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 $1B 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.

The way we did this is simple…

To make the cut for our revised Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1B 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.

After our price and liquidity filters are applied, we sort by proximity to new highs in order...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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 the stock is about to move in...

These are the registration details for our Live Monthly Candlestick Strategy Session for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

This month’s Video Conference Call will be held on Tuesday April 5th @ 6PM 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 Tuesday evening:

It's easy to get lost in the weeds.

As humans, we're vulnerable to it.

So it's important to understand the way our minds work and set up gates that can bring us back home, to what's important.

In the case of trading and investing, being on the right side of the trend.

A great way to do that is by zooming out.

Here's Bitcoin, for example, going back to 2014.

Doesn't this give you a much different perspective compared to most Bitcoin charts you see?

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

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.

You can find the whole list of trades here.

Below you'll find the full PDF of this week's charts:

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Cyclical stocks are all the craze.

If you're doing well this year, it's because you own these stocks. If you're not, it's because you don't own these stocks.

Whether we're talking about energy, agricultural inputs, or industrial metals, these are the kinds of industry groups that are showing relative strength.

And, to be clear, this is nothing new. This theme has been in place for over a year now.

The only new development is that we're seeing upside momentum in these names pick up. As a result, the gap between these winners and the rest of the market has widened to historic levels.

The reason why many of these groups are working is simple. They make their money by selling various commodities, and the prices of those commodities continue to rise at an extraordinary pace.

As such, these "value stocks" are now growing their earnings and revenue at levels that make SAAS companies wish they were in the commodity business.

For much of my career, I've listened to investors clamor over...

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 which you can check out here.

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:

And here’s how we arrived at it:

• We filtered out any stocks that are below their May 10th 2021 high, which is when new 52-week highs peaked...

We do a lot of intermarket analysis here at Allstarcharts.

We include all asset classes and countries in our process.

How can we not?

I mean we have the time.

This is what we do.

And so, Australian dollar vs. Japanese yen has historically been a great indicator for me to measure risk appetite. That's not just in the currency markets but, more importantly, in stocks and commodities as well.

So, take a look at what Bitcoin has been doing when compared to aussie/yen, one of my favorite intermarket relationships...

For this week's trade, we're putting on a GrowGeneration $GRWG January 7.5/15 Bullish Risk Reversal for a small net credit.

This means we’ll be selling Jan 7.5-strike puts short and using those proceeds to purchase an equal amount of Jan 15 calls

Get the full details, risk management procedures and targets for this trade here:

The question keeps coming up.

As it should.

"JC, do you think this bounce in Growth has legs?"

And the answer is that yes, I think it could. There are some nice trades in these beat up growth areas that have set up very nicely.

We discussed a few of these once again on Monday night.

But I believe this one really depends on your time horizon.

Can Growth outperform for a bit? Sure.

But do I think it can do that throughout the rest of the year?

No I don't.

Here's the Large-cap Growth vs Value in black, as well as the Small-cap Growth vs Value in Blue:

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. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports. Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to the Short Report.

We'll publish this column...

This one has to be the Chart of the Day.

We're looking at the outperformance of Square vs Paypal.