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.
Let me ask you this: In bear markets does it historically get easier and easier to find stocks making new all-time highs?
Where I grew up, new all-time highs, yet alone more and more of them every day, are not something that we normally see in bear markets.
And here we are. I can't remember the last time it was this easy to find stocks breaking out to new highs. And not just new 3-month highs or even 52-week highs.
Stocks are breaking out to new ALL-TIME Highs.
And not just in one or two sectors.
We're seeing it in Financials, Industrials, Technology, Energy, Healthcare, Staples, Telecom and more.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts
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 $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.
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 which you can check out here.
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.
As our Premium Members already know, we have a laundry list of scans that we run internally on an almost daily basis.
Different market environments, naturally, are more conducive to certain scans and less so to others.
We think our “Freshly Squeezed” scan is perfect for the current market. With so many individual issues in massive drawdowns as the broader market begins to turn a corner, there are going to be some serious short-covering rallies in some of the most beaten-down names.
In fact, it’s already starting to happen. Infamous meme stock, AMC Entertainment $AMC was up 25% at its highs today (not on a closing basis).
Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with heavy short positions. When a stock is heavily shorted, it means there are natural incremental buyers. Bulls need incremental buyers, as this is the only way price can move higher. When shorts are proven wrong, they have to buy their shares back to close out their position.