From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos
The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a series of Form 4 filings by Gilead Sciences.
The American biopharmaceutical company revealed a purchase of roughly $320 million in Arcus Biosciences Inc $RCUS, increasing its ownership stake to 40%.
Let me remind everyone what a bad idea it is to sell naked calls.
We don't do it.
I often want to do it.
Many times, it makes sense to do it.
But the answer is always no.
It's just not worth it.
Go ask around. The old timers will tell you.
"Don't do it kid"
But that doesn't mean that as a philosophy, we shouldn't approach the market with that sort of "naked call selling" mentality, at least for the foreseeable future.
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.
So Santa was a no-show this season. The Nasdaq 100, the S&P 500, and Papa Dow are still managing to post positive monthly returns heading into January’s close.
That's an auspicious data point for the rest of the year.
Beneath the surface, last quarter’s laggards are also playing catch up to the leadership groups…
This is a bonus, second trade idea for today that came out of our internal conference call this morning and dovetails nicely with this note that JC just published.
We're getting short Lululemon, $LULU due to what appears to be a failed breakout:
It doesn't happen very often that a bearish setup presents an opportunity for us to position with a simple long puts purchase. Usually, when we want to buy puts, the whole world is on to the idea and the premiums in the options market reflect that.
But today, we've got a situation where a stock is flirting with breaking a key support level, and the options market is pricing in a smaller move than our research suggests is possible.
