As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. It's really been working for us!
One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn't just end there. We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
We held our February Monthly Strategy Session Tuesday night. Premium Members can access and re-watch it here.
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.
We debuted a new scan recently which goes by the name- All Star Momentum.
All Star Momentum is a brand new scan that guides us towards the very best stocks in the market. This time around, we have incorporated our stock universe of Nifty 500 as the base. Among the 500 stocks that we follow, this scan will pump out names that are most likely to outperform the market.
While we go through our lists of sectors and stocks on a weekly basis, we thought of launching a product that would highlight the strongest performers in our universe. These are the ones that are primed for an explosive move.
Just like The Outperformers scan, this is a list of stocks belonging to the sectors that display relative strength in the market at any given point in time. Since sector rotation is the lifeblood of a bull market, we will be ahead of the curve before the gears keep shifting.
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.
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.
We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…
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.
In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.
Testing Former Resistance
We've been pounding the table on the importance of defending the 2018 highs for a long time. These levels represent when risk assets peaked four years ago. The chart below shows the Value Line Geometric Index pulling back to its 2018 highs. This index measures the median stock performance and is an excellent way to view how the overall market is doing. Right now, it’s telling us that the average stock has endured significant damage and has erased almost all of the progress from recent years. Bulls really want to see these 2018 highs hold. If they do, the bias is still higher and the structural trend is intact. But if this level is breached, it will be a major bearish development for the broader market and risk assets in general.