From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

I’ve got an old pair of Chaco sandals that I’m not ready to part with just yet. But the soles were becoming detached from the footbed, so I had to do a little repair work. 

I glued them up and started thinking about rigging a clamp to provide even pressure to help the glue set. Catching sight of a couple of bricks laying nearby, I realized that these would work just fine for this type of job.

Would a well placed clamp or two have produced a more textbook repair? Perhaps. But the bricks I had at hand worked just fine for this.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!

One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth 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, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey...

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

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaway: Permabulls will almost always complain about rallies being unloved, just as permabears never leave their refrain that downside risks are under appreciated. That is the prism through which they view the world. In the current situation, complacency is rising and optimism is building, both from low levels. After the buying panic seen in the NAAIM data in July, we saw something similar in this week’s data from Consensus Inc (the largest one-week increase in optimism in over a decade). Even though bears still outnumber bulls on the AAII survey, equity ETF inflows are heating up. The shift from excessive pessimism to increased optimism is the most bullish part of the sentiment curve and that is where we find ourselves. Breadth thrusts and surging momentum are cherries on the top.

Sentiment Report Chart of the Week: Strong Momentum Doesn’t Usually Just Evaporate

This study looks at instances of 40-day momentum surging from below zero to above 15%. There are...

This is the video recording of our August 17, 2022, Inside Scoop Weekly Strategy Session.

Monday night we held our August Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.

Let’s get right into it!

During our morning Analyst meeting today, the team was looking across a variety of asset classes and sectors to identify the current leaders, and those likely to continue tracking higher if the broader stock market rally is for real.

One sector that stood out starkly was Big Pharma.

There are some monster bases in the process of resolving higher here.

From the Desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

One of the common criticisms of technical analysis is that it's all self-fulfilling prophecy.

Its proponents argue that technical analysis doesn't work by understanding underlying supply and demand dynamics.

Rather, it operates on a single dimension, where market events are caused either directly or indirectly by a preceding prediction by technician that it was going to perform a certain way.

An intuitive example of the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis (SFP) is the classic technical analysis principle of support and resistance.

Those who favor SFP argue that markets only sell off at resistance and bottom at support because other traders identified these levels and acted according to technical analysis principles.

After all, a self-fulfilling prophecy is defined as a person or a group's expectation for the behavior of another group bringing about the expected behavior.

Within the industry, arguments like these tend to get hyperpolarized and over-divisive. That's not surprising considering there's still a cohort of investors that argues technical analysis is like...

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

Last night we held our August Mid-month Conference Call. This is when we discuss our tactical view of the market and look for any signs of change in the short-term trend.

Let's go through some of the most important charts to track as this month progresses.

The most significant insider transaction on today’s list comes in a 13D from Carl Icahn.

Icahn increased his ownership stake in the natural gas services company Southwest Gas Holdings $SWX from 7.6% to 8.7%.

My friend Patrick just invited me to talk markets on his Trendlines Over Headlines video series.

I had a blast chatting about some of my favorite charts and what we’re seeing in crypto, the major averages, small-caps, crude, and a lot more. We covered a lot of ground, hitting on some of the most important market themes right now.

You can watch it here:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend Aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street.

These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to long-term-minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That's why we're turning our attention to the future aristocrats.

In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we're curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for five to nine years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are "stocks that pay you to make money."

Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

By adding our...

The stock making its way to today's post is part of the Defense sector that has been performing well for a while now.

And guess what? We have a breakout! Do you know which stock we're talking about?

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

As I scrolled through my currency charts this weekend, the same three-word phrase kept popping to mind: "Can’t be short!"

Whether it’s the Swiss franc, the British pound, or the Thai baht, we can’t be short most global currencies against the US dollar. Not at current levels.

There is one major exception. It’s the euro.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Breadth is improving and our bull market re-born checklist has satisfied two more of its criteria. We are moving off the sidelines and getting more involved, increasing equity exposure in both the Cyclical and Tactical Portfolios and staying in harmony with current leadership trends.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaways:

• Breadth thrusts and global strength have fueled the market in the past
• Price patterns are consistent but participation is stronger now than in 2008
• If June low was important, remainder of 2022 could see less volatility and more strength

The first half of 2022 was a great time to be on the sidelines, letting the bulls and bears bloody themselves in the market. Last year saw the previous breadth thrust regime expire in June and by November more stocks were making new lows than new highs. As 2021 turned to 2022, fewer and fewer world markets were showing any strength. The second half of the year is shaping up to be a different story, with a breadth thrust in July and a sharp expansion in the percentage of world markets trading above their 50-day averages, the conditions that have fueled all of the net gains in the S&P 500 in the past 40+ years are now present. 

We have compared the market action over the first half of 2022 to the behavior of the market following the peak in Q4...

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