Today’s Hot Corner list is a short one.

EcoR1 Capital Fund filed a 13G for Apellis Pharmaceuticals Inc $APLS revealing an initial stake of 5.40%.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

All the indices have been on fire.

Earnings are coming up.

We'll see if the bar is low for them and they jump that hurdle or not.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Up and away we go, with new highs all around.

As the saying goes, we're overbought, but we can stay this way for some time.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The US Dollar Index’s $DXY break toward fresh lows resembles a defiant crawl more than an earnest march.

An image of dragging my children away from the toy aisle flashes across my mind.

(Actually, I let them walk around the store with their toy of choice. And then, we ditch the item before checkout after a couple rounds of negotiations. It works quite well – no screaming involved.) 

But while the DXY drags its feet, the individual currencies that comprise the index are picking up the pace. 

The Swiss franc is ripping. The euro is posting fresh 52-week highs. And the British pound is hitting our upside objective.

Our initial target for the pound marks a logical level of resistance.

But since the Dollar Index broke down less than a week ago, could the pound slice through this...

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

Today’s Hot Corner list is a short one.

Director John D. Harkey, Jr. revealed a purchase of 100,000 shares, equivalent to $852,000, in Lions Gate Entertainment Corp $LGF.B.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It's another new day, and maybe more new highs.

It's getting harder to find longs.

We do get opportunities, but it's more difficult with things stretched like this.

This is the video recording of the July 2023 Mid-month Conference Call.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The US dollar is approaching a slippery slope. 

And few markets embrace a falling dollar quite like precious metals.

Yet gold’s response to a weakening dollar so far has been subdued, perhaps due to elevated real yields.

But gold’s crazy cousin, silver, has enjoyed quite the boost…

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

And it doesn't have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to new highs in...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It was kind of a range-bound day, though some names had nice movement.

$IWM and $QQQ led the way.

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.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.

What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.

And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think...