The broadest measure of European equities just hit new 52-week highs last week.
As you can see here, Europe went nowhere for 20 years, mostly due to its lack of exposure to high growth stocks like the United States.
And now that those growth stocks have been out of favor, and it's the more Industrial and cyclical stocks leading the way this bull market, Europe is the global leader once again.
It's the U.S. that's the laggard.
Here's the Euro STOXX 600 hitting new 52-week highs and coming out of a multi-decade base:
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...