Congratulations to the 2023 NBA Champion Denver Nuggets!

I’m a total bandwagoner, having never watched a Nuggets game in the eleven years I’ve now lived in Colorado. My first Nuggets watch was the first playoff game this year. And I watched every game the rest of the way.

My timing was pretty good.

What has stood out the most to me in the interviews and press I saw and read last night and this morning following the Nuggets win is how their journey to the top required tremendous patience and a focus on their edge.

And more patience. More sharpening of the edge. And then a little more of both after that.

The Nuggets organization knew they were building a winner. But it would take time. Time for the stars to develop. Time for injuries to heal. Time for missing pieces to be added. And time for the stars to align.

The most significant transaction on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Ryan Cohen, executive chairman of GameStop $GME.

Cohen revealed a purchase of 443,842 GME shares, equivalent to roughly $10 million.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We've got the Fed today, and let's say we sell off.

Even so, it would be a much needed consolidation.

How's the Bull Market treating you so far?

Can you believe it's been a year already since the new 52-week lows list peaked?

Remember, the first thing stocks need to do before they can start to go up in price, is to stop going down!

That happened 1-year ago.

Since then Technology, Communications, Consumer Discretionary and Industrials are all up over 20%. Tech is up almost 40%.

Meanwhile, Healthcare and Financials are each up 10% during this period.

And then some of the more defensive sectors, like Staples and Utilities, are up, but very much underperforming the more offensive sectors.

This is all perfectly normal behavior in bull markets, so we're not surprised at all. No one should...

They've been telling me for almost a year that this is just a bear market rally.

If you're one of those people, I would ask your therapist about it.

The New Lows list peaked last June.

It's been steady improvement and sector rotation ever since.

This month is just the latest example. We now started to get rotation into Small-caps.

See: Bullish Risk Reversal In Small-caps (May 2023)

I'm convinced the world needs more bubble charts. There just aren't enough.

So here at...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market was happy with the CPI numbers.

No rest for the weary...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Markets are bracing for tomorrow’s FOMC decision – including the dollar.

That’s right – we have more indecisive action on tap. Let’s call it the knee-jerk before the knee-jerk, with a little help from today’s May CPI print. 

Interest rates, the US Dollar Index $DXY, and gold have yet to make a decisive directional move.

To be fair, most markets are trading within their respective year-to-date ranges (except the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, of course).

But if we turn to emerging market currencies, we don’t see any sign of hesitation…

Check out our EM Commodity Currency Index (equally weighting the Mexican peso, the Brazilian real, the Chilean peso, and the South African rand) posting new 52-week highs after violating a long-term downtrend line at the beginning of the year:

...

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

The most significant transaction on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Len Blavatnik.

Blavatnik reported a purchase of $10 million in Day One Biopharmaceuticals $DAWN.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We have CPI for May coming out at 8:30 a.m. ET.

I'll hold off on ideas until I see how the market absorbs the data.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended June 9, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated 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.

Under the Hood is a value-add for investors of all kinds, as we can express our views through a variety of different types of stocks.

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...

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...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Gold can’t do all the heavy lifting.

I believe a generational rally for gold has already begun. But my structural outlook hinges on the former 2011 peak.

Gold must hold above that former high, marking the end of the previous secular bull run. 

It’s held this level so far. 

But if gold has any chance of printing new all-time highs as it has versus most major global currencies, it needs a little help from its friends…

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

New highs for $QQQ once again...

There hasn't been any cooling off for the indices just yet.

We'll see what this week brings.

[12/4: updated stop to 107]

We've been talking a lot lately about the number of stocks setting up to play "catch-up" to this bull market that is only just now starting to get the attention it deserves, in spite of it being nearly 8 months old now, by our measures.

Today's trade is in another one of these setups that continue to work for us ($CAT and $IWM are great, recent examples).

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Gold can’t do all the heavy lifting.

I believe a generational rally for gold has already begun. But my structural outlook hinges on the former 2011 peak.

Gold must hold above that former high, marking the end of the previous secular bull run. 

It’s held this level so far. 

But if gold has any chance of printing new all-time highs as it has versus most major global currencies, it needs a little help from its friends…

I’m talking about the rest of the precious metals space – silver, platinum, and palladium.

Silver is hanging tough as it attempts to reclaim last month’s pivot lows. But this is a lonely bullish data point – one I imagine gold bugs wish they could attribute to palladium.

Check out the Aberdeen Physical Palladium ETF $PALL:

Instead of challenging former support from below, PALL is breaking down to fresh four-year lows. The breakdown in palladium fails to reflect the broad demand for metals I associate with the next secular uptrend in gold.

In short, this is not bull market behavior.

To be clear, I’m not interested in shorting PALL. It...

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

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

The most significant transaction on today's list comes in a Form 4 from Diversified Healthcare Trust director Adam Portnoy.

Portnoy revealed a purchase of $14.7 million in DHC.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It's going to be a busy week, with CPI tomorrow and the Fed on Wednesday.

We must be on our toes and trade tactically.