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.
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.
We have the Consumer Price Index data for September coming out on Thursday morning, and we have more Fed speakers this week as as well. Expect more tough talk about inflation.
Should the $SPY break down below 360.94, we can potentially head to the lows of 357.04.
I'm monitoring the $QQQ as well to see if it touches the lows at 267.01.
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.