From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
In recent weeks, we’ve been diving into individual commodity groups to size up the structural trend and to get a better idea of where we’re likely headed in the new year.
Last week, we highlighted energy contracts and the fact that many are still grappling with overhead supply. And earlier in the month we covered the worst-performing area of the commodity markets - precious metals.
Today, we’re going to turn our attention back to metals and review the base metals group.
Even with the S&P 500 printing record highs, trading ranges and overhead supply stole the show in 2021 and those dominant themes are evident when we look at base metals.
Notice the strong relationship between our equal-weight base metals index and blue-chip international equities in the Global Dow Index $DGT.
Here is a list of trade ideas organized by date, ticker symbol and directional bias. Please make sure you have clicked on the link and read the details surrounding the trade before acting upon any of them. Also, make sure you have checked with your financial advisor and tax accountants to make sure you are suitable to be executing what is discussed on this website. The risk management procedures and targets are detailed for each idea. Please read and review the terms and conditions page before making any trades of your own.
Yesterday, we wrote a post about scanning for new lows, putting our own spin on a strategy called "Wall Street's only free lunch."
I was joking with JC that it felt a bit uncomfortable to search through such a weak list of stocks. After all, we’re used to scanning for strength.
But the scan was a fun exercise, and we found some weakness we want to be buying in secular leaders.
The universe wasn’t exactly full of strong stocks, as we were scanning for new 52-week lows. But that’s OK; we have plenty others for that.
In this post, we’re going to walk through another scan we did internally this week. Unlike the "free lunch," this one is more in line with our top-down approach of finding the strongest stocks in the strongest groups.
While we're still scanning for new lows, we’re doing so on a much shorter time frame, and we're adding additional filters to ensure all the stocks on our list are leaders.
We like to tailor our scan parameters to the market environment. As such, we’re always changing it up...
Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 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 100 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 high, which is when new 52-week highs...
The Outperformers is our newest scan that pinpoints the very best stocks in the market. It’s the fastest, easiest way to find quality names that are primed for major moves.
The goal is that as the market rally progresses, the sector rotation within the market will reflect in this scan. So while our Top/Down Analysis helps us with the broader view of the market, this Bottom/Up scan makes sure that we catch the slightest change in sentiment.
Many of you are already familiar with this popular market adage as it is a commonly used quip in our industry.
All it really means is that you can't get something for nothing from the market.
Have you ever bought a high-yielding stock for the dividend and rode it into a big drawdown just for them to announce they're cutting the payout?
Did you listen to a friend about a biotech stock that was supposed to rip higher on positive FDA results... but it actually gapped lower?
How about following the analyst community into a stock that was a consensus buy... until it turned out not to be?
In all of these scenarios, the investor is simply looking for a free lunch. And 9 times out of 10, these situations don't work out. There are no easy investments or get-rich-quick tricks on wall street. At least not sustainable ones. You have to put in the work.
One rule that I live by for my own investing is this: "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is."
I've learned first-hand to run from investment opportunities that don't...
Right now it's hard to ignore how the bond market is impacting certain stocks, and which ones of those are already ahead of the game.
You see in December, we've seen credit spreads narrowing to levels not seen since the pandemic crash in 2020. The Yield curve has been steepening as well. And rates in general, particularly the 10yr and 30yr held their key levels and started moving higher.
To me, all of this screams higher for bank stocks. But it's not a one size fits all scenario. There are leaders.
And I can't help but point out Customers Bancorp. This $2B Regional Bank stock has continued to make new all-time highs, despite the industry under pressure over the past couple of months.
We’re buying an $MPC Feb/Apr 70 Call Calendar Spread for around a $1.10 debit. This means we’ll be short the February 70 calls and long an equal amount of April 70 calls for a net debit
Check out our short video with the thought process behind these trades: