From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts
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.
Welcome back to our latest Under The Hood column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended February 3, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated on-and-off 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.
"If you can't find a stock in America to buy you're not looking hard enough, JC"
"I live in America, JC"
"I don't know anything about those stocks in other countries, JC"
Trust me, I hear all these things.
Not so much from you guys, as it is my friends and colleagues in the business.
I feel like readers of Allstarcharts know better, and also we have a very global audience.
So the recency bias that oozes out of most American investors, who have gotten accustomed to the U.S. being the best place to be, forgot what it's like when that's not the case.
You're talking about a decade of outperformance, and depending on how you measure it, you can even argue that's it's been a decade and half of U.S. dominance.
But believe it or not, stocks traded before 2011.
The U.S. wasn't always the global leader in equities.
I remember last year getting yelled at and trolled online because I was talking about breadth improvement.
Just because their stupid computers weren't telling them that it was time to buy didn't stop me and my team from simply counting how many stocks were going up vs how many were going down.
Boy did that serve us well as stocks have absolutely ripped higher over the past couple quarters.
We've been in a raging bull market while most investors keep asking me when stocks are going to bottom.
That's how far removed most people are from reality.
In fact, market breadth has improved so much that we're now seeing more stocks making new 52-week highs than we saw at the peak in the S&P500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq back in late 2021.
Yes, more stocks are making new highs today than there were at the "market's highs":