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.

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...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

This market is not for the faint of heart. It'll whipsaw you around, so you must be diligent. Failing that, it's best not to trade.

Just because I'm taking a trade doesn't mean you have to. 

In bear markets you'll find that the majority of stocks are making lower lows and lower highs in price.

With basic arithmetic, we can call those downtrends.

Using that same math, in order for stocks to be in uptrends, they first need to stop making lower lows.

"They need to stop going down before they can start to go up", is how I learned it.

Going through my charts this weekend, I found this chart right here pretty interesting.

The last time Mid-caps, Small-caps and even Micro-caps made lower lows was almost 4 months ago:

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We have the Consumer Price Index data for September coming out on Thursday morning, and we have more Fed speakers this week as as well. Expect more tough talk about inflation.

Should the $SPY break down below 360.94, we can potentially head to the lows of 357.04.

I'm monitoring the $QQQ as well to see if it touches the lows at 267.01.

The most significant insider activity on today’s list is a 13G filed by Baker Bros Advisors LP.

The hedge fund revealed an increase in ownership from 7.7% to 10.9% in the small-cap biotechnology company Rhythm Pharmaceuticals $RYTM.

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.

Is it a bear market or a bull market, JC?

Are you bullish or bearish, JC?

These are the wrong questions to ask, in my opinion.

They're the ones I get most often, but I think it defeats the point of what we're trying to do here.

The question I find myself asking is whether we should be spending more of our time looking for stocks to buy, spending more of our time looking for stocks to sell, or should we be on vacation doing nothing in this market?

Those are 3 real options we have as investors.

For me, I think it's worth spending our time looking for stocks to buy.

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. You can 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. ...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Economic data came out this morning, which, in reality, wasn't bad. But the S&P 500 dropped 3% at its low.

As I mentioned this morning, to me the issue is oil up, bonds down posing the biggest risk to the overall market.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

That was a wild move yesterday. Almost everything reversed lower.

I'd like to think this is simply just a healthy consolidation before a potential move higher for the indices.

It’s another short one today.

However, we do have some founder activity in the recreational vehicle manufacturer Thor Industries $THO.

The way I learned it was that we want to buy stocks when the journalists put a chart on the cover of a magazine.

I like to pick on The Economist because they have such a great track record of being the last ones to the party.

Here's a good run down of a few favorites and part of the reason we got so cautious last Spring.

Fast forward to today: Can we classify this one as a chart? Does this count?