Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended August 16, 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.
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.
It's fun seeing all the ADRs in the wild - Bank of Montreal $BMO, Canadian Pacific $CP, Royal Bank of Canada $RBC and so many others!
Also, the conversations I'm overhearing in the hotel lobby have been about the S&P500 and earnings. You don't hear talk like that in many other cities.
It's not surprising, as we all know Toronto is a big financial hub for Canada. But it's reassuring to experience it and watch it thrive.
In this scan, we look to identify 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.
We use sentiment to help put the behavior of the stock market into context.
When looking at markets, it's easy to see what stocks are doing. All you have to do is look.
But what are people thinking? That's what we want to know.
When everyone is bullish, it's hard for stocks to go up in price at the same rate. When everyone turns bearish, that's historically a great time to be putting money to work.
Coming into August, sentiment was running hot. The VIX was at 10, the put/call ratio was muted, newsletter writers were giving us some of their most bullish readings of all-time, and our sentiment composite was as complacent as it's ever been.
Boy did that change quickly.
We just saw the largest week over week spike in bears among individual investors since 2022, just as this bull market was getting started.
Stocks with high short interest are proving resilient, even in challenging market conditions, as the bears struggle to drive down even the most hated names.
With this in mind, it's time for another Freshly Squeezed report.
Here's our approach:
We find the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. Then, we monitor these names for signs of upward momentum. Once that momentum kicks in, we ride them higher as the bears get squeezed.
We got fresh short data on Friday, so let's dive in and talk about 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.
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.
Nowadays, to make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
