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...

Below is my weekly video for members of Macke's Retail Roundup. 

Fear has entered the market.

Not panic just yet, but Wednesday afternoon in the Rose Garden, POTUS unleashed the Kraken on the market, the global economy, and just about any retailer selling clothing or making shoes.

We knew the tariffs were coming. We realized the cost of doing business was going up, and it was going to somehow be passed along to consumers. But until the President held up his Reciprocal Tariff tag board, it wasn’t clear just how much of a blood sport this was going to be.

I discussed the implications and reaction in this week's Retail Roundup Video.

Watch the video below.

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Today was tough.

Equities got smoked across the board.

Transports suffered one of their worst days in history.

Semiconductors and Homebuilders  completed massive tops.

The damage is real.

Defensive rotation has been brewing for weeks, and today was yet another reminder the bears are in full control.

When it comes to the bond market, nothing tells the story better than credit spreads.

A month ago, I flagged the HYG/IEI ratio as one of the ...

Here's the replay and chartbook from the April 3 Weekly Strategy Session.

Be sure to join us on Thursdays at 11 am ET and maximize your return potential.

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

1. No new positions today.
2. Rolled ARKK position to May options.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

Insiders keep stepping in to buy the dips across industries as U.S. equities continue to struggle.

Here are today’s standouts:

📌 Zymeworks $ZYME saw a bold insider move, with ECOR1 Capital buying 127,415 shares, equivalent to $1,5 million.

📌 Staar Surgical $STAA also caught our attention, as Broadwood Partners increased their stake with a $941,285 purchase.

Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from April 2, 2025:

Click the table to enlarge it.

📌 Last but not least, Point72 Asset Management, the hedge fund led by legendary investor Steve Cohen, just filed a 13G revealing an increased stake in Shoals Technologies $SHLS. 

The firm boosted its position from 3.32% to 5.40%, signaling a passive investment in the solar infrastructure company.

Are we having fun yet?

No. No, we are not.

Stocks are getting hammered after President Trump's Reciprocal Tariffs were larger and broader than economists anticipated. Retailers and tech are leading the way lower early, which has been the case since this sell-off started to pick up steam in late January.

The immediate impact will hammer the margins of companies importing and/or manufacturing which, in the market consumer world is almost anything you can think of, to one degree or another. The declines in the pre-market tends to reflect worse-case back of the envelope calculations for how hard companies will be hit based on the announced tariffs which, it should be noted repeatedly, are "immediate", "permanent" and "open to negotiation". Three words not typically used to describe the same action, yet here we are.

Take Nike. Please. Nike produces 50% of its shoes in Vietnam, 18% in China and 27% in Indonesia. 

Going into the news conference Nike had probably been planning to shift some production around to whichever countries got the best terms. If so, this was a very bad moment in Beaverton:

Is it worth it for Nike to move...

Today's number is... 639

The S&P 500 has gone 639 consecutive trading days without a -3% decline.

Here’s the chart:

Let's break down what the chart shows:

• The blue line in the top panel is the S&P 500 index price.
• The black lines in the bottom panel indicates the number of consecutive days since the S&P 500 experienced a daily move of -3% or less.

The Takeaway: As I write this daily note, the S&P 500 futures are down over 3% after Trump imposed tariffs on most countries around the globe last night.

The last time the S&P 500 experienced a drop this significant was 639 trading days ago, which was during the cost-of-living crisis in 2022.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been 104 days with a change of -3% or less, with most of these down days happening while the market was in a sizeable drawdown.

When examining the S&P 500's forward returns, we find that on days with a decline of -3%, there is only a 55% chance the market will be positive two weeks later.

As...

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Today was called Liberation Day in the U.S.

It’s funny how there’s always a headline everyone is waiting to react to.

I treat these as nothing more than volatility events.

Meanwhile, U.S. equities continue to struggle. 

The bulls haven’t been able to make a comeback.

In crypto land, it’s just as messy.

If there’s...

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

Today's trade is something I don't do much of: a pairs trade, but with an options twist.

A typical pairs trade goes like this: You find two stocks that typically trade together, but for some reason, they've diverged. So, you buy the underperforming stock and short-sell an equal dollar amount of the outperforming stock. This is typically a market-neutral trade where you're betting the values of the two stocks will eventually resume their normal parity, resulting in a net profit from the two trades.

We have a situation developing right now that screams pairs trade to me, but I'm going to do it with options.

I was busily preparing for the post-close rantings of a polarizing lunatic (by which I mean the RH earnings report and conference call) when it came across the wire that Amazon could be in the running to buy TikTok.

Amazon spiked on the news, as well it should have. As mentioned almost too often, Amazon is exceptional at deploying capital. Amazon convinced America to put what amounts to spyware-capable microphones in bad speakers, call it Alexa and sell about a billion of them. Amazon started selling Prime memberships in exchange for 2 day delivery on select items. Now Prime generates $50b in membership sales per year.

The company started as a bookstore. 

If Amazon buys TikTok and hotlinks weirdly specific targeted advertising to America's preferred hub for impulse shopping chains like Target might as well stop trying to build out online retail and focus on going viral. I'm only half kidding. 

Merging social media and retail seamlessly has been a dream since the first pop-up ad. In September of 2020 Walmart and Oracle announced a "Tentative" deal to...