November marks the beginning of the best three-month period of the year for stocks and a brand-new NBA season. Moreover, the sportsbooks have priced in my local OKC Thunder as the Western Conference champions.

It's a fantastic time to be alive.

Now is also a great time to take a step back and assess the underlying trends.

Earlier this year, we outlined our Fab 5 Charts for a 2024 equity bull market. 

One of the five key groups we selected was homebuilders, which have been on an absolute tear:

Homebuilders have experienced tremendous markup phases this cycle, nearly doubling in many instances. The visual above shows the SPDR Homebuilders ETF $XHB components sorted by proximity to the 52-week low (the y axis) and 52-week high (the x axis). The 14-day RSI is the size of each bubble.

The homies have been one of the hottest groups of stocks...

If you're living on this planet, credit is everything—it shapes economies and tells us whether we’re in a "risk-on" or "risk-off" environment. 

And there's no better indicator of investor sentiment than the bond market.

With over $140 trillion traded daily, bonds are the largest asset class in the world, spanning all around the globe, from retail investors to governments.

One way we use bonds for information is by analyzing credit spreads as a signal for stress in the market. 

Right now, credit spreads are not warning of elevated risk, they are doing just the opposite. Giving bulls the green light.

Credit spreads are tightening and hitting multi-year highs when comparing junk bonds to treasury bonds.

We’ve overlaid the HYG/IEI ratio with small caps to show how similar the two charts look.

Despite the new highs in HYG/IEI, the S...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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. 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.

Here’s this week’s list:

*Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month.

Then...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Junior International Hall of Famers.

With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.

This scan is composed of the next 100 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 100 and are thus covered by the International Hall of Famers universe.

Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original International Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these future big boys are up to.

This is our Junior International Hall of Famers list:

Click table to enlarge view

And here’s how we arrived at it…

We removed laggards which are down 5% or more relative to the ACWI Ex. U.S. Index $ACWX over the trailing...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

In this scan, we look to identify 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 journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on Technology and Growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online...

The market keeps rewarding investors for buying some of Wall Street's most hated stocks. 

We're getting buy signals from biotechnology and crypto stocks, which tends to happen in healthy market environments.

With this in mind, we're going back to the well and buying a biotech stock with nearly 1/3 of the float sold short and a double-digit days-to-cover ratio. 

The stock we're buying is named after what was once an important ancient trade center in modern-day Turkey.

Let's talk about how we're playing this short squeeze:

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 October 25, 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’...

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.

Each year, Americans buy over 600 million pounds of candy and eat over 1 pound each for Halloween.

It's a lot...

But are there opportunities to profit from Americans ritualistically eating way too much candy? You betcha!

Let's talk about it.

After a historic 190% run earlier this year, cocoa futures have formed a textbook consolidation pattern:

In addition, chocolate bears have failed to register an oversold reading as the bulls have maintained control during this consolidation phase.

We like owning cocoa futures above 6,900, with a target of 11,700 over the coming 2-4 months.

Sugar futures look poised to retest last year's high:

After rallying 20% in a single week last month, the sweet commodity has formed a sweet bullish continuation pattern. If and when this pattern is resolved, we want to own sugar futures in anticipation of a fresh leg higher.

In addition to the chart pattern, the bulls registered a 14-day RSI reading above 80 during the last leg higher, as they were in...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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...

Long bonds are sending a message loud and clear these days, and I’m all ears.

When the Fed started cutting rates last month, long-term bonds reversed course lower. They are making fresh 3-month lows this week.

This might seem surprising, but it's not as uncommon as you'd think.

We saw a similar situation in November 2018, when the Fed raised rates, but the bond market didn't buy it, with the TLT rallying for two years.

Now, the Fed is cutting rates, and long bonds are calling their bluff again. This time, by reversing trend lower.

You can see what I mean in the following chart:

If bond prices continue to decline, it likely signals an expectation of rising inflation or stronger economic growth. 

Personally, I’m betting on inflation increasing.

If this is the case, the Fed rate...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

In this scan, we look to identify 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 journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on Technology and Growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online...