From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

I want to elaborate on a big theme of late that's been on my mind. We've written about it, discussed it internally - as well as on Clubhouse, and just this morning JC and Willie were both tweeting about it.

One major implication of the impending trend reversal in growth vs value is its potential effect on passive investment vehicles.

Considering what a mega-trend passive investing has become with the ETF boom over the past decade-plus, this is likely to impact investors far and wide... If they don't reposition themselves appropriately.

The reason for this is nuanced but in my opinion, it boils down to the argument that passive is really just active and there have been significant changes in market structure since the financial crisis that have resulted in the major averages being dominated by just a small handful of...

Every month we get a fresh batch of Monthly Candlesticks. It only happens 12 times a year.

I promise you guys from the bottom of my heart that there is no other part of my entire process that provides as much value and information as my monthly chart review. Premium Members can access the Chartbook here.

In the meantime, my friend Josh Brown and I have been doing these short monthly videos since last summer.

On the latest episode we talk about the historic breakout in Financials, the rotation into Value and out of Growth, what this means for interest rates and how that affects the global intermarket landscape.

This is always a fun chat.

Hope you enjoy it!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

Check out our latest Mystery Chart!

What we do here is take a chart that's captured our attention, and remove the x and y-axes as well as any other labels that could help identify it.

This chart can be of any security, in any asset class, on any timeframe. Sometimes it's an absolute price chart, other times it's on a relative basis.

It might be a ratio, a custom index, or maybe the price is inverted. It could be all three!

The point is, when we aren't able to recognize what's in front of us, we put aside any biases we may have and scrutinize it objectively.

While you can try to guess the chart, the point is to make a decision...

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

This month, I'm going to start presenting these monthly reviews in a different way. I think what would be far more useful to all of you would be a review of all trades we exited in the previous month, as well as updates on any positions approaching expiration in the current month.

While we had a bunch of exits in February, we don't have any positions remaining on the books with March expirations. Let's get to it...

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

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

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 Willie Delwiche.

Key takeaway: Another bout of late-month market volatility produced quickly frayed nerves. The VIX spiked and put/call ratios moved away from excessive complacency. Our tactical sentiment indicators point to still-elevated optimism even as sentiment surveys have eased recently. Risks arise when breadth deteriorates and a sustained shift from optimism to pessimism emerges. We are not seeing this yet. The $78 billion of equity ETF inflows in February (over the past two months equity ETFs have seen daily net outflows on only 3 occasions) suggests excessive investor positioning, but the risks inherent in that have not yet been manifested. Despite last week’s volatility, cyclical sector leadership persisted and defensive areas made new lows. That does not suggest investors are moving quickly to a risk-off posture.

Sentiment Chart of the Week: XLU/SPY & XLP/SPY Ratios

Two of the most defensive sectors, Utilities and Staples, made new lows...

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

We think it's time to buy Gold Miners again, specifically the VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF $GDX.

The yellow metal has not been a great place to deploy capital over the last 6 months as the environment has significantly favored stocks over rocks... and risk-assets over defensive ones in general.

Owning Gold or Gold Miners has been nothing more but opportunity cost. However, there is mounting evidence that suggests now might be the time to jump back into this trade.

First, Commodities have really been working as an asset class. We've been pointing this out for months now, from Industrial Metals and Ags to even petroleum-based commodities.

Although through the early innings of this Commodities resurgence, Gold and Gold Miners have taken a back seat as prices peaked all the way back in the summer of last year and have been trending lower since.

We think that...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

We've enjoyed a ton of success with our bottoms-up scans and the columns they've inspired over the past year.

We've already launched four columns around them since last summer, and we have more coming soon.

When we combine these scans with our traditional top-down approach, they make it almost impossible to miss profitable opportunities and key market themes.

Today, we're sharing one of our internal favorites with you. It's called "Fade The Street,"  and we introduced it in a report last month which you can read here.

It was a big hit and there's been a lot of change since then, so we thought a follow-up was appropriate.

Our Fade The Street scan leverages buy/sell ratings and price target data from sell-side analysts to identify strong stocks with significant potential tailwinds that can propel prices higher in the future.

How do we do this? Simple...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger Macro thesis, we recently rolled out our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."

We write a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist.

We've already had some great trades from this universe and couldn't be happier about the early feedback.

Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.

In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.

Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy done.

And what better time than now to launch a small-cap focused column!? We've seen very strong evidence of a structural rotation down the market cap scale, suggesting a new period of outperformance from small-caps in the coming...

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

Over the last few months, there's been a distinct rotation into Financials and other cyclical areas across equity markets not just in the US, but across the globe.

This topic is nothing new around here as it's been a big theme for us recently. Consider some of our calls from this month:

• Buy Energy and Financials and anticipate potential outperformance from these long-term laggards.
• Position for a structural trend reversal in favor of value.
• Intermarket signals indicate higher interest rates.
• Breadth suggests Energy stocks are in a new bull market.
• ...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Intermarket analysis is always an area of focus over here at All Star Charts. Right now, there are a lot of changes taking hold beneath the surface in some key cross-asset relationships.

For the longest time, the alpha has been in the US... it's been in large-caps... and it's been in growth stocks. That's been the playbook. We know because we've been running it back for years now.

Although, we're seeing strong evidence that this is no longer the case...

One of the best things about our approach is that it allows us to be incredibly flexible and adjust our views as new data becomes available.

We pride ourselves on never being dogmatic. Speaking of which, despite how much we've leaned on secular leadership from growth and tech stocks in recent years, the data is suggesting we reposition ourselves in favor of Value (read more about it, here).

Today, we'll zoom out and...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We’ve been vocal about the strong internals supporting the rally in US Equities.

We've pounded the table about one historic breadth reading after the next as they’ve continued to pop up in a variety of the major indexes and sectors since early last summer.

This seemingly constant influx of extreme readings is not something we see very often... if ever.

For example, the NYSE and Nasdaq recently registered the most new highs in history on a combined basis.

The bottom line is breadth has been overwhelmingly bullish and is one of the main reasons we're in the camp that this is likely the early innings of a new cyclical bull market.