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.
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended December 8, 2023. 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.
Whenever we want to gauge animal spirits in the precious metals space, we resort to our trusty intermarket ratios.
Two weeks ago in our Gold report, we covered the notable bounce we were witnessing in the Silver/Gold ratio, pointing to brewing risk appetite within this space. And this week, we outlined a bullish trade in the iShares Silver ETF off the back of this recent momentum.
But when we take this relationship one step further, we see a similar situation in the relationship between Silver and Gold mining stocks.
Credit spreads have tightened a good deal since October.
I can't help but think this is just more classic bull market behavior.
As the major US equity indices have been rallying into year end, we've seen confirmation out of a number of credit ratios we track to gauge risk appetite within fixed income markets. Specifically, the the iShares High Yield Corporate Bond ETF $HYG is trading at 52-week highs relative to the iShares 3-7yr Treasury Bond ETF $IEI.
This ratio ultimately gives us an inverted chart of credit spreads. Check it out:
Notice how both the S&P 500 and the HYG/IEI ratio are pressing back through their summer highs.
It's hard to have a bull market in equities if the bond market is positioning defensively. Think about it; the players in the market with the deepest pockets require an incredible amount of liquidity.
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 around the world.