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.
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...
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.
And it doesn't have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.
The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to new highs in order to...
In today's Flow Show, me and Steve Strazza came out swinging with an opportunity to add to an already winning options trade.
Back in late January, we entered into a bullish longer-term bet in Wells Fargo $WFC. You can read about it here. That original position still has until January 2025 to play out (another nine months).
But take a look at this high & tight flag forming on the eve on their next earning release scheduled for this Friday morning:
To us, this screams an opportunity for an upside resolution happening with the earning report being the catalyst.
Looking into the monthly May expiration options, premiums are not bad for a play targeting a measured move to the $70 area.
The NYSE Oil Index includes the leading companies involved in the exploration, production, and development of petroleum.
This index dates back to 1984 so it's got some history to it.
It also includes a lot of Energy stocks headquartered outside the United States, giving investors a much more global perspective, as the NYSE tends to do.
On Friday, this index closed at the highest price ever.