The largest insider transaction on today's list is a Form 4 filing by Cevian Capital II GP LTD.

The hedge fund reported a purchase of roughly $9.1 million in the automotive safety supplier Autoliv $ALV. It now has a total stake of 10%.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!

One way we're doing this is by identifying 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.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey...

This is the video recording of our August 31, 2022, Inside Scoop Weekly Strategy Session.

The most significant insider activity on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Ryan M. Lance, the CEO at ConocoPhillips $COP.

However, it wasn’t COP shares that Lance just reported purchases worth roughly $1 million in.

The largest insider transaction on today's list is a Form 4 filing by ValueAct Partners.

ValueAct reported a purchase of roughly $10 million in Insight Enterprises $NSIT.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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.

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.

What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.

And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think the...

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.

And it doesn't have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Top 10 Charts Report was just published.

In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.

Stocks Fail at Key Level

A wide variety of risk assets have suffered significant corrective action dating back to last year. As such, we’ve gotten used to looking for logical areas of potential support, or levels where we could expect demand to enter the market.

No levels have provided a better guideline than the prior-cycle highs from 2018. And when it comes to the stock market, no index provides us with a more comprehensive view of the price action than the Value Line Geometric (VLG), shown below. The Value Line is composed of roughly 1,700 components and is designed to measure how the average - or more specifically, the median stock is performing.

As you can see, the median stock is currently rolling over after a successful retest of its 2018 highs. As long as the Value Line is below 595, stocks are likely to remain under pressure.

...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Check out this week's Momentum Report, our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector, and Industry Group level.

By analyzing the short-term data in these reports, we get a more tactical view of the current state of markets. This information then helps us put near-term developments into the big picture context and provides insights regarding the structural trends at play.

Let's jump right into it with some of the major takeaways from this week's report:

* ASC Plus Members can access the Momentum Report by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.

Macro Universe:

• This week, our macro universe was mostly negative, as 74% of our list closed lower with a median return of -1.48%.
• The Volatility Index $VIX was this week's winner, closing with a 24.08% gain.
• The biggest loser was the Nasdaq 100 $QQQ, with a weekly loss of -4.78%.
• There was a 5% drop in the percentage of assets on our list within 5% of their 52-week highs – currently at 6%.
• 11% of our macro list made fresh 4-week...

Ernest S. Rady, the chairman and CEO of American Assets Trust $AAT, continues to appear on our list with his eighth Form 4 filing in the trailing month.

Rady reported his latest purchase on Friday, revealing another 25,000 shares, equivalent to $719,600.

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, 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.

Here’s this week’s list:

Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month. 

Then, we sort the remaining names...

The largest insider transaction on today's list is a Form 4 filing by Cevian Capital.

Cevian reported an $11.4 million purchase in Autoliv $ALV, the world’s biggest manufacturer of airbags and seatbelts for cars.