As the pandemic raged on March 23, 2020, the S&P 500 was bottoming out following the quickest crash from its highs in history.

Of course, we didn’t know it was THE bottom in real-time. How could we?

Yet just five days later, we were able to hold our 4th Annual Chart Summit virtually. No, we didn’t get a chance to meet in person or enjoy any amazing skiing in Colorado like we did in year’s past. But we were able to pick the brains of the best analysts I know at what turned out to be a critical moment for the markets.

And I’m so glad we did…

While the world felt like it was falling apart, traders just like you had the chance to soak in the wisdom of some of the top minds in finance. Instead of panic, we were treated to process and analysis. And a ton of hot charts!

JC and I recorded our latest options conference call last night (subscribers can access it here). We discussed some trades that were exited last month, updated some current positions, and discussed a couple new ideas.

One of the new ideas discussed was a bullish breakout in United Therapeutics $UTHR. And I'm ready to pull the trigger today.

There's always information in the Currency markets, even if trading currencies isn't something you do.

There is wisdom in some of the world's largest markets like forex and fixed income. To ignore it would be irresponsible.

One thing that's been hard to ignore is the strength in the US Dollar Index throughout the first quarter of 2021. This could be a potential wrecking ball to the global growth, rotation into cyclical and commodity supercycle themes.

But is it?

When we look at several G-10 Currencies relative to the Dollar, the Commodity-centric currencies have held up the best, which is interesting, isn't it?

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

Key takeaway: Despite the decreasing exposure of active equity managers, the weight of the evidence continues to lean toward a neutral sentiment backdrop that supports a much needed reset, allowing optimism to rebuild moving forward. Investment managers may be pulling back from the market, but equity ETF inflows have reached record levels. This past month inflows reached over $80 billion, the highest level over a one month period. This may suggest excessive investor positioning but inflows can remain high for extended periods of time before negatively impacting the market. Another piece of information that points to growing optimism is The Consensus Inc. Bullish Sentiment Index as it reached 74% last week, it’s highest level since early 2018. These pockets of investor optimism, within the broader neutral setting, allude to the nature of the recent unwind.

Sentiment Chart of the Week: Economic Activity and Risk Appetite

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From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley.

We held our April Monthly Strategy Session Thursday night which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

For these calls, we really take a step back and put things in the context of their structural trends by focusing only on Monthly charts. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises.

In this post, we’ll provide a summary of the call by highlighting three of the most important charts and topics we covered along with commentary on each.

Let’s dive into it.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ended April 2, 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...

Once again this month, I'm going to share info on positions that were closed in the month of March. As a reminder, our exit plans are always laid out ahead of time in each trade idea we publish. In every case, the exits mentioned below were all exited in accordance with the plan as laid out.

One of the things that stood out to me this quarter was most certainly the performance of Value Stocks over their Growth counterparts.

Take a look at the difference in Q1:

The big news to end of the week is Ethereum completing this monster base and breaking out to new all-time highs.

For me, I don't care if we're talking about Crude Oil Futures, Apple or Tesla shares, Treasury Bond ETFs, Gold, Silver, Crypto....

It doesn't matter to me. It's just letters and math. All that other stuff isn't my problem.

The trade has been to be long ETHUSD if we're above those former highs from 2018. It was that simple. The risk was very well-defined and the potential reward was exponentially greater. That's what we look for. And so far, that strategy has worked well for us.

But now, while stocks are on holiday, Ethereum is really making a go of it:

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

Many of the same themes that we came across in last week's Commodity Report continue to play out.

Overhead supply keeps demand at bay while price churns sideways, offering mixed signals.

Like many areas of the market, Commodities are a bit messy.

While sideways price action and choppy market conditions are the norms at the moment, there is one consolidation in the Commodity space that demands our close attention.

As JC pointed out in last night's Monthly Strategy Session, one of the most important charts right now is the Copper/Gold ratio as its intermarket implications span far and wide.

As the...

This is the video recording of our April 1, 2021 Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

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

I think we can all agree that the market is an absolute hot mess right now.

The Precious Metals complex is as good an example of this as any right now.

In this post, we’ll use this shiny group of commodities as a case study to illustrate the mixed signals we see not just here but in asset classes all over the globe these days. 

It’s a major development, to say the least - so we’d be irresponsible not to monitor it closely as the way things resolve from here will likely have implications that span across markets, far and wide. 

We’ll also provide an update of our post from earlier in the month whereby we outlined a trade idea in Gold Miners.