Investors are reaching for the riskiest stocks in the market.

How do we know?

A long list of stock market indexes and individual issues just had their best day since the pandemic lows almost 5 years ago.

Meme coins are mooning while we're asleep at night.

More and more stocks are completing primary trend reversals.

The most risk-on groups are leading the charge.

With this in mind, it's time for another Freshly Squeezed report.

Here's our approach:

We find the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. Then, we monitor these names for signs of upward momentum. Once that momentum kicks in, we ride them higher as the bears get squeezed.

We got fresh short data on Monday, so let's dive in and talk about it.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

In this scan, we look to identify 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.

The underperformance from Technology stocks continues.

And keep in mind that you've been seeing it in Large-caps for most of this year, but you've been seeing the underperformance from Small-cap Technology for over 18 months.

Small-cap Tech peaked in the summer of 2023 relative to the rest of the small-caps:

It's really been a disappointment for Technology investors.

Granted, there are Tech stocks working, but they are few and far between, compared to what we have seen in the past.

Look at the returns of these Technology ETFs relative to the performance in Bitcoin over the past month:

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 Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club.

We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

We're now well into Year 3 of this bull market. 

So the question becomes: Is this fresh breakout the beginning of the next leg higher for equities?

Or is this market behavior evidence of exhaustion and it's time to get out?

Let me remind you of the "Fab 5" charts from the beginning of 2024 that helped determine whether we were starting a new leg higher this year or if it was time to bail.

We recently discussed gold achieving its second target since it put the finishing touches on a massive base earlier this year.

It wasn't clear how the price would react to our target, but sure enough, the sellers showed up right on cue.

But the weight of the evidence continues to suggest this bull market has legs and it's better to spend our time looking for buying opportunities, not selling opportunities.

Let's talk about the recent price action and what it means for our portfolios:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended November 8, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation with 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.

With the Stock Market making new all-time highs every month, you would think that American consumers would be a little more optimistic.

You would think...

The S&P500 keeps hitting new all-time highs. Same for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq100.

More recently the S&P600 Small-caps, Dow Jones Transportation Average and Bitcoin all joined the New All-time highs list.

And yet...

Sentiment is still way down in the dumps.

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment data goes all the way back to the 1950s. So this isn't some kind of random johnny-come-lately poll.

There's real data here that reiterates how bull markets end with too much optimism, but thrive throughout periods with too much pessimism.

Bitcoin just broke out to new all-time highs. The new bull market in Crypto is alive and well.

BTC actually closed yesterday at the highest level in history, and now has a market cap of over $1.5 Trillion.

For perspective, there are only 5 companies in the S&P500 that are worth more that Bitcoin: Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon.

Every other stock is worth less than Bitcoin. As we say around here, Bitcoin is the 8th component of the "Magnificent 8".

But as we know from prior cycles, as well as Bitcoin performs, it doesn't even come close to the real winners.

Remember the last Crypto Bull Market? DogeCoin rallied 37,000% in a little over a year to reach an $85 Billion market-cap:

The goal this cycle is to catch moves like this.

And we're already seeing it.

Dog Wif Hat recently rallied 7000% in just 3 months to reach a market-cap of $4.5 Billion:

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.

The market has spoken.

It's only a bubble if it's going up and they don't own enough of it, or any at all.

They only call things bubbles when they have a hard time understanding why prices are doing what they're doing.

As someone who studies human behavior every single day, I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that 99.9% of people who call things bubbles haven't actually done any of the work required to determine whether something is in a bubble or not.

And that's the key thing here.

There is a huge arbitrage between the people who put in the work, and actually take the time to analyze markets using real data, and those who are too busy doing other things to truly have an honest opinion about whether a particular period of time is, in fact, a bubble.

Bubbles, as those of us with common sense know, are incredibly rare, by definition.

So when someone calls something a bubble, they are almost certainly wrong about that, or in most cases, just making it up because they don't know how else to describe certain market behaviors that they can't wrap their heads around.

Curious about how to handle bonds during an inflationary cycle? Wondering which asset classes tend to thrive—and which to avoid—when inflation’s on the rise?

We’ve invited Stephen Weitzel to break it all down. With the election, the Fed meeting, and a constant media buzz, it’s the perfect time to take a step back, focus on the big picture, and understand how the bond market might shape your portfolio.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Talking with Stephen is always a pleasure!