We held our December Monthly Strategy Session last night. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.
Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.
By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.
With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.
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.
Today's trade has me thinking of this classic corny joke from Pulp Fiction:
One of the strongest sectors out there right now is banking. Particularly regional banks. And as we head into year-end, the catch-up trade is real and money managers chasing alpha are looking into some beaten-up names in the regional banks to get the juice they need to make their year.
This plays in favor of today's trade which has a yawning gap to fill which is likely to overshoot on the upside if a broader market melt-up is in the cards (narrator: we think it is).
Another $73 Billion came in last week, as investors decide they would rather sit in cash collecting an inflation-adjusted, after tax profit of around 1%.
Meanwhile, the Nasdaq is up 50% from the October lows last year. The S&P500 is up a humble 30%.
Technology stocks are up 60%.
Bitcoin is up 160% this year.
But investors are deciding to close their eyes to the current market trends and, for some reason, hoping it goes away.