In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. No new positions today.
2. Adjustment to ARKK position.
3. Closed GLD at Profit Target.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

We're back this morning LIVE on Stock Market TV with The Best Morning Show in Finance. 

It's not just Technical Analysis all the time. It's actually quite the opposite. We have a lot of conversations with really smart people about all kinds of topics.

Today's guest is my pal Steve Reitmeister, who brings 40 years of experience, including being Editor-in-Chief at Zacks.com and CEO of Stocknews.com. 

...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended December 6, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation with The Minor Leaguers.

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.

Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers, there’...

Control Empresarial de Capitales SA is at it again! 

The Mexican investment giant just dropped $9.25 million on more shares of PBF Energy Inc $PBF, pushing its ownership stake to a hefty 24.20%.

What’s noteworthy is that Control Empresarial continues to build its position in PBF despite the stock’s current trend being far from ideal. 

This move highlights Control Empresarial’s strong conviction and a clear long-term focus.

Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from December 6, 2024:

In another Form 4, director Jeffrey C. Campbell, who is also the CFO of American Express, bought 6,000 shares of Marathon Petroleum Corportion $MPC for $149.60, a total purchase of $897,642.

Today's number is... 500

The S&P 500 is reaching all-time highs, yet more stocks are declining than advancing on most days.

That's what we saw last week! 

But does it matter? 

Below is a table showing instances of the S&P 500 reaching all-time highs, with more stocks declining than advancing, along with the weekly forward returns:

(right-click and open image in new tab to zoom in)

The Takeaway: On Friday afternoon, there was a lot of discussion on X, with many bears highlighting that poor breadth readings while the S&P 500 index is at all-time highs are a bearish signal for the markets. 

I usually pay little attention to what perma bears are saying; instead, I prefer to dig into the data and decide whether the information is valuable or not.

Since 1950, there have been 25 instances where the  S&P 500 is reaching all-time highs, yet more stocks are declining than advancing on most days.

On average, a year later, the median return is 14.9%, with...

As part of an educational effort, I've unlocked this previous paywalled post so anyone can access.

I've flipped my short-term bias (that looks out weeks) to bearish as the three largest tokens in the asset class test critical resistance levels. Ethereum has been the exception in the group over the last few weeks, but even now it looks set up to consolidate its gains.

If Ethereum, the one token that has helped support market breadth over the last two weeks, begins to pause, it could set the asset class up for a few weeks of indiscriminate selling. What would prove me wrong is seeing all three of these assets complete successful breakouts.

Regardless of whether sellers step in here, I think this is a good area to pay ourselves and take some profits off the table. It is prudent trading/investing to scale out of positions as the market works higher.

I think if we see any meaningful weakness here in the coming weeks, it will present itself as a great buying opportunity.

But in the interim, I think the best approach is to be patient.

Directional Bias

• Short...

Speculative technology stocks have been mooning in recent weeks. Many of these stocks have rallied over 100% in the last month alone. 

Today, we're outlining a technology stock that rallied 700% in half a year after pivoting from blockchain infrastructure to high-performance computing. In other words, they pivoted from crypto to AI.

After consolidating for over a year, the stock put the finishing touches on a textbook basing pattern last week and is beginning a fresh leg higher.

But it's not just the chart that has us excited... the short sellers have gotten way too greedy, and we're going to exploit their weakness.

Let's get into the details:

Quick Update:  

According to the National Retail Federation, 197 million Americans shopped over the 5 days from Thanksgiving weekend through Cyber Monday. There are only 216 million Americans over 15 years old in the country. Even allowing for double-counting, that’s a good turn-out for a fake holiday with unexceptional discounts. 

Who won?

Well according to our Retail and Consumer expert Jeff Macke,

"Abercrombie won the mall. Walmart won Discount. William Sonoma and Dick’s Sporting Goods have won Home and Sports so hard they’re running out of chains to compete with. Amazon is winning the world and barely seems to care about (or profit from) retail at all." 

Make sure you download his...

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

The S&P500, Nasdaq100 and Global100 Index each made new all-time highs yesterday.

This is among many other stocks, sectors and indexes around the world that are also making new cycle highs. 

We've been buying stocks very aggressively, of course, because historically it pays much better to own stocks during bull markets vs doing the alternative.

We've gone back and done the work. It's just math. 

Those investors with too much cash, or too few stocks in their portfolios, have been paying the consequences.

The pushback I get, and have been getting over the past couple of years, tends to revolve around valuation and how stocks are "too expensive". 

