This is the video recording of our July 1st Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

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.

This past February the market was running hot!

Too hot.

We saw some of the most bullish sentiment readings in years. And this sentiment came after a historic rally for equities throughout the 4th quarter last year that couldn't miss. Everything was working.

But things can't just go up forever. They need to rest eventually, and reset some of that excessive optimism.

That's exactly what happened.

Despite some of the growth indexes making new highs, a lot of the most important groups of stocks have done absolutely nothing since February.

Look at Consumer Discretionary, Financials, Industrials and Healthcare trading sideways to down this entire time:

I'm being told that the Consumer is dead and can't afford anything.

That's why "it's only the high end retail" that is doing so well....

Take Williams-Sonoma for instance. It's harder to afford the things they sell at this place:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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 $3T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Arista Networks and Crowdstrike.

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 Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

While the market remains a mixed bag and participation is lacking, we're still seeing evidence of risk appetite.

How do we know?

The stocks that investors are betting against the most are making big moves... to the upside.

And we know just what to do in these environments.

We find the most heavily shorted stocks in our freshly squeezed universe. We wait for momentum to come into these names, and then we ride them higher with the squeeze.

We got new short data recently, so let's talk about how we're playing it.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions. When a stock is shorted, it means incremental buyers are waiting in the wings to close out their bearish bets.

We love this, as new buyers are the one true catalyst for higher prices.

When shorts are proven wrong, they become buyers of the stock. In many cases, this happens as momentum flows into these names and fuels massive short-covering rallies.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend Aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to long-term-minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That's why we're turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we're curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for five to nine years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are "stocks that pay you to make money." Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.

However, when it comes to this one, it couldn’t be any simpler!

With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US stocks.

Welcome to The Junior Hall of Famers.

This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That’s good enough for us.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

Have you heard about the breakout in America's online marketplace?

Amazon is up 5% this week as it follows other mega-cap growth stocks to new record highs. Everyone is talking about it.

But there's more to this story.

Online retail is a burgeoning industry, offering investment opportunities in a variety of companies around the world.

These growth stocks provide some of the highest beta vehicles as they are direct plays on the consumer economy.

And Amazon doesn't dominate around the globe the way they do in America. There are other regional plays that offer investors exposure to higher growth markets outside the US.

With Amazon $AMZN making a decisive resolution to fresh all-time highs today, it is an opportune time to talk about the broader online retail space.

Let's dive in!

Following the path of other Magnificent Seven names, here's Amazon.com $AMZN surging to new all-time highs:

This is a big deal for me.

Those of you who know me well already know.

Tomorrow is the last day of June. So do you know what that means????

NEW MONTHLY CHARTS!!!!

If you're new around here, I will just tell you that there is NOTHING, and I mean absolutely NOTHING, I do that adds more value to my approach than this process of taking a step back and reviewing a list of Monthly Charts.

It's so easy to get lost in the day to day noise of the markets.... What did the Dow do today? What did the Powell say? Who reported earnings this morning? etc etc...

I have found over the years that it is so important to just stop, take a deep breath, and focus on the direction of the primary trends.

The reason is because asset prices trend. They're not random. We know this. It's just a fact.

So if we know for a fact that asset prices trend, don't you think it would be advantageous to identify the direction of those trends?

As it turns out the answer is an overwhelming YES!

Here's a good example of the Nasdaq going back 25 years.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as "a market of stocks."

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions. But there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club.

We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports.

Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to the Short Report.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended June 21, 2024. 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.