From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as a market of stocks.

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions… but there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club. We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports. Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our May Monthly Strategy Session on Tuesday. ASC Premium Members can click here to access the recording and the chartbook.

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.

It's no secret the oil and energy sectors have been outperforming in 2022.

Of course, when a trend like that is no secret, it tends to become a crowded trade. And we've seen a taste of the ramifications of that in recent weeks. There were some vicious pullbacks in all the biggest winners about two weeks ago.

Fast forward to today, and the smoke has cleared a bit. Many of these names survived the exits of hot money and are now showing signs of resuming their prior uptrends.

At the top of this list right now is Exxon Mobil $XOM.

This is the video recording of our May 3rd Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended April 29, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with our Minor Leaguers column.

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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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 their direction and make them a pretty penny.

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Tuesday May 3rd @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Tuesday evening:

Twitter is on everyone’s mind these days. In light of Elon Musk’s takeover, there are a lot of people with mixed thoughts/feelings about the platform. But I for one am incredibly grateful for what Twitter has brought into my world.

During the depths of the financial crisis, I was trading (poorly) from home. I had left my office at the Chicago Board of Trade a couple years prior and I was having a hard time adjusting to being away from “my people.”

I missed the camaraderie of being around other traders. I missed the serendipitous strategy brainstorms. I was lacking the sounding boards to vent after a bad trading day, or to celebrate after a good one. And there was nobody else on Earth who understood the inside jokes and mannerisms that were second nature to those of us who attempt to pull money from the markets on a daily basis.

We are a different breed of human animal.

In March 2009 as the stock market was nearing the bottom of the Great Financial Crisis, I read an article in Barron’s that mentioned this “new online community called Twitter” and it highlighted people in finance who were using the platform to share trading ideas and network.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley  

The rally in some commodities has been near-vertical this year.

And we’re seeing this strength across the entire complex -- from energy contracts like crude oil to base metals such as tin and even grain markets like wheat.

While these kinds of moves are bullish over longer time frames, when things get too hot (like they have), it’s often not sustainable on a tactical basis. 

This is the situation right now for a lot of commodities. We think a period of well-deserved digestion is underway for the broader asset class.

But this doesn’t mean there won’t be fresh up-legs taking place in some individual contracts.

As this new secular bull market matures, pockets of strength will rotate across the space. Our only job is to find the emerging leadership.

Today, energy and base metals are correcting after explosive rallies while strength emerges from the agricultural complex -- especially grains.

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 around the world.

Here’s this week’s list:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!

One way we're doing this is by identifying 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.