Island Reversals are few and far between. They don't show up very often.

But when they do....look out!

Here's Meta, the parent company of Faceplant, I mean Facebook, losing a few hundred billion dollars in value since yesterday's close.

I'll say that again, "Losing a few hundred billion dollars in value"....overnight!

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

As most of you know, we use 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.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Did you see the candlestick in the Mexican peso last Friday?

It was all wick!

The way I learned it, you want to trade in the opposite direction of blow-offs like this. 

That means betting on a stronger peso and an end to the stock market correction.

Check out the XXXL lower shadow in the Mexican peso futures (denominated in USD):

Last Friday’s intraday swing spanned six percent and registered the highest single-day ATR reading since March 2020.

Despite the earth-shattering volatility, the bulls prevailed. That’s the critical lesson from last week’s action: The bulls immediately repaired the damage. 

Stock prices don't move based on "fundamentals".

Prices move based on positioning.

When investors are primarily on one side of a market, the pendulum swings to the other extreme.

One of my heroes John Roque said it best, "We're not in a reversion TO the mean business, we're in a reversion BEYOND the mean business".

In other words, from extremes in positioning, the market doesn't just go back to the average positioning. It tends to continue towards the other extreme.

This is the situation we currently find ourselves in as investors.

This is one of the biggest questions we want to ask ourselves right now.

How many ounces of Silver does it take to buy just 1oz of Gold?

The answer is that it's currently too many.

Here is the Ratio between Gold and Silver, overlaid with a 200-week moving average just to smooth out the data better.

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 now, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Investors are dropping gold and silver like they’re hot.

But don’t let the sellers push you toward the exit.

It might look ugly, but a corrective period following gold’s vertical rally to our initial target sounds about right.

Plus, three of our current long positions – Harmony $HMY, Wheaton $WPM, and Kinross $KGC – posted new 52-week highs Thursday. 

I expect the new highs list to expand as gold and silver work through overhead supply in the coming months.

Instead of sweating today’s selling pressure, I’m placing orders to buy the following two mining stocks on a breakout…

As we've discussed here plenty, this year is very different than last year.

Remember in 2023 when breakouts would stick and prices of stocks and ETFs would keep heading higher?

That's not happening these days.

It's actually been the opposite.

The bigger question for me is whether these new trends are here to stay, or if at some point the stock market reverts to those longer underlying uptrends that got us here.

Another question I have is which mining companies are going to lead their groups as metals continue to make new highs.

Here's a good way to view it. This is Gold breaking out of a decade+ long base to new all-time highs, resuming its secular uptrend from the 2000s.

Have you counted how many stocks and sectors put in failed breakouts?

Market breadth has been deteriorating so fast that most of the "breakouts" that everyone was so excited about last quarter are all failing one by one.

It's pretty nasty out there.

That's what happens when you get aggressive and buy stocks while breadth is deteriorating in your face.

I've seen this too many times to get fooled again.

You're seeing a lot of first timers out there who haven't learned this yet.

One of the better examples is in the Equally-weighted S&P500. Look at this nasty failed breakout.

How's the stock market correction treating you so far?

The Nasdaq100 is only up 1% this year, underperforming a typical year for the market by a long shot.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is flat for 2024.

The Russell2000 Small-cap Index $IWM is still down this year.

Emerging Markets $EEM are down.

Meanwhile Gold is up 15%. Silver is up 20%.

In fact, the Dow/Gold ratio just hit new 3-year lows this week:

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.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The media is showering gold and precious metals with attention.

I get it. New all-time highs capture eyes. 

But you can’t leave copper and base metals out of the story…

Copper is ripping to its highest level in almost two years, posting a 15% year-to-date gain:

For perspective, the S&P 500 is up less than 5% since January 1.

Our next profit target of roughly 4.85 is now in focus. A decisive break above this new objective sends copper toward new all-time highs and the psychologically important five-dollar level.