We use sentiment to help put the behavior of the stock market into context.

When looking at markets, it's easy to see what stocks are doing. All you have to do is look.

But what are people thinking? That's what we want to know.

When everyone is bullish, it's hard for stocks to go up in price at the same rate. When everyone turns bearish, that's historically a great time to be putting money to work.

Coming into August, sentiment was running hot. The VIX was at 10, the put/call ratio was muted, newsletter writers were giving us some of their most bullish readings of all-time, and our sentiment composite was as complacent as it's ever been.

Boy did that change quickly.

We just saw the largest week over week spike in bears among individual investors since 2022, just as this bull market was getting started.

Look at that spike this week:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Stocks with high short interest are proving resilient, even in challenging market conditions, as the bears struggle to drive down even the most hated names.

With this in mind, it's time for another Freshly Squeezed report.

Here's our approach:

We find the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. Then, we monitor these names for signs of upward momentum. Once that momentum kicks in, we ride them higher as the bears get squeezed.

We got fresh short data on Friday, so let's dive in and talk about 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.

For this reason, we pair short-interest data with short-term momentum overlays, as this...

Despite any selling pressure in stocks over the past few weeks, the Nasdaq Inc continues to push to new 52-week highs, again.

This is a trend that has been in place.

The Capital Markets stocks, which are part of the Financials universe, continue to be leaders in this bull market.

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.

Nowadays, 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 new highs in order...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Have you heard about the rally in the bond market?

After a severe multi-year drawdown, bonds have carved out a massive basing pattern and are putting the finishing touches on a primary trend reversal.

More importantly, interest rate-sensitive stocks are following suit and rallying higher as rates come down.

The sector with the highest correlation to bonds, Real Estate, is also putting the finishing touches on a bearish-to-bullish reversal.

With the market under pressure in recent weeks, Real Estate's relative strength and resilience stands out in a big way.

This once left-for-dead group of stocks is now the sector leader over the trailing month and quarter.

The only responsible thing for us to do is dive beneath the surface and find the strongest individual names to use as vehicles to play this trend.

Before we do that, let's set the stage.

Here is a look at those multi-year bases in bonds and real estate. Notice how they look the same:

If these...

I love it when a group of people dislike a stock for reasons that have nothing to do with the stock itself.

In some cases it's because they don't like the CEO, or they don't like the politics of the players involved, or they think the stock is some kind of fraud.

In the case of Palantir, you're getting all 3 of these.

We love it when a stock hitting new 52-week highs makes people sad.

That built-in short-squeeze scenario is just added fuel to the fire to send stocks much higher, much faster.

Here is PLTR hitting new multi-year highs this week:

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 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 ServiceNow, Palantir, and MercadoLibre.

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.

Here’s this week’s list:

*Click table to enlarge view

We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month.

Then, we sort the...

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 this one, 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.

The bottom line is it is a bull market. We want as many vehicles and options to express...

BlackRock just filed for a "Nasdaq Top 30" Stocks" ETF.

That's the top

This is the company that runs the iShares ETFs.

NOW is when they want to launch a vehicle for investors to buy ONLY the top 30 Nasdaq stocks?

Now?

Where was this 10 years ago?

To me, this type of sentiment is just further evidence that Technology has peaked as a percentage of total market cap in the stock market.

This sort of top-heavy hype is confirming what price is already suggesting.

Look at Technology hitting new 10-month lows today relative to the S&P500:

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...

In order to have a bear market, or a correction of any kind, the prices of stocks need to fall.

That's just math.

But you know what hasn't happened? We really haven't seen the new lows list blowing up at all.

You would think that Monday would have seen a lot of new 52-week lows, considering the VIX practically tripled overnight, for the first time in the history of the stock market.

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 August 2, 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.

Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual...