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

Tough sledding today.

The market is caught between two levels, the eight-day moving average and the 21-day.

I traded small, and I'll do that the rest of the week.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I’ve had the pleasure of driving cross country multiple times, covering every inch of I-10. 

I made so many memorable moments on those drives …

I pushed through white-out conditions in Kansas. (My brother had an appointment with the State Department in Washington D.C., and we couldn’t stop.)

I "accidentally" crossed into Juarez, Mexico, which turned into one helluva time!

And I picked up more than one speeding ticket on the reservation (highway patrol doesn’t play in Navajo country).

I somehow made it coast to coast every time.

While many details of those treks slip away with the years, I’ll always remember the Alamo.

I know, it’s funny. I didn't even go inside.

To be clear, my memory of the Alamo has nothing to do with the historic battle or the revisionist histories that have been written and rewritten since.

Instead, I picture a meager fort in the twilight – nothing more. A truly humble beacon of strength.

The understated image resurfaces in my mind's eye this week as I plan and plot the best way to trade gold.

As gold meets increased...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza

The largest insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filed by Ares Management Company.

The hedge fund reported a purchase of Frontier Communications Parent Inc $FYBR shares in the amount of $573,540.

As I mentioned last week, we're in an environment where we want to be collecting delta-neutral options premium. Unfortunately, we can either pick instruments that are in well-defined ranges or we can sell high implied volatility, but it's getting increasingly hard to find both.

With this in mind, today's trade is in an instrument where options pricing may not be as elevated as it was earlier in the year, but it's still giving us a lot of room to be wrong.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Tough sledding today.

The market is caught between two levels, the eight-day moving average and the 21-day.

I traded small, and I’ll do that the rest of the week.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I’ve had the pleasure of driving cross country multiple times, covering every inch of I-10. 

I made so many memorable moments on those drives …

I pushed through white-out conditions in Kansas. (My brother had an appointment with the State Department in Washington D.C., and we couldn’t stop.)

I “accidentally” crossed into Juarez, Mexico, which turned into one helluva time!

And I picked up more than one speeding ticket on the reservation (highway patrol doesn’t play in Navajo country).

I somehow made it coast to coast every time.

While many details of those treks slip away with the years, I’ll always remember the Alamo.

I know, it’s funny. I didn’t even go inside.

To be clear, my memory of the Alamo has nothing to do with the historic battle or the revisionist histories that have been written and rewritten since.

Instead, I picture a meager fort in the twilight – nothing more. A truly humble beacon of strength.

The understated image resurfaces in my mind’s eye this week as I plan and plot the best way to trade gold.

As gold meets increased selling pressure...

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

The next new position in our Paid-to-Play portfolio is:

The largest insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filed by Lloyd M. Yates, director, president and CEO of NiSource Inc $NI.

Yates reported a purchase of 40,000 shares of NI, equivalent to $1,057,600.

With stocks selling off this quarter, the bears are back.

Could you imagine still telling yourself that the rally we got in equities over the past year was a bear market?

What kind of serial killer thinks like that?

A 3-5% correction in some of the major Indexes can cause people to lose their minds.

Heck, you may be wondering yourself if this is the beginning of a huge move lower for stock prices. I certainly am.

Remember, every big move starts with a small one. But not every small move turns into a big one.

That's where Credit Spreads come in. If there is real stress in the market, you're going to see it in credit.

But as stock prices corrected this month, Credit Spreads only got more narrow.

Here's an easy way to view that, comparing the prices of High Yield Bonds vs US Treasury Bonds:

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It's the last week of August, and the market had a nice recovery on Friday.

We'll see if $SPY 440 holds for a move back to 444 or not.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza

The largest insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filed by Lloyd M. Yates, director, president and CEO of NiSource Inc $NI.

Yates reported a purchase of 40,000 shares of NI, equivalent to $1,057,600.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It’s the last week of August, and the market had a nice recovery on Friday.

We’ll see if $SPY 440 holds for a move back to 444 or not.

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Click here to check it out.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

*Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month.

Then, we sort the remaining names by their proximity to new 52-...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It was a very volatile Friday -- up, down, and all around.

That makes for tough trading, and I told the people in the Live Trading Room the best you can do is to NOT trade today.

That being said...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley 

“Looks like cocoa and sugar are poised to break out.” 

That’s the first message I saw on my phone this morning as traders across the US were preparing for the upcoming session.

But I wasn’t ready to get behind a tactical move in either cocoa or sugar.

Instead, my full attention rests with one commodity on the precipice of an explosive rally…

Cotton.

Check out the weekly continuation chart of cotton futures:

My eyes have been fixated on cotton since early February.

Buyers were challenging a critical retracement level at approximately 89 to open the year. And they continue to do so, slowly absorbing overhead supply as momentum steadily improves.

Prolonged periods of contraction often lead to explosive expansions in price. Cotton is in the midst of the contraction phase. 

So when will...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I bought bonds last December and again in March.

I thought it was time to bring these beaten-down assets back into the fold as US Treasuries printed fresh six-month highs.

But I was wrong. 

Fast-forward to today, and the downtrend for bonds remains intact.

And those false breakouts last spring have led to fresh breakdowns as we head into the fall.

The 10- and 30-year futures are flashing sell signals as they undercut their respective March pivot lows.

Now, the shorter end of the curve is doing the same.

Here’s the two-year Treasury note completing a bearish continuation pattern:

The...