From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended August 30, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation with The Minor Leaguers.

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

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names.

There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases,...

The crypto market is trading sideways after a major liquidation event last month.

My base case is for sideways trading for at least a month before an upward move into year-end.

I have little trading exposure and think patience in the near-term is the best approach.

It's a good thing this is a long weekend. Because if you're like me, and you actually count how many stocks are going up and making new highs, then it's going to take longer than ever to do it.

The list of stocks going up keeps getting longer and longer. 

That's probably NOT because breadth is deteriorating. 

In fact, the Advance-Decline line on the world's most important stock exchange just hit new all-time highs. So did the world's most important stock index.

Meanwhile, we don't have bull markets without Financials participating.

So how are Financials doing?

New all-time highs. Again.

But is it just Financials though?

Or are other Sectors making new highs too?

Here are Industrials hitting new all-time highs. Again.

Even Materials are participating now.

Chemicals just hit new all-time highs.

And the broader S&P Materials Index just hit new all-time highs. 

In bull markets Healthcare does well.

Healthcare's weighting is the 2nd largest in the Dow Jones Industrial Avg and 3rd largest weighting in the S&...

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

The current market environment is creating a unique opportunity for bonds. 

With the charts signaling strong potential for gains into year-end, now is the moment to take action and add some bond exposure to your portfolio. 

With some big reversals underway, the timing couldn’t be better to capitalize on these new trends. 

Not only are we seeing a growing list of base breakouts for treasuries, corporate bonds, and bond ETFs, but the intermarket landscape is turning increasingly favorable for fixed income in general.

Let’s jump in and discuss why we’re buying bonds here and how we want to express this thesis.

The fed is giving us a clear indication these days that we’ve seen the peak in interest rates for now. The odds of a rate cut at the September meeting in a few weeks are at 67.5%. 

Click the table to enlarge the view.

This data is from the CME FedWatch Tool as of August 29, 2024.

In this kind of...

If you're like me, you probably spend too much money on coffee every morning.

And that's not likely to change... but that's okay!

We can profit from an upside move in the commodity and hedge our exposure.

We've had tremendous success trading Cocoa futures in the last several years. 

We're also close to buying Cotton futures as they look to trap the bears below a key polarity zone.

There's a trend here: soft commodities keep rewarding us for owning them.

We think Coffee is next.

My analyst team took a look up north, eh!

And what did they find? A liar standing next to a whole in the ground. (Old gold speculators joke).

While that line might be a joke, nobody will laughing at today's trade idea if this stock makes a run to anywhere near our price targets.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Junior 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:

Click table to enlarge view

And here’s how we arrived at it…

We removed laggards which are down 5% or more relative to the ACWI Ex. U.S. Index $ACWX over the trailing month.

Then we sorted...

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

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

Let’s dig in!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.

We've also sprinkled in some of the largest ADRs from countries that did not make the market cap cut. 

These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.

It's got all the big names and more–but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.

The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.

We take the largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Based on the market environment, we can also flip the scan on its head and filter for weakness.

Let's dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from...

One of the many amazing things about public markets is that price is the final arbiter of truth.

They come to you with a credit crisis that will be here any day now. The fairy tales about recessions won't stop. The president will ruin everything. And a war in the middle east is something they pretend is only happening now, and isn't always happening...

Yet the line keeps going up. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P500 (equally-weighted), New York Stock Exchange Composite and many other measures of U.S. equities are hitting new all-time highs.

More importantly, the list of stocks going up in price keeps getting longer, not shorter.

The number of sectors and industry groups participating to the upside continues to increase, not decrease.

More countries around the world are going up in price, not fewer.

The lines are up and to the right fam.

And this chart below just might be the best way I've seen to measure that yes, in fact, the lines are going up.

What we're doing here is looking at the % of stocks in the S&P500 that are above important prior highs from the past several cycles.

More specifically, we'...

