As August gets under way, it’s time to review positions with August options that remain open (haven’t already hit profit targets or been stopped out).

Most trades I put on for All Star Options tend to have a minimum duration of 30 days (short premium plays) and often as long as 6-8 months (for long premium plays). As options approach expiration, greeks like theta and gamma start to become my enemy and whipsaw my P/L. Therefore, as options and spreads get into the expiration month, my best practice is to put each position on notice — it’s time to take action.

Did you see the Rare Earth Metals Index get back above its 2016 lows?

Should we even bother to acknowledge their existence? We have Tech in the US and don't have to go dumpster diving into these little tiny serial underperformers!

While that is certainly true, today I want to point to something that we haven't seen in a long long time: Rare Earth Metals NOT making new lows.

You see, this in and of itself, is a huge development. I'm pretty sure these stocks were designed to just always go down. It's like a slot machine, just keep putting money in, and you'll eventually lose it all. Rare Earth Metals stocks have kind of been like that been exactly like that.

BUT, this is no longer the case, IF we are above those 2016 lows:

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Tuesday August 4th @ 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 Tuesday:

What do we know for sure about New All-time Highs?

We know for a fact that they are NOT a characteristic of a downtrend. We've gone back and done the work, and as it turns out, New All-time Highs are normally things we see in uptrends!

With the S&P500 going out at New All-time Highs yesterday, and the Nasdaq making it now 3 months in a row of all-time highs, is the bet you want to make that we're in a downtrend for stocks?

This 10-month moving average strategy is one of the more simple, yet effective trend following systems that I know of. If the S&P500 closes the month above its 10-month moving average, we want to be long. If the S&P500 closes below its 10-month moving average, we do not.

For us, there's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes. We were not waiting for this to occur before buying stocks. There were plenty of names to buy in...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to this week's edition of "Under The Hood." You can read more about the column here.

What we do is analyze the most popular Robinhood stocks over the trailing week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them. This was a busy week so let's get right into it.

It was surprising not to see Facebook $FB on this week's most popular list heading into earnings. All the other big tech names were. We'll cover this more below.

Kodak $KODK took this week's top spot with 113,000 new accounts and was a big winner from both a performance and headline perspective.  The stock went from 2 to as high as 60 this week on news that it is taking a government loan to build a drug-ingredient business. Funny, because I always thought they made cameras...

There are no analysts covering the company and no targets to...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

My tweet this morning got some traction, so I figured I'd think out loud and give you some things to think about over the weekend.

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Thanks to everyone who participated in this week's Mystery Chart.

Most were looking at this as a potential inflection point and waiting for more info, so let's get into what it was and what our interpretation is.

This is Part 2 of my Happy Hour with Brian Shannon and Joe Fahmy. I learn something new from these guys every time we chat.

In this video we discuss the importance of Risk Management and why paying attention to our own emotions and behavior patterns is so critical.

Make sure to also check out Part 1 of this Episode.

The title of this trade plan is a modified take on a famous old floor traders saw. Basically, when experienced floor traders saw the entire pit screaming to hit the same bid or offer, the rule of thumb was to give 'em what they want. Take the other side and close your position when all those same lemmings try to hit the exits at the same time too.

It was the second easiest money on the floor (first was "trading against paper" --- which is you and me.)

The trade I'm putting on the board is a loose take on this idea. But instead of fading direction, we're going to fade the volatility premium priced into Gold options today.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Every week we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.

Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the relative strength trends at play and give our outlook and some of the things we're watching for in the week ahead.

This week we're going to highlight our International ETF and Global Index tables, and focus on some of the rotation we're seeing into more offensive assets across the board. Let's dive into it.

Emerging Markets $EEM, particularly Latin America $ILF, continue to rebound strong. These two indexes were this week's leaders on our International ETF list but notice that they are also the top performers over the trailing one and three month periods.

Latin America has really picked up the slack for Emerging Markets as the Asian-Pacific region and especially China have given back some gains recently after a strong start to the month. Emerging Markets are...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome to this week's edition of "Under The Hood." You can read more about the column here.

What we do is analyze the most popular Robinhood stocks over the trailing week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

This week we have a handful of trade ideas on the long side, many of which belong to the Health Care space and are working on Covid-19 vaccines.

We'll also walk through a number of mega-cap bellwethers and get a feel for what's going on in that space.

The stock market has been going crazy again this week, and maybe it's beginning to rub off on me... We usually only share about 10 charts in this post, but there is just too much going on in these names so I went a little crazy myself in looking through the charts for this week's post. We ended up with 14. Let's dive into it!

Here is this week's list of most popular stocks, measured by net increases in Robinhood accounts that hold shares.

Click...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

Cryptocurrencies are back on our radar for the first time in a while...but we're not talking about Bitcoin, which remains stuck below a year of overhead supply.

Instead, our focus is on Ethereum, which is breaking out on an absolute and relative basis.

Let's get into it.