The market correction has extended over the past few weeks and the negative sentiment build-up is definitely not something that will fade away quickly. As more and more sectors move below their support zones, buy ideas are hard to come by. Today we're sharing a short idea from the financial services sector.
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.
The largest insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing from Allied Physicians of California.
The firm reported a purchase of roughly $9.2 million in Apollo Medical Holdings $AMEH. It now owns about 11 million shares for a total ownership interest of 19%.
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.
We're going on over 16 months of this so far, and counting....
Remember, stocks peaked in February of 2021, meaning that was the best things were for stocks during this cycle. And it's been a slow deterioration ever since.
The first stocks to peak are what we refer to as the "Culprits". Every bear market has that group that you can point to as the leaders to the downside.
We came into 2022 with a close eye on those Culprits (see here) and we've continued to monitor their declines.
If you haven't been following along, those groups include Chinese Internet, Biotechnology, the IPO stocks, and of course Cathie Wood's ARKK Funds, who have become the poster child for this latest bubble.
But a funny thing happened 6 weeks ago - they all stopped going down.
And the leader to the upside has been Chinese Internet (yes you read that right, I had to run the numbers multiple times to believe it myself).
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.
William Griffith, director of Procore Technologies $PCOR, reported an additional purchase of roughly $7 million, as he continues to build his position in the stock.
Under Iconiq Strategic Partners II, he now owns about 44 million shares for a total ownership interest of 33%.