When the worst stocks on the planet can't go down any more, that's usually good information.
We saw a lot of Small-cap Growth, Arkk Funds, Biotech, Chinese Internet and many of those other "Growthy" areas bottom out this Spring, and some of the last ones in June.
At the Mega-cap level, nothing caused more shareholder wealth destruction than Facebook, down 60% from its highs less than a year ago.
With a few breadth thrusts in recent weeks, and a little preview of what a weaker dollar could do to this market, we had plenty to talk about.
This question included: New Bull or Mean Reversion in a Bear?
I think the S&P500 tells an interesting story. You've got that massive top that formed throughout the past year, completing with a break of support this Spring.
And after further selling, the bounce has brought it back all the...
You probably think I say the same thing every week. That’s because I do.
Of course, I throw in a well-defined trade setup here and there, but always within the context of the dollar and its impact on the major asset classes.
It’s that important.
As the US Dollar Index rally is well underway, it’s interesting some individual USD crosses are finding resistance at historical levels of interest to both the currencies involved and risk assets!
Here’s a chart of the US dollar/Swedish krona cross zoomed out to the late 1990s:
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...
This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow.
In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish, but not both.
We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients.
Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.
We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.
What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.
And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think the stock is about to move in...
Financials went back and kissed the same prices they hit at their peak just before the Great Financial Crisis.
This is easily one of the most important price levels in stock market history. And I heard no one talking about it.
Meanwhile, the Home Construction Index did the exact same thing. In this case, even more special. The peak in Home Construction was when the fund launched, which is both classic and hilarious.
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 which you can check out here.
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.