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. 

Below is the 9th ASC Mastermind  Course. In this video, I discuss my process for finding the best small-caps. 

If you don't pay attention to small-caps, you should start. 

At All Star Charts, we look at small-caps for two reasons: they give us valuable information about the market, and they give us many trade ideas. 

Small-caps might have a reputation for underperforming large-caps at the index level (at least, for most of the last 15 years), but at the individual stock level, this is where the biggest winners are often found. After all, every large-cap stock was once a small-cap. 

The challenge in trading small-caps however, is that there's so many of them. So we've come up with a number of scans specifically designed to help us identify the small-caps in the best position to pop. Here's how we do it. 

Enjoy.

Several months ago, we discussed the blowout momentum readings for the junior gold and silver miners.

These momentum thrusts often initiate the beginning of significant trend reversals, not the end.

Since then, the price action has been lackluster. However, our technical analysis suggests that the bulls are on the cusp of stepping in and resuming the primary uptrend.

Let's delve into the charts and how we plan to profit from them.

Silver Miners $SIL are printing fresh 52-week highs relative to silver futures:

We're back this morning LIVE on Stock Market TV with The Best Morning Show in Finance. 

It's not just Technical Analysis all the time. It's actually quite the opposite. We have a lot of conversations with really smart people about all kinds of topics.

Today's guest is my pal Steve Reitmeister, who brings 40 years of experience, including being Editor-in-Chief at Zacks.com and CEO of Stocknews.com. 

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended December 6, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation with The Minor Leaguers.

What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names.

Speculative technology stocks have been mooning in recent weeks. Many of these stocks have rallied over 100% in the last month alone. 

Today, we're outlining a technology stock that rallied 700% in half a year after pivoting from blockchain infrastructure to high-performance computing. In other words, they pivoted from crypto to AI.

After consolidating for over a year, the stock put the finishing touches on a textbook basing pattern last week and is beginning a fresh leg higher.

But it's not just the chart that has us excited... the short sellers have gotten way too greedy, and we're going to exploit their weakness.

Let's get into the details:

Quick Update:  

According to the National Retail Federation, 197 million Americans shopped over the 5 days from Thanksgiving weekend through Cyber Monday. There are only 216 million Americans over 15 years old in the country. Even allowing for double-counting, that’s a good turn-out for a fake holiday with unexceptional discounts. 

Who won?

Well according to our Retail and Consumer expert Jeff Macke,

"Abercrombie won the mall. Walmart won Discount. William Sonoma and Dick’s Sporting Goods have won Home and Sports so hard they’re running out of chains to compete with. Amazon is winning the world and barely seems to care about (or profit from) retail at all." 

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

The S&P500, Nasdaq100 and Global100 Index each made new all-time highs yesterday.

This is among many other stocks, sectors and indexes around the world that are also making new cycle highs. 

We've been buying stocks very aggressively, of course, because historically it pays much better to own stocks during bull markets vs doing the alternative.

We've gone back and done the work. It's just math. 

Those investors with too much cash, or too few stocks in their portfolios, have been paying the consequences.

The pushback I get, and have been getting over the past couple of years, tends to revolve around valuation and how stocks are "too expensive". 

I find that to be a hilarious reason to avoid buying stocks during a bull market.

Common excuses for fighting this powerful trend include, but are not limited to:

The New York Stock Exchange held its annual Tree Lighting Event this week. It was spectacular, as always.

But we're not here to talk about pine trees or LED lights. We're here to talk about commodities.

The NYSE has an array of vehicles to trade, most being equities.

They also have several commodity funds, which happen to offer asymmetric risk versus reward opportunities at current levels. Let's talk about them.

Our first setup is the Invesco DB Agriculture Fund $DBA:

Who Won Black Friday?

I was wondering myself. So I asked Retail and Consumer expert Jeff Macke to shoot over some results.

His answer?

"Abercrombie won the mall. Walmart won Discount. William Sonoma and Dick’s Sporting Goods have won Home and Sports so hard they’re running out of chains to compete with. Amazon is winning the world and barely seems to care about (or profit from) retail at all."

Man is he good. 

Look at this chart of Abercrombie breaking out of this multi-decade base to new all-time highs:

Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.

We've also sprinkled in some of the largest ADRs from countries that did not make the market cap cut. 

These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.

It's got all the big names and more–but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.

The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.

We take the largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Based on the market environment, we can also flip the scan on its head and filter for weakness.

Let's dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.

Here's this week's list: