From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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.

We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…

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.

The way we did this is simple…

To make the cut for our new 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...

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

You can find the whole list of trades here.

Below you'll find the full PDF of this week's charts:

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Equities continue to get hit. And yesterday, commodity-related stocks were not immune to the selling pressure.

Energy, metals, and natural resources, in general, all sold off into the close. The inflation, interest rate, and commodity trade had a really rough week.

It's never a good thing when the leaders get hit like this. At the same time, two days really doesn’t make a trend.

Before we get sucked into calling peak inflation, let’s zoom out and put all this near-term volatility into the right context.

When we do, it reconnects our eye with the underlying trend – which is unequivocally higher. It also becomes clear that many of these stocks are finding resistance at logical levels – areas where we would expect these stocks to digest gains. 

And that’s exactly what they’re doing!

Let's take a look!

First up is a triple pane chart of the Metals & Mining ETF $XME, Copper Miners ETF $COPX, and the Steel ETF $SLX: 

This chart gives a great read on how base and industrial metal stocks are doing.  

XME...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that which you can check out here.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

And here’s how we arrived at it:

• Filter out any stocks that are below their May 10th, 2021 high, which is when new 52-week highs peaked for...

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

One of the refrains I heard coming into 2022 was that, given inflation, holding cash was an expensive proposition. It is true that over the past year, inflation has eaten away 8.5% of the real purchasing power of the dollar. But it has only taken the market 75 trading days this year to reduce the value of stocks and bonds by an even larger nominal amount. Surging inflation is prompting an aggressive policy response from the Fed, pushing bond yields higher and weighing stocks and bonds. Passive investors have seen their portfolios stumble to their worst start to a year in the past quarter century. There is a challenge brewing for the passive index-based investment approaches that have soared in popularity in recent years. Holding cash in inflationary environments does come with a cost, but it has the benefit of flexibility in the face of uncertainty. And the way it looks right now, holding stocks and bonds has been even more expensive.        

I've been talking recently about how coming out of the March expiration cycle, if feels to me that volatility (as tracked by $VIX) has changed regimes. During the first quarter of this year, buyers of vol dips were rewarded. But now it is my belief that sellers of vol spikes will be rewarded.

With that quick peek into my thinking as a backdrop, the price action in the broader stock market indices over the past few days has caused VIX to pop from 20 to north of 24 in short order and it feels to me that this might offer an advantageous opportunity for us to step in and sell some premium.

This is the video recording of our April 22, 2022, All Star Charts Crypto Weekly Strategy Session.

The largest insider buy on today's list is a Form 4 filing by Jan Barta of Pale Fire Capital.

Barta now owns 2,658,550 shares of Groupon $GRPN, which represents an ownership stake of approximately 9%.

Monday night we held our April Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.

Let’s get right into it!

This is the video recording of the April 21st Weekly Town Hall w/ Willie Delwiche.

04/21/22 2:00 PM ET

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

A couple weeks ago we pointed out that the stock market was questioning the rise in rates.

Defensive areas we would expect to underperform in the current environment such as utilities and REITs are actually outperforming.

And the names we would expect to do well – specifically banks – can’t seem to catch a bid on either absolute or relative terms.

This is concerning from a broader intermarket perspective. But it’s not the complete story.

While our stock market ratios are not supportive of higher rates, when we look within the bond market, we’re seeing the opposite.

Not only is there a synchronized global rally in interest rates, but the intermarket evidence from our bond market ratios supports this action and indicates a healthy degree of risk appetite. 

Today we're going to highlight one of those bond market ratios – high-yield vs. investment-grade debt.

Let’s take a look.

Here’s an overlay chart of the US 10-year yield and the junk versus investment-grade...