This is the video recording of the October 11, 2023, Hot Corner Insider Weekly Strategy Session.

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Cormorant Asset Management.

The hedge fund reported a $3.5 million purchase of MoonLake Immunotherapeutics $MLTX stock, increasing its ownership stake to 15.20%.

From the Desk of Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

As the market has been sending mixed signals since July, we’re seeking information from our risk appetite indicators to try to gauge the next move.

One of our favorite ways to measure risk appetite is to compare the consumer discretionary sector with consumer staples. This tells us whether market participants are positioning themselves defensively, or embracing risk. 

Discretionary stocks include automobiles, retailers, and homebuilders, among other things. Theoretically, we’re talking about products and services consumers buy with their discretionary incomes. 

Meanwhile, staples are what "consumers" will buy regardless of how bad economic conditions get… things like food, toothpaste, cigarettes, etc.

When this ratio points higher, it illustrates a healthy degree of risk-seeking behavior among investors. Alternatively, when it points downwards, it speaks to a defensive tone and typically occurs during bear markets.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

With investors and executives scrambling to figure out what the geopolitical events of the weekend mean for their portfolios and companies, all was silent on the insider filings front. 

There were no Form 4s, Form 13s, or political reports that meet our materiality threshold. 

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Broadwood Partners.

The hedge fund reported a purchase of $7.7 million in STAAR Surgical Company $STAA.

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. 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:

*Click table to enlarge view

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.

However, when it comes to our latest project, it couldn't be any simpler!

With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US stocks.

Welcome to The Junior Hall of Famers.

This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That's good enough for us.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by J. Alexander Douglas Jr,, the CEO of Overstock.com Inc $OSTK.

Douglas revealed the acquisition of 11,265 OSTK shares, equivalent to $498,306.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Magnolia Capital Fund.

The investment firm revealed the acquisition of 215,565 shares of RE/MAX Holdings $RMAX, equivalent to $2.6 million.