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.
Yesterday, Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management filed a 13D revealing the purchase of an additional 16 million shares of the fast food chain, Wendy's $WEN.
This brings Trian’s total interest to just shy of 20%.
Buried in the footnotes of the filing, Trian also disclosed that it advised the board of directors it’s exploring a potential transaction.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
The US dollar is front and center as risk assets hang in the balance.
Earlier in the month, we placed the Australian and Canadian dollars on breakdown alert as they completed major topping patterns.
US dollar strength was expanding at the time, and the AUD and CAD were the last dominos to fall.
Or so it seemed.
What started as strong downside resolutions for these top commodity currencies quickly turned into potential failed breakdowns.
Now that the most resilient currencies are snapping back against King Dollar, it's compromising the broad US dollar rally and could usher in a more favorable environment for risk assets.
Let’s discuss what it means for stocks and commodities if these failed breakdowns resolve higher.
Here’s a chart highlighting the recent action in the Canadian dollar and Australian dollar futures:
The largest insider transaction on today’s list is a Form 4 filing by Winder Investment, which reported an additional $1.8 million purchase in Sensient Technologies $SXT.
The firm now owns more than 6 million shares, representing a 12.4% ownership interest in the specialty chemicals stock.
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.
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.
We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…
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.
The way we did this is simple…
To make the cut for our new Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.
A Record-Setting Slide
The S&P 500 just booked its seventh consecutive down week. This is only the fourth time in history that the index has registered so many consecutive losing weeks.
When we look back at the last three instances, the forward returns are mixed. The last time we experienced so many consecutive losing weeks was in the middle of the dot-com bubble crash in 2001. This was not a good time to buy stocks.
On the other hand, when this happened back in 1970 it coincided with a major bottom. As for the instance in 1980, the forward returns were excellent, but a multi-year bear market followed soon after.
While this stat doesn’t give us an actionable signal over any material timeframe, it does suggest that markets are due for a relief rally.
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.
ValueAct Partners revealed an additional purchase of roughly $10 million in Insight Enterprises $NSIT, as the activist hedge fund continues to build a position in the enterprise cloud company.
The firm now owns more than 3.8 million shares for a total ownership interest of just under 11%.
However, during that time, commodities continued to rip higher.
Now that the rally in raw materials is reaching significant areas of overhead supply, it would make sense for this leadership space to follow stocks and enter a corrective period.
In other words, the uptrend in commodities that has persisted since 2020 is likely to take a breather and turn into a sideways trend.
