The largest insider transaction on today's Hot List is a Form 4 filing by Ernest Garcia II, CEO and co-founder of Carvana $CVNA.

CVNA just raised an additional $1 billion via a private offering of perpetual preferred stock, and Garcia has taken a large allocation.

He remains CVNA’s largest shareholder by a wide margin.

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

Earlier in the month, we pointed out breadth deterioration in the US dollar.

While the dollar pressed to new highs against the yen, the pound, and the euro, it struggled to gain ground against commodity-centric and emerging market currencies.

The lack of broad strength had us questioning the validity of the recent rally in the US Dollar Index $DXY. 

That’s changed recently.

Today, the dollar index is catching to new highs against a backdrop of broadening strength, not weakness. Now that we’re seeing dollar internals flip and start to confirm these new highs from the index, this is not a trend we want to fight.

And, to be clear, we haven’t been. 

While we’ve been skeptical of the rally in the DXY, we’ve expressed a bullish view on the dollar via the major crosses. They’ve been the weakest links and main drivers of DXY strength.

...

It’s been just over three weeks since Elon Musk filed his original 13G and revealed an investment in Twitter $TWTR.

Now, it looks like he’s about to take control of the entire company.

Yesterday, it was announced that Twitter has accepted his $44 billion offer to take over the company and go private.

Here’s what else is happening in the world of insider activity…

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

The market has become increasingly volatile as selling pressure spreads to the strongest stocks.

As bullish opportunities become more scarce, we’ve had to become more selective in terms of our long exposure.

This is because we’re trend followers. We want to be involved in uptrends, and as more and more uptrends come under pressure, we have fewer options. It’s as simple as that.

But when it comes to corporate insiders and activists, they actually become more active when stocks are under pressure. They love buying weakness.

So while there are fewer opportunities for trend followers like us, there is a growing list of opportunities for bargain-hunters like them. 

As such, insiders have been very active in recent weeks as stocks continue to slide. But they don’t only buy downtrends. There has been some activity in names showing impressive relative strength as well.

Let’s talk about a handful of leading stocks that insiders have shown interest in recently.

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 stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny.

Then we flip through our list of stocks flashing...

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.

Selling Spreads

Speaking of leaders, even the strongest stocks have come under pressure in recent sessions. There was no good place to hide toward the end of last week as stocks were being sold indiscriminately. We saw the start of this on Thursday as the market leaders came under serious pressure. Friday, that volatility accelerated as investors shrugged off record earnings numbers and took profits across the board.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen money rotate into defensive groups or growth stocks in sessions where cyclical stocks have sold off. That wasn’t the case last week as the market was a sea of red.

The below chart shows one of the strongest industry groups - Agribusiness, as well as one of the weakest - Biotech. One in a strong uptrend and the other in an ugly downtrend. But, last week it made no difference as sellers were in control of both the leaders and the laggards. This is...

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.

• Our macro universe was lower on the week as 85% of our list was negative with a median return of -2.01%.
• The Volatility Index $VIX was this week's winner, closing with a 24.27% gain.
• The biggest loser was Silver $SI, with a weekly loss of -5.61%.
• There was a 6% drop in the percentage of assets on our list within 5% of their 52-week highs – currently at 17%.
• Only 9% of our macro list made fresh 4-week highs.
• ...

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.

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...

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.  

XME...

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:

And here’s how we arrived at it:

• Filter out any stocks that are below their May 10th, 2021 high, which is when new 52-week highs peaked for...

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%.