In bull markets we see more stocks making new highs than new lows.

I know that probably sounds like common sense, but you'd be surprised....

It's really just basic math. You need more stocks going up and making new highs, than stocks going down and making new lows.

And although we did see a couple of days of more new highs than new lows recently, we haven't seen that for a sustained period, yet.

In fact, we're going on 20 straight weeks of more new lows than new highs.

Energy is dominating the market sector conversation these days. And well, you can see a reflection of that in the stocks and the strength coming through.

Today we're here to discuss a long setup in the Energy space.

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.

The way we did this is simple…

To make the cut for our revised Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1B 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.

After our price and liquidity filters are applied, we sort by proximity to new highs in order to...

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

We held our April Monthly Strategy Session last week. Premium Members can click here to review the recording and download the chartbook.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends.

This is easily one of our most valuable exercises, as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

It didn’t even last a week!

The Elon and Twitter $TWTR team-up is over before it ever got started.

In a tweet last night, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced that Elon had rejected the company’s offer to join the board.

The two will not be working together for now, at least not in a friendly way.

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...

The largest insider transaction on today's list is a Form 4 filing by Durable Capital Partners LP.

After disclosing a purchase of roughly $25 million in Duolingo Inc $DUOL, the firm now owns 9% of the language-learning platform.

Are you noticing?

Energy stocks continue to push up against new highs.

The Integrated names, Oil Services, the Explorers & Producers.

They're all still at or near new 52-week highs.

The kicker? It's all happening with Crude Oil in the midst of a 26% drawdown:

We discussed this at length on Tuesday night (re-watch here).

Large-cap Healthcare.

And there's an element of defense to it as well. Let's not get it twisted:

You see how large-cap healthcare does when stocks are under pressure?

Pretty good huh?

Look at the size of some of these bases:

It’s been a wild few weeks of insider activity.

Today, we have another big splash, brought to us by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.A.

The investment conglomerate filed both a Form 3 and a Form 4 last night, revealing a brand new position worth roughly $4.2 billion in HP Inc $HPQ.