As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using 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...
The Technology Index made another new 52-week high on Monday.
This is becoming a habit.
Apple carries a huge weighting in that Index.
So as some people get distracted with how Apple's $2.75 Trillion market cap is now bigger than the entire Russell2000 Index, I'm more interested in how quickly Apple can get to $5 Trillion.
I think it can happen pretty soon.
Look at these massive moves in market cap that can happen in a relative short period of time.
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.
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...
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.
We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.
What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.
And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think...