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.
Look what we have here: a $VIX popping its head up to two-month highs.
Are investors getting a little spooked by the prospect of a tricky earnings season?
We'll be able to figure all that out after the fact. In the meantime, we will use these elevated options premiums to help us ride out some portfolio profitability.
I asked my analysts to find me a big cap name that is trading sloppy.
And the one they came with is a widely followed mega-cap name that has been flopping around in a sideways choppy range which, coupled with upcoming earnings, is helping to juice options premiums.
Here's everyone's favorite EV car maker Tesla $TSLA:
Many Small-caps have been leaders from the very beginning of this bull market.
Even through the first couple of weeks of 2024, which haven't been great, Small-cap Industrials are still up over 42% since the Summer '22 lows. Small-cap Consumer Discretionary is up over 37%.
Both of these have outperformed even the S&P500 during this period.
So maybe the "Russell2000" has underperformed. But that doesn't mean that "Small-caps" have underperformed.
It's on a case by case basis.
Here is a list of our Minor Leaguers, for example, which include the strongest stocks between $1 Billion - $4 Billion in market cap:
One of the areas I’ve identified where I can improve my trading is in trade selection. Specifically, my trade avoidance.
Due to my early trading experience as a stock trader, it was ingrained in me during my formative trading years to avoid positioning in stocks that are about to announce earnings.
And for good reason.
Once a stock trade is on, our only real defense against punishing losses is to have a stop-loss order working. That’s fine if you trust yourself to always honor your mental stops. But for most of us mere mortals, the good-til-canceled stop-loss order is our best protection.
99% of the time, a stop-loss order works as intended. Sure, we might suffer a little slippage here and there. But it works like a charm in preventing disaster. Especially for intraday trades.
But for overnight holds, a stop-loss order has its limits. And these limits are fully exposed in the event of a binary news release – most notably earnings announcements.
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 now, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
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.
