Objectively speaking, knowing when to sit out is something that often separates good investors from mediocre ones.

We've already laid out our approach, which you can read here.

In summary:

This is the video recording of the April 14th Weekly Town Hall w/ Willie Delwiche.

04/14/22 2:00 PM ET

These are the registration details for our live mid-month conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

Our next Live Call will be held on Monday April 18th at 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 night:

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

It’s easy to fixate on percentages when discussing and labeling market moves, especially when those moves are to the downside. 

The S&P 500 can be 9.99% below its peak and you’ll hear nothing but crickets. Cross the 10% threshold and it’s a Correction. Cross the 20% threshold and banner headlines announce a Bear Market.

There are plenty of problems with this approach. A market environment where the S&P 500 is down 9.9% from its peak is likely not materially different from one where the index is down 10.1%. The same can be said on either side of the bear market threshold. Problems go beyond these arbitrary, specific thresholds. 

The questions it raises reflect its lack of utility for everyone except headline writers: Is a market that is on its way to, but has not yet achieved a 20% peak to trough decline, in a bear market? Or is it still a bull market? And what happens after it enters bear market territory but nudges higher so that the peak to trough decline is now less than the 20% threshold? Is this still a bear market?

Pundits can wrestle with these questions. Historians...

Individual investors with way too much exposure to growth stocks are not happy.

In fact, they're the most pessimistic they've been in 30 years.

Last time individual investors were this bearish, Baby Got Back and Achy Breaky Heart were topping the music charts.

In a letter to the board of directors, Elon Musk has made an unsolicited bid to buy 100% of Twitter $TWTR in an all-cash deal.

He’s offering $54.20 per share, which represents a 54% premium from when he began investing in the stock and a 38% premium from the time it was announced.

We debuted a new scan recently which goes by the name- All Star Momentum.

All Star Momentum is a brand new scan that guides us towards the very best stocks in the market. This time around, we have incorporated our stock universe of Nifty 500 as the base. Among the 500 stocks that we follow, this scan will pump out names that are most likely to outperform the market.

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...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaway: Renewed selling pressure brings an air of disappointment rather than fear. Lackluster price action, an absence of a meaningful breadth thrust, and an overall risk-off environment leave little to spark an optimistic outlook. We’ve seen bears from a survey perspective, and that has created the conditions for a rally. Now, we need to see an increase in bulls if a rally is to materialize into a bull market. Without a rebound in price it’s hard for bulls to get excited and a v-shaped recovery in optimism (like we saw in 2019 and 2020) becomes less likely.                 

Sentiment Report Chart of the Week: Reversing From An Extreme

Sentiment is not always best used as a contrarian indicator. The way I learned it was to “go with the crowd until it reverses at an extreme.” In other words, when moving away from extremes go with the crowd. Our sentiment composite shows that pessimism has peaked at excessive levels and that represents an opportunity for investors. Now we need...

This is the video recording of our April 13, 2022, Inside Scoop Weekly Strategy Session.

Yes, it's tricky both tactically and mentally to get long in the stock market right now. One look at the broader indexes would give any rookie market technician pause.

That said, there are still pockets of strength that are working and growing stronger --- both on a relative and an absolute basis. Which, by the way, is not uncommon. Even in the most vicious bear markets, there are often certain sectors that see gains. And so a bear market may force us to be more selective when searching for bullish bets, but the opportunities are there for those willing to do the work.

With that in mind, today's trade is one of those names that is thriving in this current market environment.

From the desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

Every day the blossoming crypto asset class makes strides toward what appears to be its inevitable maturation.

Almost all breakthrough technologies follow an Adoption S-Curve; more on that here.

Chart credit: Osprey Funds

Most look at Bitcoin on the S-Curve through the lens of standard metrics of volatility or network data.

Still, an often underappreciated element of Bitcoin's maturation is the rising cohort of traders approaching the market from the perspective of yield.

An influx of capital in the coming years will come not just from the directional side but instead to capture yield.

The largest insider transaction on today’s list is a Form 4 filing by Jan Barta of Pale Fire Capital.

Barta continues to grow his position in Groupon $GRPN, as this is the second large Form 4 filing in the last two weeks.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley

The turmoil in equity markets has stolen all the attention since last year. But stocks aren't the only asset class that's a mess. We're getting the same kind of mixed signals and sloppy price action from forex markets.

While stocks remain under pressure, currencies have been throwing head fakes and dishing out whipsaws all year long. The AUD/USD broke to fresh nine-month highs just last week only to reverse 200 pips by Friday’s close.

We're seeing this type of action from currencies all over the world. It’s hard to trust a breakout these days. As frustrating as these failed moves may be, there are some clean chart patterns and favorable setups shaping up right now.

One area where the trend is very clear is the Japanese yen. Just about anything priced in Yen has been rallying recently as the currency continues to collapse.

Today, we’re going to highlight the massive base in the USD/JPY.

Lets’ dive in.

Here’s the weekly chart of the USD/JPY cross:

...

Yesterday we documented how we're shifting back to our defensive strategy. Tight trading correlations to weak equities dictate this approach.

At the same time, we've been stopped out of most altcoin long positions.

There's little to discuss in the way of tactical trading opportunities.

Even the strongest names can't get it done when we look at the alts. We're seeing many failed breakouts, and there's little to like in shorter time frames right now.

Here are a few examples.

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key Takeaways:

• Lack of follow through evident beneath the surface
• Risk Off Environment persists
• Defensives gain strength while Value & Growth stumble

Last month’s equity market bounce was impressive at the moment. But it has failed to produce the sort of strength that argues in favor of a broadly-based “risk on” environment. Short-term upside surges have not been followed by breadth thrusts in our work. Despite a handful of days in which new highs outnumbered new lows, it has not been consistent. We are now at 20 consecutive weeks of more new lows than new highs and our 10-day net new high advance/decline line has been falling since November. Our weight of the evidence dashboard suggests a cautious approach remains warranted.

At this point, it seems evident that the degree of the March move higher was as much a function of the weakness that preceded it as anything else. We need to see...

Abdiel Capital Management LLC reported a $2.6 million purchase in the cloud computing and enterprise software stock Appian Corporation $APPN.

The firm now owns more than 5.9 million shares, representing a 15% ownership interest.

In bull markets we see more stocks making new highs than new lows.

I know that probably sounds like common sense, but you'd be surprised....

It's really just basic math. You need more stocks going up and making new highs, than stocks going down and making new lows.

And although we did see a couple of days of more new highs than new lows recently, we haven't seen that for a sustained period, yet.

In fact, we're going on 20 straight weeks of more new lows than new highs.