From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Futures are bright this morning.

I mentioned yesterday that there's potential to 438 on $SPY.

Are you ready for the end of the year squeeze?

Many investors think it's not coming and that the market is going to crash instead.

In fact, CTAs have never been this short. The last few times they were anywhere near this bearish, stocks went on to have some of the greatest rallies in history. I remember them well:

From the Desk of Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

Relative strength is one of the most essential tools we employ on a daily basis. 

Analyzing relative trends allows us to determine whether an asset is outperforming a benchmark or its alternatives.

This increases our chances of success as we navigate the markets.

Even though the stock market has been trading sideways since July, the relative trends are very much in favor of technology these days.

Below is the equal-weight Technology Sector (RSPT) breaking out of a 3-year base relative to the equal-weight S&P 500 (RSP):

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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.

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.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians!

The market was very resilient today considering what's going on.

If $SPY continues on this path higher there's potential to 438.

From the Desk of Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

Energy stocks have been the best-performing group thus far during the second half of 2023. However, they have given back some of their gains in recent weeks as selling pressure resurfaces.

With energy indexes rolling over at their old highs yet again, the question we’re asking (and have been asking) is simple… 

What is it going to take for these stocks to finally break out?

Here is a dual-pane chart showing the Equal-Weight Energy Sector testing the upper bounds of a multi-month basing pattern on both absolute and relative terms.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Broadwood Partners.

The hedge fund reported a purchase of $7.7 million in STAAR Surgical Company $STAA.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

That was a powerful day on Friday for the indices.

Futures are lower this morning due to the attack on Israel.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market had its rally cap on today.

It wasn't looking so great in the morning.

But it ramped higher with force into the weekend...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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. Click here to check it out.

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.

Here’s this week’s list:

*Click table to enlarge view

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.

However, when it comes to our latest project, it couldn't be any simpler!

With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US stocks.

Welcome to The Junior Hall of Famers.

This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That's good enough for us.