From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Risk assets are taking a hit.

The major equity indexes are seeing red. Crude oil is slipping below eighty bucks. And Gold is failing at new all-time highs.

Perhaps the markets are navigating the summertime blues – a tune base and industrial metal investors have been humming for months.

Here's this week's crypto roundup. It's an opportunity for us to take a step back, set aside the distractions, and delve into the key charts shaping the crypto complex.

Is it bearish when the largest component in the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaks out of a multi-year base to new all-time highs?

To be clear, we're talking about the world's most important stock market index here. And UnitedHealth represents over 8.5% of the entire Papa Dow.

Look at this chart. While people are telling you that the market is in a bubble, things are parabolic and this is unsustainable, the largest weighting of the most important stock market gauge hasn't even done anything for years.

Until now...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

As most of you know, we use 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.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market...

Counting is a lost art.

Humans love their short cuts.

Rather than taking the time to actually go one by one counting each of the stocks that are going up, down, or sideways, humans would rather skip that altogether in favor of their favorite Index or some kind of statistic.

 You don't need any sophisticated math skills in order to count how well or poorly the stock market is doing.

It's actually incredibly simple. 

Humans just don't want to do it.

And that's the arb.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

The stock market is in the middle of one of its fiercest multi-day rallies in recent history.

Since last week, there has been a notable expansion in breadth, with areas like small caps, regional banks, biotechs, and speculative growth joining the bull market party.

Long story short, investors are beginning to move out on the risk spectrum and embrace some of the riskiest stocks the market has to offer.

Another way to see this offensive positioning is by analyzing the performance of the stocks that investors are betting against the most.

Names with sky-high short interests continue to work in this environment.

As such, it's time to run it back with another Freshly Squeezed report.

Here's how we do things...

We find the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. We wait for momentum to come into these names. And then we ride them higher as the bears get squeezed.

We got new short data last week, so let's dive in and talk about it.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions.

When a stock...

I believe there to be a rather spectacular opportunity lining up in crypto markets. We've seen a decent portion of tokens give up their entire bull market gains and are now back to where they started.

If you're making the bet, as I am, that crypto and web 3.0 aren't going away anytime soon, I think this recent calamity in the price action of these tokens present a rather favorable opportunity.

I outline my thinking as well as twenty trade ideas I like to take advantage of this.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

The bull market is back! 

The major indexes are hitting new all-time highs, and so is gold. 

Small-caps are ripping. Crypto is ripping. And the most heavily shorted names on the street are squeezing higher.

I’d expect the US dollar to break down as stock market bulls rush to put their greenbacks to work. 

Instead, the US Dollar Index $DXY is holding steady. Dollar-yen is refusing to roll over.

And risk-on commodity currencies – the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand dollars – are failing to trigger buy signals.

Stock market bulls don’t seem to care about the lack of risk-on signals from global currencies. 

As long as that’s the case...

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.

Nowadays, to make the cut for our Minor Leaguers list now, 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...

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. No new positions today.
2. Rolled XLI position into September.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.

Let’s dig in!

Are you paying attention to the things happening around you?

More stocks are going up in price, not fewer.

Consolidations and rangebound markets are resolving higher, not lower.

New leadership groups are emerging, not the same old leaders being recycled.

Big bottoms are completing and bases are breaking out to the upside, not huge tops breaking down to the downside.

And all of this while the world's most important stock market index is breaking out of a 4-month base to new all-time highs:

This is the video recording of the July 2024 Mid-month Conference Call.