Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended September 30, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with The Minor Leaguers.
What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.
We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names.
There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.
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.
Depending on who you ask, people might agree that consumers are feeling the pinch of inflation. The sentiment that I encounter on a nearly daily basis is: "I can't believe how much _____ costs now. It's insane!"
If we look at a daily chart of the consumer discretionary stocks ETF $XLY, we might draw a conclusion that consumers are beginning to feel tapped out, as the upward momentum in early 2023 seems to have run out of steam.
With elevated options premiums in $XLY, this sets up a nice options premium collection play.
Coming into July, the Nasdaq 100 had already achieved record-setting returns through the first six months of the year. Over the past quarter, however, the trend has cooled off as stocks have struggled with overhead supply.
The same could be said for the relative trend as growth stocks have paused their advance versus the overall market.
The chart below shows the Nasdaq 100 versus Russell 3000 ratio coiling beneath a critical level of interest.
