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.
Microsoft $MSFT announced earnings last night, and while the stock gapped higher at the open, it has spent most of the morning giving back much of those gains.
It looks to me that the prior trading range for $MSFT is acting as a powerful magnet. And the broader market weakness sure is helping things along in that regard.
At the end of the day, the market is telling us that the latest earnings report hasn't really changed any minds of Microsoft bulls or bears, and therefore, we're likely to remain stuck in this range until some new information reveals itself:
We options traders can benefit from this scenario.
From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos
The most significant transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Randall J. Weisenburger, independent director of Carnival Corporation & plc $CCL.
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.
I'm making the bet here the Bond Bears may have overshot here. And today's trading action feels to me like $TLT put in an actionable level to lean against for risk management purposes.
This is not a bet that the final bottom is in for bonds. Only that odds favor a bounce that might have some legs.
With this caveat out of the way, here's how I'm going to play it.
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.
