From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

$SPY finally closed its gap down to 442.97.

There are lots of gaps below, but I was looking for this nearby gap to get filled.

Today we have the minutes from the July FOMC meeting.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market pretty much drifted lower all day.

It erased yesterday's bounce, and $SPY closed to its respective gap below.

Is now the time to get long equities?

If you kept up with the headlines and what the sell side analysts have to say, you'd think it would be.

Fortunately we try to stay ahead of the curve around here.

Yesterday we discussed the recent sentiment shift among permabears, wall street analysts, hedge funds and financial media.

You can read that again here.

To add to that sentiment shift, here is the our internal sentiment composite which includes data from Individual Investors, Advisories, Active Investment Managers, Volatility and the Options Market.

As you can see last year saw some of the most pessimistic levels in history, giving us one of the greatest buying opportunities we've ever seen.

Today, Sentiment is at the opposite extreme:

The largest insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filed by Michael Andrew Chambers, director of Sarepta Therapeutics $SRPT.

Chambers reported an additional purchase of 23,686 SRPT shares, equivalent to $2.5 million.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The indices ran right to resistance yesterday only to get slammed overnight.

It's a little bit of a tug of war right here between the bulls and the bears.

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 Kimmy Sokoloff

$SPY and $QQQ are stuck under a lot of resistance levels.

There's a possibility we break above those levels this week, but we must keep stops tight.

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.

The largest insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filed by Michael Andrew Chambers, director of Sarepta Therapeutics $SRPT.

Chambers reported a purchase of SRPT shares worth $3.7 million.

The Nasdaq100 is already down 4.5% this month. Technology as a sector is down almost 6.5% for August.

But corrections are a choice, not a requirement.

As an investor, you make the choice and decide which assets you want to own and which you do not.

Remember, "Passive Investing" is a lie. There's no such thing. All investors are active. The difference is whether you choose your portfolio holdings, or you let some random index providers make those decisions for you.

But we're all active investors, whether we like it or not. Don't forget that.

So even thought the indexes are messy this quarter, take a look at Energy hitting new 6-month highs this week:

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It should be a little bit of a calm week, although we do get retail sales coming up.

Typically in mid-August we get a bounce.

$SPY still hasn't closed its gap below at 442.97. I was looking for that last week, no dice.