If/when the market can find it's footing, today's trade is in a name that I'd like to get aggressively bullish in for a long-term bet.
In the meantime, I'm not ready to be aggressive yet, but there is an opportunity for us to get paid to wait with a conservatively bullish bet that gives us room to be wrong.
Welcome to TheJunior International Hall of Famers.
With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.
This scan is composed of the next 100 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 100 and are thus covered by the International Hall of Famers universe.
Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original International Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.
Let's dive right in and check out what these future big boys are up to.
This is our Junior International Hall of Famers list:
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...
Microsoft $MSFT announced earnings last night, and while the stock gapped higher at the open, it has spent most of the morning giving back much of those gains.
It looks to me that the prior trading range for $MSFT is acting as a powerful magnet. And the broader market weakness sure is helping things along in that regard.
At the end of the day, the market is telling us that the latest earnings report hasn't really changed any minds of Microsoft bulls or bears, and therefore, we're likely to remain stuck in this range until some new information reveals itself:
We options traders can benefit from this scenario.