Traveling is one of life's greatest joys—getting to know new places, cultures, and food never gets old.

I've been lucky to visit some incredible spots like the UK, the south of France, Chicago, San Diego, Madrid, Rome and my all-time favorite: New York City. As a 27-year-old Venezuelan, I feel that place is just electric.

But travel isn't just fun—it's also a hot theme in the market right now.

Travel stocks have been some of the biggest winners since the market bottomed this summer, showing how strong the consumer economy is.

These are the kinds of stocks that thrive when the economy and markets are doing well.

The Defiance Hotel, Airline, and Cruise ETF $CRUZ does a great job of illustrating the recent strength in this area.

The ETF has been ripping in a near-vertical line in recent months, breaking out of a massive base to fresh all-time highs.

Speculative growth has been one of the hottest corners of the market in recent months.

At the group level, it’s a brand new uptrend for this risk-on basket of stocks.

The ARK Investment flagship fund ARKK is my favorite barometer for the spec-tech space, and it just completed a trend reversal with a bang. 

But it isn’t alone. 

A growing list of indexes are completing textbook reversals and embarking on new mark-up phases.

Alfonso pointed out the Retail Index $XRT as a good example of this theme the other day. Retail stocks are resolving from a rounding bottom and hitting their highest level in years.

Retail is a heavily bifurcated space. There have been some big cycle winners already. And there is an even...

Today we held our Breakout Multiplier Weekly Strategy Session. If you’re not a member, click here to join us.

We do this every Thursday at 11 a.m. ET for Breakout Multiplier members, where we discuss new trades ideas, open positions and answer questions from the chat.

One of the key benefits of buying cheap call options on low-priced stocks is the flexibility they provide when managing and scaling out of positions. This becomes especially valuable when we hit a big winner.

Take our $SOUN 1/17/25 $7 calls, for example. We...

Here's the replay and chartbook from the December 5 livestream. Note that we talk strategy every Thursday at 11 a.m. ET, and I answer questions in the chat room. 

Be sure to join us and maximize your return potential.

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. New position in XLV.
2. No adjustments are needed today.
3. Closed USO at Profit Target.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

The most notable insider transaction today is a Form 4 filing by John H. Stone, President and CEO of Allegion plc $ALLE. 

Stone purchased 7,500 ALLE shares, totaling $1 million.

Meanwhile, Sardar Biglari, CEO and founder of Biglari Holdings Inc $BH, reported an additional purchase of BH shares valued at $1,499,970.

While CEO buys aren’t necessarily signals for immediate action, such transactions often reflect strong confidence in a company’s future and can serve as a supportive factor for long-term bullish trends.

Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from December 4, 2024:

HHLR Advisors Ltd has increased its stake in BeiGene $BGNE from 5.30% to 9.00%, as disclosed in a recent 13G filing. BGNE is now Hillhouse’s largest holding.

The hedge fund...

Today's number is... 0

Typically, sentiment matters most at extremes, and I like to use it as a contrarian indicator. The way I learnt it was to beware of the crowd when the crowd is too one‐sided.

Currently, we are not at extreme levels. However, what caught my attention this week is that the Bull-Bear spread from the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) has fallen below 0, while the S&P 500 has reached all-time highs.

Here’s the chart:

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Let's break down what it shows:

• The blue line represents the price of the S&P 500 index.
• The red lines represent when the S&P 500 is at all-time highs while the AAII Bull-Bear spread is below 0.

The Takeaway: This is the first time in 30 weeks that the AAII Bull-Bear spread has dropped below 0. This indicates that there are more bears than bulls, and what stands out to me is that this has occurred while the S&P 500 is reaching new all-time highs. This event is rare. In the past 34...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.

However, when it comes to this one, it couldn't be any simpler!

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 stocks.

Welcome to The Junior Hall of Famers.

This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That's good enough for us.

The bottom line is it is a bull market. We...

