Over the past half-decade or so, we've seen the US Dollar Index maintain a very high negative correlation with risk assets.
When stocks are doing well, the Dollar has normally been under pressure. And when stocks have struggled, as most of them have over the past year, the US Dollar has kept a bid.
Look how poorly the Dollar did when stocks ripped in 2020 off those pandemic lows. And then look at the strength in the Dollar over the last year as most stocks have struggled:
The largest insider buy on today's list is a Form 4 filing by William Clay Ford Jr., the executive chair of Ford Motor $F, who reported a purchase of roughly $4.5 million.
Coliseum Capital Partners continues to build its position in GMS Inc $GMS, as it just filed its second Form 4 in the last week.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
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 $1B 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.
The way we did this is simple…
To make the cut for our revised Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1B and $4B.
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.
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 are almost done with the first quarter of the calendar year and the last quarter of our financial year. There are certain sectors that are peeping out from beneath the surface and hence attracting attention. Is this a theme we may see play out in the quarter going forward? Most likely. Most sectors have remained sideways or subdued in their move and they are finally picking a side!
Today we are here to discuss one such sector and some interesting setups that one could take advantage of.
Let's see what's on the roster sheet today.
We mentioned this in the recently concluded conference call, and we'll say it again- Bouncebacks are here! From within the price bouncebacks that we're seeing certain sectors are displaying more strength. One such sector is the Industrials. We're talking about the Industrial Manufacturing sector, so don't go looking for the US sector XLI.
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.