From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column where we'll cover all the action for the week ended May 13, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with our Minor Leaguers column.

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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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.

The largest insider transaction on today's list is a Form 4 filing by George Lopez, founder and former CEO at ICU Medical $ICUI, who reported a $4 million purchase of his own stock.

We had two different insiders report purchases in the battered Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy $MSTR.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

Here’s this week’s list:

In Elon Musk’s latest internet musings, he let the investing public know that the Twitter acquisition is on hold for the due diligence process.

Here’s what he said:

Technically, not everything can underperform.

There are always some groups of stocks that are doing better than the others. Whether that means going up in price faster, or going down in price slower.

In some cases, like more recently, some stocks do well on an absolute basis well others lose value altogether.

This year we've seen the largest dispersion of returns among US Sectors in over 20 years. The difference in returns between Energy and some of the Growth areas like Communications or Tech have been historic across the board.

Here's Energy relative to Technology, as well as Energy relative to the overall market, as defined by the S&P500:

Global markets have been in a mess for a while now. For some time there, India was displaying resilience when it came to the broader market indices. But that has changed over the past few days.

We have seen a selloff come through in the market and it is time to revisit the levels that could be crucial going forward.

There are a lot of charts that looks very similar to this one.

Tops are a process right?

This is what this one looks like:

Jan Barta of Pale Fire Capital revealed an additional purchase of roughly $23 million in Groupon $GRPN, as he continues to build a position.

The CEO and the president of OPKO Health $OPK revealed a purchase of approximately 400,000 shares of his company's stock in a Form 4 filing.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

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.

This is the video recording of our May 11, 2022, Inside Scoop Weekly Strategy Session.

I think it’s safe to say insiders are buying the dip!

This might be the most Form 4 filings we’ve seen in a single day since we started doing this.

And we’re seeing activity in all different sectors, from software to chemicals, including even casinos.