We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

If this is a bull market, then what comes next?

Breadth Expansion.

More upside participation.

Sector Rotation.

The list of the 52-week highs getting longer.

We've been betting that this is a bull market since last year. That has worked in our favor.

But what does the market need to do to reiterate that we are still, in fact, in a strong, healthy bull market?

More new highs.

Here's a look at the NYSE new 52-week highs list creeping higher in recent weeks.

The largest insider buy on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by the executive vice president and chief people officer of Stericycle $SRCL.

That purchase was worth $308,618.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Let see what today brings.

I still think it would be healthy for the indices to pull in further.

$SPY closing its gap down to 422.92 would be a decent contraction.

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.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It was a consolidation day for most of the indices, except $IWM.

I'd still like to see $SPY pull back to 423, but time will tell.

This is the video recording of the June 7, 2023, Hot Corner Insider Weekly Strategy Session.

As the bull market in stocks continues, the lifeblood to keep the ball rolling is sector rotation.

We're already seeing some of the big caps that have driven the first leg of this run start exhibiting signs of overexertion (check out $GOOG today).

It makes sense to us that stocks further down the cap scale are going to start asserting themselves and perhaps in some cases play "catch up" to their big brothers.

Today's trade is in a cyclical name in the Logistics space.

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

The largest insider buy on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Diversified Healthcare Trust $DHC director Adam Portnoy.

Portnoy reported a purchase of $9.8 million in the small-cap health care REIT.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The indices are kind of flat this morning.

Yesterday there was a lot of movement in names, names that haven't moved in quite some time.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Petrocurrencies and crude oil futures are diverging.

The currencies that benefit most from higher oil prices refuse to roll with crude’s steady decline. 

Perhaps it’s more about the US dollar than a handful of currencies tied to oil’s supply and demand dynamic.

But with OPEC up to its old tricks again – Saudi Arabia announced deeper production cuts last weekend – the question arises…

Is crude oil due for a bounce?

Check out the overlay chart of our petrocurrency index and crude oil futures:

Crude oil posted a key pivot high a week after our index bottomed in late September. Since then, these markets have taken separate paths.

Yes, correlations tend to come and go. It’s the natural rhythm of the markets. Yet past divergences have ultimately corrected over time. 

Our currency index led crude off the bottom in early 2016. It also peaked well before the 2018 and 2022 tops in...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

$IWM led the pack today, up almost 3%.

Banks started to rally as well.

Time will tell if this continues.

The next new position in our Paid-to-Play portfolio is:

The largest insider buy on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Artal Group SA.

The firm reported a purchase of 27,775,050 shares, equivalent to $72.2 million in Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, Inc. $LXRX.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We just about hit the 4,300 mark on the S&P 500.

A healthy pull-in here would be optimal. 

This is the video recording of our June 5th Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

What will it take for gold to make new all-time highs?

A weaker US dollar and falling real yields are likely candidates for leading catalysts.

We can also add a significant unwind in commercial positioning to the list. 

Meanwhile, it’s a range-bound mess.

Let's stick to the basics. Uptrends – at the core – come down to more buyers than sellers. And risk-on/risk-off intermarket ratios provide excellent tools for tracking whether bulls or bears dominate a particular market.

After the recent bout of selling pressure, one precious metal risk ratio is approaching a potential inflection point…

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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 new highs in...

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 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...