From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

We've had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it back in 2020 and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.

For the first year or so, we focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B.

That was fun, but we wanted to branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.

We expanded our universe to include some mid-caps.

To make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

And it doesn't have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to...

In bear markets you'll find that the majority of stocks are making lower lows and lower highs in price.

With basic arithmetic, we can call those downtrends.

Using that same math, in order for stocks to be in uptrends, they first need to stop making lower lows.

"They need to stop going down before they can start to go up", is how I learned it.

Going through my charts this weekend, I found this chart right here pretty interesting.

The last time Mid-caps, Small-caps and even Micro-caps made lower lows was almost 4 months ago:

A funny thing tends to happen near the end of important trends.

The journalists finally catch on.

It's never at the beginning of trends. That's not when they get excited.

It's when everyone has finally agreed that a trend is in place, which by definition, is late in the cycle.

You see, the journalist community does an amazing job of aggregating consumer & investor sentiment. I find they are the very best at this.

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.

Is it a bear market or a bull market, JC?

Are you bullish or bearish, JC?

These are the wrong questions to ask, in my opinion.

They're the ones I get most often, but I think it defeats the point of what we're trying to do here.

The question I find myself asking is whether we should be spending more of our time looking for stocks to buy, spending more of our time looking for stocks to sell, or should we be on vacation doing nothing in this market?

Those are 3 real options we have as investors.

For me, I think it's worth spending our time looking for stocks to buy.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. You can click here to check it out.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month. ...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I love it when a pattern carries both bullish and bearish implications. It could break out or break down. Either direction works for me.

That’s the beauty of the setup. 

For traders, the directional move doesn't matter. We can prepare for both outcomes. And, lucky for us, sugar futures look ready to swing either way.

Check out the weekly continuation chart of sugar:

Sugar posted a big base breakout followed by a year-long consolidation. This chart looks similar to gasoline, crude oil, and copper – which have all broken down to retest their respective 2018 highs.

It’s reasonable to imagine sugar futures do the same. But we have to see the move before we can take action.

Here’s a daily chart of the most actively traded contract (March 2023):

...

The way I learned it was that we want to buy stocks when the journalists put a chart on the cover of a magazine.

I like to pick on The Economist because they have such a great track record of being the last ones to the party.

Here's a good run down of a few favorites and part of the reason we got so cautious last Spring.

Fast forward to today: Can we classify this one as a chart? Does this count?

From the Desk of Ian Culley @Ianculley

If you can pry your eyes from the UK gilt and Credit Suisse articles, you’ll find it’s not all doom and gloom across the bond market – especially high-yield debt in the US.

A quick warning before we continue: You probably won’t see a similar message on the financial news. It’s just too optimistic for the current environment. It wouldn't get enough clicks.

But facts are facts. And right now, high-yield bonds are hooking higher, while stocks are also rising.

Check out the dual-pane chart of the Fallen Angel High-Yield Bond ETF $ANGL and the S&P 500 $SPX: 

ANGL tends to bottom with the S&P 500 at significant turning points. That’s because high-yield bonds are risk assets more akin to small-caps than investment-grade debt or Treasury bonds. 

A sustained breakdown in ANGL implies growing risk aversion among investors. But that’s not what we’re witnessing...

According to the Wall Street Journal, options volume continues to explode – driven primarily by the growing popularity of short-dated options.

Whether looking to speculate, hedge or collect premiums, options players are increasingly flocking to options that have fewer than 7 days to expiration. And with the proliferation of weekly options and three-times weekly expirations in popular index ETFs like $SPY, $QQQ, and $IWM, traders frequently have the opportunity to trade options expiring within 24 hours!

It is no surprise that these types of short-dated options are attractive to some players. They offer the best characteristics of options: defined risk, leverage, and affordability for even the smallest of traders.

Of course, there is no free lunch. As nice as all the pros are, the cons are equally supersized when the ass-end of gamma smacks your trade in the face. As quickly as profits can accumulate...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

We held our October Monthly Strategy Session Monday night. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

From the Desk of Louis Sykes @haumicharts

One of our favorite anecdotal indicators is the classic magazine cover.

Journalists do a tremendous job of aggregating consumer and investor sentiment.

By the time these magazines and other features take time to plan, develop, and eventually publish their covers, they're always going to be late to the party.

That time delay often presents a prime opportunity for investors.

Similarly, ETF providers also give us a wealth of sentiment information, particularly when it comes to ETF launches and de-listings.

ETF providers have a hilarious track record of launching funds at the complete worst time while de-listing them right before things get going.

A classic example is the coal ETF that got de-listed right before the epic bull market in coal stocks just began.

In crypto, we have yet another insightful indicator, one I like to call the "FTX indicator."