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.
Welcome to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended October 28, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with our 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.
Today was a nice consolidation day, with the indices just chopping around. If the indices can continue to trade sideways, we can hopefully work off overbought levels.
I'd like $SPX 3,835 to hold if this market wants to trend higher.
People would even complain that it was only 5 stocks driving market returns.
Do you remember how hilarious that was?
Good, because it's so much funnier now.
Get this, those same people complaining that only 5 stocks were driving the market higher are now complaining that those 5 stocks aren't participating.
Market returns are currently being driven by all the other stocks. Those 5 big massive ones are doing their very best to hold the market down, but it's not working.
Investors are buying stocks, whether you like it or not. And they're buying the smaller ones at a much faster rate than their larger-cap counterparts.
Look at the Small-cap Russell2000 hitting new Year-to-Date highs vs the Large-cap S&P500.
And of course Small-caps are also hitting new 16-month highs relative to the Nasdaq100:
I'm glad to hear how well you guys are doing in this environment.
But keep in mind that not everyone looks at the market the way you and I do.
Some people out there think the Dow Jones Industrial Average is beneath them.
Some people like to pretend to be smart and wait for computers to tell them if stocks are going up, instead of just counting.
Price weighted indexes don't seem to be good enough for some of their boujee lifestyles.
Fortunately, for us simpletons who are only here to make money, we see the Dow Jones Industrial Average rallying for a 4th consecutive week, finishing up the greatest October of all time.