This morning, the big market news is that Twitter $TWTR and Elon Musk are getting close to striking a deal for the eccentric billionaire to take the company private.

This is a dramatic turn of events from just last week, when the company announced it had adopted a “poison pill” to ward off Musk’s takeover efforts.

The latest reports suggest a deal could be finalized as early as today.

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.

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.

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.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Equities continue to get hit. And yesterday, commodity-related stocks were not immune to the selling pressure.

Energy, metals, and natural resources, in general, all sold off into the close. The inflation, interest rate, and commodity trade had a really rough week.

It's never a good thing when the leaders get hit like this. At the same time, two days really doesn’t make a trend.

Before we get sucked into calling peak inflation, let’s zoom out and put all this near-term volatility into the right context.

When we do, it reconnects our eye with the underlying trend – which is unequivocally higher. It also becomes clear that many of these stocks are finding resistance at logical levels – areas where we would expect these stocks to digest gains. 

And that’s exactly what they’re doing!

Let's take a look!

First up is a triple pane chart of the Metals & Mining ETF $XME, Copper Miners ETF $COPX, and the Steel ETF $SLX: 

This chart gives a great read on how base and industrial metal stocks are doing.  

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:

The largest insider buy on today's list is a Form 4 filing by Jan Barta of Pale Fire Capital.

Barta now owns 2,658,550 shares of Groupon $GRPN, which represents an ownership stake of approximately 9%.

Monday night we held our April Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.

Let’s get right into it!

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

A couple weeks ago we pointed out that the stock market was questioning the rise in rates.

Defensive areas we would expect to underperform in the current environment such as utilities and REITs are actually outperforming.

And the names we would expect to do well – specifically banks – can’t seem to catch a bid on either absolute or relative terms.

This is concerning from a broader intermarket perspective. But it’s not the complete story.

While our stock market ratios are not supportive of higher rates, when we look within the bond market, we’re seeing the opposite.

Not only is there a synchronized global rally in interest rates, but the intermarket evidence from our bond market ratios supports this action and indicates a healthy degree of risk appetite. 

Today we're going to highlight one of those bond market ratios – high-yield vs. investment-grade debt.

Let’s take a look.

In the activist world, Bill Ackman announced that Pershing Square exited its position in Netflix $NFLX, as the stock was plunging lower by 35% on the heels of a disappointing earnings report.

It’s estimated that the hedge fund lost over $400 million on the position, which was just purchased back in January.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as a market of stocks.

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions… but there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club. We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports. Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to the Short Report.

This is the video recording of our April 20, 2022, Inside Scoop Weekly Strategy Session.

The only insider buy on today's Hot List is a Form 4 filing by the CEO of Solo Brands $DTC, who reported a purchase of roughly $486,200.

In the options market, there was bullish options activity in the social media platform Pinterest Inc $PINS and in the retail pharmacy operator Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.