I find that to be a hilarious reason to avoid buying stocks during a bull market.

Common excuses for fighting this powerful trend include, but are not limited to:

• The 4th Highest Trailing P/E for the S&P500 in 124 years
• US Stock Market Concentration is at a record high, when you add up the top 10 companies as a % of Total S&P500 market-cap
• US Stocks are at a 75-year high vs the...

The New York Stock Exchange held its annual Tree Lighting Event this week. It was spectacular, as always.

But we're not here to talk about pine trees or LED lights. We're here to talk about commodities.

The NYSE has an array of vehicles to trade, most being equities.

They also have several commodity funds, which happen to offer asymmetric risk versus reward opportunities at current levels. Let's talk about them.

Our first setup is the Invesco DB Agriculture Fund $DBA:

The top five holdings are cocoa (14.8%), coffee (13%), live cattle (11.9%), sugar (11.6%), and corn (11.4%), several of which we've recently discussed.

As you can...

Lately, it’s become almost routine to see tech-related groups hitting fresh highs across the board. 

From Software and Internet to Cybersecurity, Digital Payments, and Fintech, the strength in these sub-sectors has been nothing short of remarkable.

Now we can add the Cloud Computing ETF $SKYY to this impressive list of tech indexes breaking out to new all-time highs.

Price just took out a critical resistance level at the prior cycle highs from 2021, surging past 120 without looking back. 

This level now serves as a key threshold to watch on any corrective action. Will former resistance turn into support?

As long as SKYY holds above those old highs, the path of least...

Happy Friday, folks.

It was another wild week in the market. Let's wrap it up with some portfolio maintenance and general thoughts about how we made out.

First, congrats to everyone who hit big with SoundHound.

These outlier trades are actually common with our system. And we need them because they pay for all the zeros.

If you let it ride, and you are up 25x today, fantastic. 

If you didn’t. Pay attention and learn from this. It is so important to let our winners run. This is why we sell the double so religiously. It puts our minds at ease, and with the comfort of knowing we can’t lose, we are more likely to let positions go. 

In the case of SOUN, the calls were cheap, so we could own more than just 2 contracts. Larger position sizes like this make our job easier. Use it to your advantage and scale out on strength in situations like this.

If we can consistently sell doubles, we should be able to hit big trades...

Seven of the ten biggest-ever options volume days have been in 2024, with the other three in 2023, according to this report in Traders Magazine.

It goes on to say: "...numbers that would be considered spikes ten or even five years ago are more like a current-day new normal."

I wouldn't have it any other way.

The growing popularity of options trading makes sense to me. No other product offers so much dynamic flexibility for traders to craft unique ways to express market opinions.

No other product gives us the ability to define our risks absolutely, while positioning ourselves with leverage to participate in theoretically unlimited gains.

We've seen some fast moving breakouts during the recent stage of this bull market cycle. 

I'm not calling for the bull market to end. In fact, I think it continues for a while longer. But its highly likely the pace of prices increases slows.

With this in mind, today's trade is the perfect kind of play for such an environment

I was wondering myself. So I asked Retail and Consumer expert Jeff Macke to shoot over some results.

His answer?

"Abercrombie won the mall. Walmart won Discount. William Sonoma and Dick’s Sporting Goods have won Home and Sports so hard they’re running out of chains to compete with. Amazon is winning the world and barely seems to care about (or profit from) retail at all."

Man is he good. 

Look at this chart of Abercrombie breaking out of this multi-decade base to new all-time highs:

Whenever I want to know what's going on in retail, Jeff is the guy I ask. 

And he...

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. No new positions today.
2. Adjustment to XOP position.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.
5. Volatility Snapshot.

Let’s dig in!

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:

Below is the 10th ASC Mastermind  Lab. In this video, I'm joined by Brian Shannon. Brian is the founder of Alphatrends, and also wrote two of the most influential technical analysis books: Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes, and Maximum Trading Gains With Anchord VWAP. 

Brian Shannon has written two of the most influential recent books on technical analysis, and moving averages are at the core of both. 

In this Mastermind Lab, Brian and I discuss the flaws of traditional moving averages, and why VWAP is itself essentially another form of moving average. 

Moving averages are generally meant to allow investors to analyze assets across multiple timeframes, and Brian literally wrote the book on multiple timeframe analysis. So when I want to talk about this stuff, Brian is one of the first guys I call. 

Enjoy this Mastermind Lab.