I was away from the office last week with the team, but I was still able to pop into BNN Bloomberg for a quick hit.

We discussed the fact that fear among investors is off the charts, stocks are in uptrends and breadth is expanding. I think the beginning of the new Commodities Supercycle is bullish for stocks and just another tailwind to take them higher.

If the tv anchors think I'm making a bold call by suggesting that stocks in uptrends will go higher, then we're probably not near a top.

Here's the interview in full:

We like buying stocks that are breaking out of bases, regardless of what sector they're a part of.

But when you combine a emerging leadership with these base breakouts, now you have a smokin' combination!

That's exactly what's happening in the Pot space. Make sure to check out our latest on Marijuana Stocks here.

But today it's the Cresco Labs that has my attention. 

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

New Mystery Chart!

For those new to this exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe... on an absolute or relative basis.

Maybe it’s a custom index or price is inverted, who knows!

We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with the asset in order to take a view based solely on price behavior.

You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now.

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

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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 to profit in the weeks and months ahead.

In last week's report, we played "devil's advocate" and laid out some of the more bearish developments we could find out there.

But all-in-all, the market is still providing bears less room to make a sound argument. We continue to find that any bearish evidence is primarily isolated to shorter timeframes... and even then, still overwhelmed by the abundance of bullish data points.

So while a minor rise in volatility can be expected in what tends to be a seasonally weak month of February, over a longer timeframe, we're still aggressive buyers of stocks.

When we poured over our...

The team recently put out a special Big Cap edition of the Under the Hood Report that offered a bevy of setups in household names we all know and love.

And a company with a market cap measured in Trillions (with a capital T), is quietly setting up beautifully with volatility near the lowest levels of the year.

Nifty Auto has been on our radar for quite some time now. When Nifty50 was under short term pressure, Nifty Auto was one of the sectors that stood out as a strong performer.

With the ensuing move in the Auto stocks, we thought of doing a deep dive into this sector to see if we could find some actionable setups.

The Auto sector has closed comfortably above the resistance level of 10,400 effectively absorbing overhead supply at these levels. In the weeks and months ahead, this sector could make a dash towards the level of 12,110. The strong bullish momentum regime indicated by RSI alludes to the same view.

Click on chart to enlarge view.

Relatively speaking, Nifty Auto has broken out of its resistance zone and is ready for the next leg of the rally.

Now let’s take a look at some actionable ideas at current...

Can you think of a more bullish combination than a bunch of angry people and indexes all over the world making new all time highs?

This is what's going on right now. And I think it's fantastic.

It's been a quiet last few days here at Allstarcharts.com as I've been meeting with the team and working on some really exciting new projects. I got together with Willie, Strazza, Peter, Danny, Jean Carlo and Matt this week, and we got a lot more accomplished than I would have imagined.

Anyway, I didn't completely fall off the grid, although I kind of tried to. Most of our conversations still revolved around the market, sentiment, breadth, rotation and the Intermarket relationships. I mean, even over dinner! We just couldn't help ourselves.

I'm seeing stocks making new all-time highs, but the questions I get from journalists is how it's possible?

How it's possible? They're in uptrends. There's more demand for stocks than there is supply of them. That's not my opinion. That's just a fact. There may not be as much demand for stocks in your household, but that's your problem. Not ours....

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ending February 5, 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...

This week we're looking at two long setups. The sectors we're looking at are Private Banks and Infrastructure.

We elaborated in the Three Charts of the Week post about the strength we're seeing in Banks and Infrastructure sectors and identified a couple of names that could do well going forward.

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.

This is the video recording of the February 4th Town Hall Meeting w/ Willie Delwiche & JC Parets.

02/4/21 2PM ET

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

Marijuana stocks have been smoking hot over the trailing quarter, with the Alternative Harvest Marijuana ETF $MJ more than doubling since the election on November 3rd.

Considering this new leadership role over the near-term, today we're going to do a follow-up on our last deep dive into the space, which we published last fall.

Back then, we were simply looking for a bottom and mean reversion move higher, which we got... Now, with the industry making new highs, we want to see how things are looking on both an absolute and relative basis.

And as always, we'll check in on some of our past trades in the space and highlight today's strongest stocks, along with trade setups skewed in our favor that we want to use to express our bullish thesis.

Before we get into the weeds, let’s start at the industry level with the Alternative Harvest ETF (MJ).

...

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

In a post last month JC discussed the recent strength in Commodities and posed the following question...

If the CRB Index is above its 2016 lows and Crude Oil is above all those former lows from the past decade, how can we be bearish commodities?

Over the last few quarters, we've seen more and more intermarket relationships make a significant shift in favor of risk-assets.

Many are showing early signs of a structural reversal and others simply accelerating in the direction of their underlying trend.

From Bonds and Agriculture, to Chinese equities, and cyclical stocks like SMIDs, Materials...

Stocks getting squeezed are all the rage these days, and rightly so. Some of the moves have been epic. The reasons for each squeeze vary from stock to stock, but the price action is hard to ignore.

With that in mind, we've identified some potential short squeezes that also have the benefit of the technicals lining up in our favor. Check out our recent Freshly Squeezed report.

One of the names on the list looks like it's ready to go...

As February gets under way, it’s time to review positions with February options that remain open (haven’t already hit profit targets or been stopped out). This month there isn't much to discuss as most of our February options trades have already been closed out thanks to hitting their profit targets or getting stopped out.

Most trades I put on for All Star Options tend to have a minimum duration of 30 days (short premium plays) and often as long as 6-8 months (for long premium plays). As options approach expiration, greeks like theta and gamma start to become my enemy and whipsaw my P/L. Therefore, as options and spreads get into the expiration month, my best practice is to put each position on notice — it’s time to take action.

At the time of this writing, I've only got 2 remaining positions with Feb options.

In the scoreboard below I denote the date we exited each position:

There is a big difference between those who follow the market on a daily basis and those who take a quick glance at it once in a while. One category tracks moves for short term trades and the other looks out for long term investments.

What catches the attention of both these categories simultaneously though?

When the top two gainers of the day in Nifty50 go by the ticker names of SBIN and ITC.

This is not a frequent phenomenon and hence attracts more eyeballs upon occurrence.

Read on to know more.

SBI and ITC are like the elephants of the jungle - they move when they have to but stay under the radar for the most part. These are evergreen names that have the good fortune of being held in high standards in the eyes of the market, regardless of market conditions.

Ask around for long term investment tips, and all analysts big and small manage to throw these two names in the mix pretty often.

But why are we focusing on these names?

Has anything changed? Maybe.

Are we observing something new in the price action? Maybe.