Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended January 3, 2025. 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.
There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.
Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.
Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or simply our proprietary lists of trending tickers, there’s...
Whenever you hear them say the word "Tariffs", you call your broker, or open your brokerage account, and you buy more stocks, particularly the Chinese ones.
And who is "they" exactly?
You know who "they" is. Mostly the noisemakers. People who produce tv shows about "trading", or write "news" articles about financial markets. Permabears looking for their next excuse to make poor decisions...
You know, they!
"They" are the ones we want to fade.
"We" are the ones who we want to make money.
And so every time they tell you the stock market is going to fall because of something they call "Tariffs", we just buy more stocks betting that stocks will rise in price (because or despite these so called, "Tariffs").
So far this is working. China doubled the returns of the Nasdaq100 in January, with the $FXI returning 4.7% last month. Meanwhile, the Chinese Internet ETF $KWEB rallied almost 7% for January.
As a reminder, we are in the midst of a bullish momentum thrust regime for Chinese stocks, so this shouldn't be surprising.
Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.
We've also sprinkled in some of the largest ADRs from countries that did not make the market cap cut.
These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.
It's got all the big names and more–but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.
The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.
We take the largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.
Based on the market environment, we can also flip the scan on its head and filter for weakness.
Let's dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.
Welcome to TheJunior International Hall of Famers.
With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.
This scan is composed of the next 100 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 100 and are thus covered by the International Hall of Famers universe.
Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original International Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.
Let’s dive right in and check out what these future big boys are up to.
This is our Junior International Hall of Famers list:
Click table to enlarge view
And here’s how we arrived at it…
We removed laggards which are down 5% or more relative to the ACWI Ex. U.S. Index $ACWX over the trailing...
We're in New York City for the Portfolio Accelerator this week, which has been tremendous.
This morning, we led a discussion about metals, bonds, economic data, and much more. Paul Ciena, the chief technical strategist at Bank of America, overlayed momentum with the unemployment rate (such a junky thing to do haha).
The technical analysis and conversations have been off the charts here.
We recorded an extra special episode of Gold Rush for you all LIVE from New York City.
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.
Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.
When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on Technology and Growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online...
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.
Nowadays, 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 new...