From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff
The futures were wild last night after the Bank of Japan intervention and then steadily crawled their way back.
I’m watching 378 on $SPY. Should we break below that level, we could see 375.
Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
by David
From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff
The futures were wild last night after the Bank of Japan intervention and then steadily crawled their way back.
I’m watching 378 on $SPY. Should we break below that level, we could see 375.
by JC
All hell seems to be breaking loose at the BOJ.
I’m not going to pretend to know, or care. But I can tell you that Yen traders like it.
And investors in precious metals sure as hell love it.
These are good things to wake up to if you’re long gold and silver: [Read more…]
From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.
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 new highs in order to focus on the best players.
But, instead of all-time highs, we’re sorting by 52-week highs these days, as we don’t want to discriminate against energy or other cyclical stocks.
The goal is still to catch the strongest names while they’re small and have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climb the ranks to the big leagues, the returns could be huge.
We’re looking at up to 10x moves just to break into large-cap land!
Let’s dive into this week’s report and see what’s happening in some of the hottest stocks in the Minor Leagues.
From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts
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 direction and make them a pretty penny.
Then we flip through our list of stocks flashing unusual activity and pick the best setups using many of the same technical filters we do for our other scans.
And, just like that, we’ll follow the money flow and fatten our own pockets along with some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.
by David
From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff
We filled the gap down on the $SPX at 3,818 and the market continued lower.
$QQQ closed its respective gap as well.
The bottom line is that the bottom is in for these stocks. The evidence continues to build in the bulls’ favor.
~ @sstrazza
Starting off with fire! We’re not mincing words here.
But I’m not going to steal any of Strazza’s fire. Head here to read his piece on what’s going on with Chinese stocks. It sets the stage beautifully for today’s trade.
Caught up? Great, let’s get into it. [Read more…]
by David
From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff
Let’s see what this week brings.
If the $SPX can hold on to 3,800 roughly, there’s potential for a back-test up to 3,940 or so.
If not, then we head down to 3,744.
by JC
This market environment is not like others that came before it.
Remember people used to complain that only 5 stocks were driving the market?
Now they complain that those 5 stocks aren’t working.
But many others are.
And that’s the point.
With new environments comes new leadership. We’ve seen this happen over many decades.
And those 5 stocks that everyone used to complain were driving the market, have now been laggards for quite some time.
I think people just like to complain.
But if you’re like us, and would rather look for opportunities to profit instead of just bitching all the time, then it’s important to look underneath the surface.
A great way to visualize the broader leadership vs just a few names is in the equally-weighted chart of the S&P500. This eliminates those mega-caps from dominating the indexes.
Here’s how that looks compared to the market-cap weighted version: [Read more…]