From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended February 16, 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.

There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Gold’s beginning to attract some attention.

Not because it was shooting higher but because it kept trading while most respectable markets closed in observance of Presidents Day.

US stocks, grains, and other god-fearing commodities did not trade. So investors needed something to talk about other than Bitcoin. 

But as gold stole the headlines, no one was talking about platinum.

I like that platinum isn’t attracting too many eyeballs right now.

Here’s why…

These are the registration details for our LIVE Mid-month Conference Call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

Our Live Call will be held on Friday February 23rd @ 3PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Friday afternoon:

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.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Naming a newborn is tough.

Who is this tiny person? And who will they aspire to be?

These are impossible questions to answer.

As you can imagine, the wifey and I were stumped upon meeting our baby girl earlier this week. 

Every time I looked into her eyes, I could hear her plead, “Give me a name, boy!” A situation ten-year-old Ian never fathomed – even while watching The NeverEnding Story. 

After a few days of deliberation, hours of snuggles, and the casual piercing gaze, I could only discern one thing: she smelled good. 

So I offered up “Coco.” 

It was on our shortlist. Plus, will we ever forget this year’s epic rally in cocoa futures? I certainly won’t.

Well, we ultimately landed on Cora, which suits her in some indescribable way.

But if I hadn’t cut technology this week so I could focus on my girls, I might have thrown "Cotton" into the ring.

I mean – it’s the “fabric of our lives!”

Volatility continues to pick up. We're seeing bigger prices swings for stocks, in BOTH directions.

But of all the things I'm seeing out there, this former darling, and market bellwether absolutely has my attention.

On Thursday, Apple went out a yet another new low relative to the rest of the market. Here's what Apple looks like vs QQQ:

This is a completed top and potentially disastrous break.

The next chart below is what Apple looks like vs the S&P500 and the absolute price laid over it.

$AAPL stock has been falling all year, despite what some of the indexes have done during this period.

It's not just the declining new highs list that we've seen the past 2 months, the next question is do we see an expansion in new lows?

We discussed that already yesterday.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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 @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 Ian Culley @IanCulley

"Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop."

Bloomberg Businessweek plastered that message across its cover in October 2022 – a blaring yellow dollar sign front and center.

Those days are far behind us. The US dollar is trading well below its 2022 peak, and the mainstream media is expressing little concern about its rise.

Yet a series of fresh $DXY highs are causing many investors to fret.

I don’t blame them.

Check out the US Dollar Index completing a three-month bullish reversal:

The DXY has risen more than 4% so far this year and shows no signs of slowing. I can easily see it running back to 107. 

But it's also approaching a logical level to slam on the brakes. Or – heaven forbid – it could reverse course.

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 Ian Culley @IanCulley

I’m fed up with precious metals. 

I’m tired of all the failed breakouts and the sideways chop.

So, please, spare me the silver-surfer stories about undervalued silver or how it will outperform gold 16-to-1 during the next bull run. 

I’m tired of it – all of it!

But the diehard gold bugs continue to rally the troops – and maybe they’re on to something.

After all, gold is trading less than a hundred bucks from its all-time high. Is there still a chance for a clean breakout soon?

Let’s take a cold, hard look…