From the Desk of Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

As equity markets continue to repair the damage from April’s correction, we continue to find more and more stocks -- and groups of stocks -- that we want to be buying.

A growing number of those groups are coming from the financial sector. 

Financials have made a comeback in the last week as a handful of financial indexes and individual issues are reclaiming their prior-cycle highs.

The relative trends are improving as well, with the large cap sector SPDR $XLF hitting new 52-week highs versus the S&P 500 recently.

When we think about the strongest stocks within financials, asset management and capital market stocks are top of mind.

In today’s post, we will dive in and outline some of our favorite charts in the space.

Before we do that, here’s the SPDR S&P Capital Markets ETF $KCE pressing against its former highs from 2021:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Cormorant Asset Management.

The hedge fund reported a purchase of roughly $10 million in EyePoint Pharmaceuticals $EYPT.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

As most of you know, we use 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.

This is the video recording of the May 8, 2024, Hot Corner Insider Weekly Strategy Session.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Aon plc $AON director Lester Knight.

Knight reported a purchase of $2.7 million worth of AON shares.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Sensata Technologies Holding plc $ST director John Mirshekari.

Mirshekari reported a purchase of ST shares with a total value of $10.6 million.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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 now, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Eli Samaha, founder and managing partner of Madison Avenue Partners LP.

Samaha and Madison Avenue reported a purchase of $13 million in Theravance Biopharma $TBPH.

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 Uber 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.

Here’s this week’s list:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Liam K. Griffin, chief executive officer and president of Skyworks Solutions $SWKS.

Griffin reported a total purchase of roughly $1 million in SWKS shares.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The biggest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Warren Buffett.

Buffett revealed an additional purchase of $7.9 million in The Liberty SiriusXM Group $LSXMK.

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.