Thanks to everyone who joined us for today's Hot Corner Insider Weekly Strategy Session.

One major theme this week is the fact that the largest companies in the world are breaking out, setting up for the next leg higher.

After six months of chopping around, Apple $AAPL broke out to new all-time highs:

We think this move in AAPL could set the tone for the rest of the mega-cap space to follow.

Meta Platforms $META is doing the same thing:

The best players are stepping up and getting back in the game.

We think Nvidia $NVDA will be back at new all-time highs soon as well:

Nancy Pelosi has been riding this megatrend higher long before anyone was talking about AI.

This is exactly the kind of action you want to see in a healthy bull market.

The...

We talk a lot around here about taking half off the table either when our position doubles in value or we hit a key price target.

It's a great position management practice that increases our win rate while leaving us with partial positions to participate in truly outstanding runs.

But we haven't talked much about alternative ways to "take half."

What if we can take half of our directional risk off the table while leveraging gamma to keep the majority of our open profits in the case of a market reversal, and participate almost fully in a truly massive breakout?

Sounds nice, right?

A situation like this is presenting itself in our current open position in $CM Dec 55 calls. We entered this position in August and now our in-the-money calls are approaching expiration on December 20th.

Here's the chart:

Normally, I would simply trail a tight stop loss in trades like this heading into expiration. In fact, I wrote about doing exactly that in this trade earlier this week. 

But then someone in the All Star Options chat room mentioned that $CM had an earnings announcement coming up before the opening this Thursday (...

SoundHound is trading around 10x today. We paid $0.30 for these calls on October 14th, and they are worth about $3.20 today.

Since the calls were cheap, we bought more than we usually do in order to size the position appropriately.

This is always nice as it gives us the flexibility to scale out of the position. In other words, if we only buy two calls, and we sell one on the double, then we have no choice but to close our entire remaining position at the same time.

In the case of SOUN, calls were only $30 per contract, so I own a larger quantity than usual. I’m going to take advantage of this and scale out over time. I did the same thing with PTON when that position went more than 10x.

I’m selling 50% of my remaining position today (or 25% of the original position). I think it is a good rule to always sell something at 10x. Ideally...

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. New position in XLB.
2. No adjustments are needed today.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

Last night was our LIVE Monthly Charts Strategy Session for Premium Members of ASC Research.

This 2-times per month LIVE event is one of the biggest reasons why most of the world's largest financial institutions that you've ever heard of come to Allstarcharts for help making big decisions in the market.

One chart that really stood out to me, especially considering where we are in the cycle, is just how many bears there are among individual investors.

In fact, despite the new all-time highs in the S&P500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq100 and Russell2000 Indexes, there are...

Today's note is brief.

For the second day in a row, M. Grier Eliasek, President and COO of Prospect Capital Corporation $PSEC, disclosed a significant insider buy – 210,000 shares, totaling $1,010,058.

Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from December 3, 2024:

These c-suite leaders typically have the most insight into the business's health and prospects, making their investments worth paying extra attention to.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

In this scan, we look to identify 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 during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on Technology and Growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online...

Today's number is... 20%

What happens after a 20% or more up year in the S&P 500?

With only 19 trading days remaining in the year, the S&P 500 has increased by 26.8%. So, it seems that 2024 could finish with a gain of 20% or more.

Here is a table with all of the 20% or more up years, along with the following year's returns:

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The Takeaway: Since 1950, there have been 19 instances where the S&P 500 finished the year with gains of 20% or more.

Of that, the stock market experienced positive returns in 15 out of the 19 years following a 20% or more gain, which is 78.9% of the time. Conversely, it was down in 4 out of those 19 years, representing 21.1% of the time. 

On average, the return following a year with a 20% or more increase was 9.6%. In years that were up years, the average gain was 15.4%. In contrast, during down years, the average loss was recorded at -11.9%.

From the data, it’s more likely that we will see strength...