From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Bullish setups are hard to come by these days.

While this makes things more challenging in terms of finding opportunities, it also makes those opportunities stand out that much more.

If you’re showing relative strength in the current market environment, we’re sitting up and paying attention.

One of these rare leaders popped up in our Inside Scoop scan this week. Let’s talk about it.

This is the video recording of our July 2nd Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

Today's most significant insider transaction report is another Form 4 filing by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.A.

Buffet continues to build his position in Occidental Petroleum $OXY, as he disclosed an additional purchase of roughly $582 million.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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 the stock is about to move in their...

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 Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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 which you can check out here.

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:

And here’s how we arrived at it:

• We filtered out any stocks that are below their May 10, 2021, high, which is when new 52-week highs peaked for...

This is the video recording of our July 1, 2022, Inside Scoop Weekly Strategy Session.

As the sleepy summer season carries on, so do the short Hot Lists.

Director Timothy J. Wilmott revealed an acquisition worth $1.2 million in Darden Restaurants $DRI.

Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors filed a 13D revealing an ownership stake of 22.3% in Telesat Corporation $TSAT.

China is an emerging market right? But is it?

While it's the biggest component of the Emerging Markets Index $EEM, is it something larger, maybe more developed?

It doesn't really have a category.

It's like Notre Dame Football.

It’s another brief Hot List today.

Neil Gagnon, the CEO of Gagnon Advisors LLC, revealed a purchase of approximately 43,200 shares in the small-cap software company SecureWorks Corp $SCWX.

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 the Hall of Famers, the 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'll...

You can pretend the bond market doesn't matter all you want.

But I'm here to tell you that this $115 Trillion + market that we call "bonds" is what's moving things around here.

It starts with credit.

If there is stress in credit, then you're going to see the implications across markets.