Weekly Relative Strength Rankings

Here's where the alpha was last week.

I hope everyone had a great weekend.

TLT

Weekly Relative Strength Rankings

Here's the rankings for last week:My current open positions right now are long the dollar (UUP), short gold (DZZ), short 20 year bonds (TBT) and long AMAT, which is in the semi-conductor sector. Comparing my positions to the above relative strength rankings shows me that I've got good trades on for now. The only categories that I'm not exposed to that I will be evaluating are energy (USO and XLE), copper (JJC) and Materials (XLB) and I'll also be looking for signs of strength in utilities (XLU).

Part of what I do to determine trades is that I compare individual stocks with their sector ETFs. For example, with energy (XLE) I watch XOM, SLB, and CVX. In order to take a position, I need to see strength and buy signals in both the ETF and the individual stocks. Here's a snippet of the daily checklist spreadsheet that I use and in this picture you can see the difference between XLE (a little mixed) and SMH (strong): The above readings tell me that energy is potentially a buy, just not yet. Keep in mind that this is just my system, anyone who owned USO or XLE in the past week made some money...I'm just saying that there's not quite an edge for me in trading energy in general at this point. We'll see what next week brings as traders and investors come back from a long vacation.

Have a great weekend!

TLT

Weekly Relative Strength Rankings

Although it was a short week, there was alpha to be made and here's where it was.What to take away from the above list? Strength in commodities, semi-conductors and tech and extreme weakness in bonds and gold. We'll see if these themes persist through this week.

Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season!

TLT

Last Weeks Relative Strength Ratings

Here is last weeks Relative Strength ratings for the 30 ETFs (and an index) I track. Note that the current relative strength score incorporates the ETFs prior score into the ranking, thus you have Copper at the top of the list because it had superb strength the prior week. Also, I want to point out that all of these instruments are ranked against the performance of the SPY (S&P)...hence the "relative" in relative strength. Here's the list:
A couple of things worth noting about this week's rankings are the strong performance of both energy (xle) and oil (uso). Also, the weakness in gold (gld), silver(slv) and materials(xlb). Furthermore, the continued weakness in financials (xlf) is concerning for those that are expecting a rally. Personally, I can't imagine much of a sustained rally without the participation of the financials, but who knows, crazier things have occurred.

Once again, these ratings are just that and they are not trade signals of any kind. I just use this spread sheet to keep track of the macro picture of order flow.

Have a great day!

TLT