By the time the S&P500 hit its final low in October, there weren't many stocks at all left going down. Most of them had already been making higher lows and higher highs.
The thought process was that if these groups were above their late 2021-early 2022 highs, then any correction in stocks, whether through time or through price, would be just that - only a correction, but within the context of an ongoing bull market.
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.
[Note: We entered this trade on June 4th following the entry trigger. Details below]
On today's Flow Show, Steve Strazza brought the heat.
It appears Bitcoin is about to start another leg higher. It's showing all the signs: A tightening consolidation on the verge of an upside resolution. And with the 100,000 level on the watch list of every professional and amateur market speculator, it's hard to believe that the next bullish breakout does not include a run to and through this highly watched level.
Despite some messy action from the broader market in recent months, risk appetite remains elevated.
How do we know?
The stocks that investors are betting against the most are making big moves... to the upside.
And we know just what to do in these environments.
We look to our freshly squeezed universe and find the most heavily shorted stocks. We wait for momentum to come into these names, and we ride them higher while the shorts get squeezed.
We got new short data recently, so let's talk about how we're playing it.
Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions. When a stock is shorted, it means incremental buyers are waiting in the wings to close out their bearish bets.
We love this, as new buyers are the one true catalyst for higher prices.
When shorts are proven wrong, they become buyers of the stock. In many cases, this happens as momentum flows into these names and fuels massive short-covering rallies.
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.
While many precious and base metal stocks consolidate, let’s review the next group of mining names before they rip…
Check out the Junior Uranium Miners ETF $URNJ versus the Uranium Miners ETF $URNM:
Despite the significant overlap between these two ETFs, I view a breakout in the URNJ-to-URNM ratio as a clear risk-on signal (much like the relative strength displayed by junior gold miners).
No matter how you slice it, bonds are stuck in a downtrend.
Perhaps bonds are carving out a tradeable low. If so, we have our levels to trade against. But price is falling away from our entry orders, heading in the opposite direction.
You just can’t buy long-dated U.S. Treasuries right now…
Check out the U.S. T-Bond ETF $TLT:
TLT is trading beneath a downward-sloping long-term (forty-week) moving average and a yearlong downtrend line. Long-term averages and trendlines epitomize the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) approach to trend analysis because they work.