From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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.

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.

As well as stocks all over the world have been doing over the past few months, the overhead supply in the major US Large-cap Indexes remains in place.

In other words, these large-cap, growth-heavy, market gauges still have work to do.

A couple of months ago we reiterated our more neutral positions in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P500, wanting to focus more of our attention on individual stocks and sectors.

That tactical approach has worked out well.

But fast forward to today, and they've yet to make any progress.

By my work, everything started to improve for stocks after June 16th.

That was when the list of new 52-week lows peaked and stocks started the process of going up all the time, instead of going down all the time.

In bull markets, stocks go up. In bear markets they go down, not sure if you heard...

Anyway, these days I'm seeing a lot of investors pointing to October 13th as the market bottom, because that's when the S&P500 and some of the other indexes made their lows.

But by then, most stocks had already bottomed. It was only a few of those large-cap indexes left still falling.

That's why looking at market internals is so important to our process.

In fact, I was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on national television the very next morning (Oct 14th), and I was telling her how stocks had already been in a bull market for months.

She looked at me like I was crazy. Go check the tape!

What do bull markets look like?

Well obviously, more stocks are going up than going down.

More sectors are participating to the upside, while fewer are falling.

And you also see an expansion in breadth across the globe, with more and more countries joining in on the uptrends.

Those are bull markets.

And do you know what you also see?

High Beta stocks outperform Low Volatility. This is a consistent characteristic among the strongest uptrends.

How's the Bull Market treating you?

Does it feel as good for you as it does for me?

I've been watching really angry people fighting these uptrends in stocks over the past 6+ months and they are not happy.

Life is harder when you ignore price, in favor of such arbitrary things like the economy or corporate earnings.

What kind of serial killer puts that gossip ahead of the tape?

I want this to be a good reminder that we DO NOT EVER want to fight the tape.

Fight the fed all you want. Ignore the economic gossip coming out of the basic cable stations. All of that is perfectly acceptable behavior.

It's the tape that you cannot fight, if your goal is to make money.

One of the things that we caught on to early on in this bull market, was the relative strength we were seeing out of Small-caps.

While the S&P500 and a few other US Large-cap Indexes made new lows early in Q4, although for just a hot second, Small-caps did not.

In fact, Small-caps found support at all that former resistance from 2018 and 2020:

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.

Remember in the first half of last year, it was only the Energy stocks that were in Uptrends.

You can use a simple 200 day moving average to point to and say, "OK price is above that so it's probably not a downtrend".

Then in October, we were talking about how Bear Markets are a choice, and one that investors didn't have to sit through if they didn't want to.

By that point, Healthcare was already being added to the list of Sector Indexes that were above their 200 day moving average.

So now entering Q4 you had Energy AND Healthcare.

By November, you then had 3 more added to the list of uptrends: Financials, Industrials and Materials.

To be clear, the list of Sectors in uptrends kept getting longer throughout the 4th quarter, not shorter.

And so now here we are, with all of those sectors still above their 200 day moving averages. But you can also add Technology and Communications to that list as well.

It's the weekly commodity edition of What the FICC?

I have to imagine Uranium stocks catch a bid if copper and gold are ripping higher.

Check it out!

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. 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:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Commodity prices remain elevated despite easing inflationary pressures.

It’s evident in the two overarching themes across the commodity space – resilience at the index level and relative strength from metals.

I’ve been vocal about both, urging readers not to fight DR. Copper while teasing the possibility of Gold reaching 5K. I’m serious about both!

Strength likely spills over into the periphery if we’re in an environment where gold and copper print fresh highs. 

That brings us to my favorite chart this week…

Check out the Uranium ETF $URA:

We like to keep things simple around here.

When there is less supply of something, and more demand for it, the price goes up.

That's how markets work.

So first it was Warren Buffett aggressively buying shares of Chevron. He now owns over $30 Billion worth.

This has been a very very good trade for us.

Warren Buffett was the smart money. And we listened.

Now this week, you can argue that the even smarter money, the company itself, announced a $75 Billion Buyback.

In other words, with all the money that Chevron is making these days, they believe the best thing they can do with all that cash is to buy their own stock.

And so $CVX is now making new all-time highs, again: