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.
I understand that some people are lazy and don't like to count.
I get that.
Also, journalists are NOT in the business of telling you the truth. The truth is just a commodity at this point, and that's no longer a secret. Word's gotten out. So it's either gross sensationalism or false information to get you to consume their content.
And then, of course, you have your standard charlatans who need to cherry pick data and manipulate anchor points so that they don't look as foolish for missing this entire bull market.
So what ends up happening is that if you're told something enough times, and you haven't actually done the work, you start to believe it.
"It's only Tech stocks that are driving this market"
Sound familiar?
But for those of you who actually take the time to look, you know it obviously isn't true.
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.
We got stopped out of a Wells Fargo trade a couple of weeks ago, and it looks like that was the whipsaw it needed to shake weak hands out. And since I was shaken out, I consider myself among the weak hands squad. I'm ok with that.
But given what we've seen since we were stopped out, we're getting back in for another try. This time, with tighter risk management and a longer runway.