The most significant insider buy on today’s list comes via a Form 4 filing by Jack Hightower, chairman and CEO of HighPeak Energy $HPK.

Hightower bought 132,487 HPK shares, equivalent to $2 million.

Pilgrim Global ICAV revealed a purchase of $633,450 in Sable Offshore Corp $SOC.

Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from August 29, 2024:

Here's this week's crypto roundup. It's an opportunity for us to take a step back, set aside the distractions, and delve into the key charts shaping the crypto complex.

The nature of the blockchain means we can analyze the transactions of smart money holders with so much transparency.

Today I want to show off my new Power Rankings table that visualizes the coins that are seeing the greatest flows by smart money every single week.

This is the definition of alpha.

Recently, I've flipped to a higher conviction bullish view. I'm of the belief this last leg lower purged a great deal of longs from the futures market, of which provides us fertile grounds to build a new trend.

In the short-term, I still think the crypto market will be messier for longer even as Bitcoin rallies to new highs.

Ethereum and the S&P 500 are both running up to a logical level of resistance.

Investors continue to be rewarded for owning Real Estate stocks.

Over 90% of Real Estate stocks in the S&P 500 are above their 50-day and 200-day moving averages.

Earlier this month, we wrote about the best setups in the Real Estate Sector, and 9 out of the 10 trade ideas have been profitable.

The market's message could not be clearer... buy more real estate!

Because of this, we were extra excited about a new name on our Freshly Squeezed list this week.

Short sellers have piled into Douglas Emmett $DEI, a $2.7B Office REIT company, and we're betting they're about to be forced to unwind their positions, causing an epic squeeze.

Before we get into it, let's talk about what we're doing here.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions.

When a stock is shorted, it means incremental buyers are waiting in the wings to close out their bearish bets.

We love this, as new buyers are the one true catalyst for higher prices.

When shorts are proven wrong, they become buyers of the stock. In...

I just want to give Warren Buffett a huge shoutout.

Officially, Berkshire Hathaway is now worth over $1 Trillion.

The only companies that are still worth more than Berkshire right now are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia.

Check out our LIVE Nvidia Earnings Reaction Replay here.

But that's it. Berkshire is officially the 7th largest company at over $1 Trillion in valuation.

Here's how the market-cap of Berkshire has grown over the years.

You can see the 10X return over the past 15 years or so since the Great Financial Crisis.

But why is this?

What's in Berkshire that's so special?

It's a ton of Financials and Industrials.

In fact, Berkshire Hathaway is...

Here's the replay and chartbook from today's stream. 

Note that we do these videos live 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.  

The most significant insider buy on today’s list comes via a Form 4 filing by Control Empresarial de Capitales S.A. de C.V.

The investment company reported a purchase of PBF Energy Inc $PBF shares with a total value of $8.7 million.

Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from August 28, 2024:

Hey everyone. If you caught our livestream this afternoon at the close, you saw the earnings trade I put on for $NVDA using options.

If you didn't watch us live, then you missed the trade, and it's too late now. No biggie. You can skip the rest of the note.

If you did watch, and either you're watching from the sidelines and interested in how it plays out, or you did take the trade, read on. We'll discuss how I'm going to handle the exit tomorrow morning.

As a reminder, this afternoon, we put on a put ratio spread (1 x 2) in $NVDA Aug 30 (weekly) options. We sold short one 125 put and purchased two 115 puts for a net credit of $1.15, right at the last minute before the closing bell.

The PnL graph of this trade looks like this:

As of the time of this writing (7:30ET), here's a one-minute chart of $NVDA since the market closed at 4pm ET (2pm MT on this chart):

As you can see, so far, it...

In today's Gold Rush video, we discussed our outlook for a new secular bull market in the yellow metal.

We also covered Commitment of Traders positioning, mining stocks, and much more.

We dug into our latest blog post as well, providing some much-needed color.

We covered Gold vs. Commodities, the best risk/reward setups in precious metals stocks, and more.

Here's the video: