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 Trade Exchange. 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.

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.

This is the video recording of our November 7th Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market started off strong and finished even stronger.

We saw a  midday lull, but that was bought up!  The $SPY broke above its 50-day moving average at roughly 379.

If you read the subject line and didn't immediately know that this post was about energy stocks, then you probably watch too much television.

FANG has always been a Texas-based Oil & Gas E&P stock.

It has nothing to do with mega-cap growth.

It's quite obvious that many investors bought the wrong FANG.

And I say good. That makes this unwind we've been witnessing that much more explosive.

The more people getting smoked in Tech and other growth, the better it is for the rest of us who aren't stuck in that garbage.

My suggestion is to ignore the gossip columnists and focus some more on the only thing that actually pays anyone: Price

Here's Diamondback Energy $FANG breaking out this week to new all-time highs:

The largest insider transaction on today’s list was reported in a Form 4 filing by Vertiv Holdings $VTR Director Joseph Deangelo.

Deangelo disclosed a purchase of VTR worth roughly $1 million.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We've seen a big gap up in the futures this morning, and we're right at resistance at $SPX 3,800. The next level above is 3,804 to 3,811.

$SPY resistance is at 379.60. Support is at 376.35, then 374.20.

The only way anyone gets paid around here is to sell things at higher prices than where we buy them.

And not necessarily in that order.

Do you have a better way?

I've been doing this for 20 years and I have never seen any other way to profit.

You might enjoy pretending to know "why" a stock or group of stocks may be moving. But the market doesn't pay you to pretend to know why.

The market only pays us when we sell things at higher prices than where we buy them.

And this is all so funny to me, because I constantly see so many people focusing all their attention on everything BUT price.

That never made any sense to me.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

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. Click here to check out the International Hall of Famers.

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:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

With slow but steady improvement in breadth over the past few weeks, we have more and more stocks rising to the top of our scans and making new highs.

Due to continued weakness from the largest stocks, the indexes are masking a lot of this internal strength. But that's OK; we don't have to trade the indexes or any of those issues!

We're finally re-entering an environment where we have plenty of options on the long side.

Here are some new favorites from our Inside Scoop universe...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We saw a lot of movement in the indices today.

The $SPX hit resistance near the 50-day moving average around 3,800 and reversed lower but then rallied into the close. 

The most significant insider transaction on today's list comes in a 13D from Carl Icahn.

Icahn reported a new position in the mid-cap packaging and container stock, Crown Holdings $CCK.