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.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey...

In Bull Markets we see more stocks making new highs.

That's just math right?

And when we talk about new highs, you'll often hear people discussing the new 52-week high list.

Until recently, this list was almost non-existent.

So while there's definitely a ton of more action there, we should really be seeing an expansion in new 1-month highs and new 3-month highs.

Crawl before you walk.

If this stock market rally has legs, more new highs is just mathematically necessary for that to occur.

It's a market of stocks.

Here's the 3-month high list on the New York Stock Exchange. An expansion in upside participation will go a long way in proving that, yes, in fact the path of least resistance is higher:

It's hard not to notice the strength we've been seeing in the metals space lately. This surely is getting the Gold Bugs excited.

We wouldn't consider ourselves any kind of "bug," but it's fair to say we're biased toward charts that trend. If line goes up, we like to buy. If line goes down, we like to sell. Simple.

If we can get into an emerging trend early -- so much the better!

"Poor man's gold" (as JC called it), might just be starting a big relative outperformance trend that could spell a big opportunity for us.

Don't listen to people who claim to know the future.

They're all full of shit.

Technical analysis isn't a mystical prediction machine. This is nothing but a simple, repeatable, and foolproof process for managing risk.

Whenever we're looking to buy a stock, a cryptocurrency, or any other publicly traded asset, we always prioritize where we're wrong rather than how much money we could make.

If you haven't learned by now that risk management is paramount when managing money, you're beyond saving at this point.

For us, most trades are rather simple.

Contrary to popular belief, I don't know what the market is going to do next.

I have no way of possibly knowing if the S&P500 is going to double from here or if it's going to get cut in half. Gold can go to $5000/oz or $5/oz. Crude Oil can go to $250/barrel or $2. I just don't know.

We all have our 'opinions', sure. I mean, how can we not? We're humans right?

But we're making decisions with unknown information.

It's the weekly currency edition of What the FICC?

Today we're highlighting three critical levels with huge implications for the US dollar.

Check it out!

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The US dollar Index $DXY is running into support at a shelf of former highs. 

How it reacts will influence how stocks fare heading into the year-end.

Let’s check out three charts and three levels to monitor.

Focusing our attention on buying stocks over the past 5-6 months has paid very well. This is especially true in the stocks that have been showing the most relative strength this year.

The laggards remain laggards. The losers are mostly still losers.

The breadth improvement, however, remains in place.

Rotation overseas continues to broaden.

It's gotten harder and harder to make money from the short side since this Summer.

This is the video recording of our December 5th Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

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.

And it doesn't have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to...

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.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.

What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.

And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think...

Let me ask you this: In bear markets does it historically get easier and easier to find stocks making new all-time highs?

Where I grew up, new all-time highs, yet alone more and more of them every day, are not something that we normally see in bear markets.

And here we are. I can't remember the last time it was this easy to find stocks breaking out to new highs. And not just new 3-month highs or even 52-week highs.

Stocks are breaking out to new ALL-TIME Highs.

And not just in one or two sectors.

We're seeing it in Financials, Industrials, Technology, Energy, Healthcare, Staples, Telecom and more.