Tuesday, the eccentric billionaire offered to close the originally agreed upon deal worth $44 billion.

The stock we're looking at this week is part of the Chemicals sector. These are stocks that are displaying strength on an absolute and relative basis. And that's exactly what we're looking for!

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.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The US dollar has been under pressure for the past five days, and investors are dancing in the streets.    

I get it. A weaker dollar sits at the top of every stock market bull’s wish list. When the dollar goes down, stocks tend to go up. But don’t forget – betting against the dollar has only brought pain this year.

So, instead of joining the celebrations, I nailed down a clear-cut strategy for selling dollar weakness. 

Spoiler Alert: Early sell signals are already starting to fire!

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market continued to rally all day. It was nice to see.

Now, hopefully we do get follow through.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

The Scales are tipped toward risk and away from opportunity.

A challenging macro backdrop is weighing on the market and unsustained rally attempts have kept Breadth and Trends & Momentum from joining Sentiment as reasons to look for opportunity.

Our Weight of the Evidence Dashboard fills in the details and includes a few high-level charts that we are watching as we head into the 2022 homestretch.

I thought last night's call went well.

Sorry it went a little long and had 200 charts.

I get carried away sometimes ;)

But I tried to hit on the most important points.

ASC Premium Members can watch the replay here and download the slides.

And speaking of important points, isn't this the exact point in time to be buying stocks?

From a seasonal perspective, the time is now:

From a seasonality standpoint, this is where you buy stocks.

Sentiment is near wash out levels. Who was left to sell?

Today on BNN Bloomberg I was asked about why we were buying stocks.

I think it adds some value to talk about the risk management procedures as well. And also which stocks we want to be buying.

Here's the full clip:

Yesterday, we briefly addressed the precarious lack of volatility within crypto markets.

It's piqued our curiosity to see crypto volatility dampen while risk markets have continued to sell off in recent weeks. This comes as equities lost their June lows, where downside volatility looked poised to follow through.

But, this week, risk appetite has shown a completely different face.

The S&P 500 is back above the lows, putting in a failed breakdown.

What's more is that both Ethereum and Bitcoin have risen in conjunction with equities, supporting the case that the conditions for a countertrend rally have been set.

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

We had a resting GTC order filled in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

What a big bounce this morning. Unfortunately, I didn't hold the $SPY overnight, which was a bad miss.

I've been looking for this 373 zone since last week, and we might just get there today. The exact level is 373.44.

The most significant insider activity on today’s list was reported in a series of Form 4 filings by Greg Abel, the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.

Abel reported purchases worth roughly $68 million in Berkshire’s class A shares.

The transactions help to align the executive more closely with shareholders as he prepares to take the reins of the company at some point in the future.

This is the video recording of our October 3rd Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we're covering all the action for the week ended September 30, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with The Minor Leaguers.

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.

Watch this video for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

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...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Today was the first "up" day since last Wednesday.

The question is whether we'll follow through or not.  I wish I had a crystal ball, but I do not.

Commodity Trend Rolls Over

You need to squint to see it, but the long-term trend in the CRB Commodity index fell last week for the first time since the end of 2020. 

The Details: This uptrend, the most persistent since 2002-2006, lasted 94 weeks. During that period, the CRB index was up nearly 70%. Over the past two decades, the CRB index has been trending higher 60% of the time and has risen at a  7.3% annual rate during those periods. It has fallen at 5.5% annual rate during the remaining 40% of the time (when the long-term trend has been falling).  

More Context: Commodities are still in positive territory for 2022, but are as far off their highs as are stocks. They now join stocks and bonds in downtrends, making an already unprecedented market environment even more challenging from an asset allocation perspective.  

Our Deeper Look looks at the absolute and relative trends across the...