The stock market is in the middle of one of its fiercest multi-day rallies in recent history.
Since last week, there has been a notable expansion in breadth, with areas like small caps, regional banks, biotechs, and speculative growth joining the bull market party.
Long story short, investors are beginning to move out on the risk spectrum and embrace some of the riskiest stocks the market has to offer.
Another way to see this offensive positioning is by analyzing the performance of the stocks that investors are betting against the most.
Names with sky-high short interests continue to work in this environment.
As such, it's time to run it back with another Freshly Squeezed report.
Here's how we do things...
We find the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. We wait for momentum to come into these names. And then we ride them higher as the bears get squeezed.
We got new short data last week, 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.
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 now, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
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 Crowdstrike and Paypal.
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.
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 this one, 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.
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended July 7, 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.
Have you heard that this bull market is only being driven by Large-cap Tech?
Well, what if Small-cap Tech broke out of this multi-year base to new all-time highs?
What then?
Would it still be just Large-cap Tech?
Here's what the index looks like and, by definition, it excludes any of the so called "Mag7" and any other Mega-cap stocks that are perhaps helping to drive other indexes.
Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.
By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.
With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.