The regional banking panic that began last week has caused a drastic repricing of financial stocks.
As selling pressure accelerates for a variety of vulnerable banks, executives are coming out and buying shares in an effort to shore up the volatility and put a vote of confidence in their stock.
Buyers taking control of a market heading into the weekend exude confidence. That describes gold bulls last Friday as they drove prices higher into the close.
To no surprise, Gold kicked off the new week gapping higher and rallying more than 2.5%. We call this bullish follow-through.
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.
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.
Buyers taking control of a market heading into the weekend exude confidence. That describes gold bulls last Friday as they drove prices higher into the close.
To no surprise, Gold kicked off the new week gapping higher and rallying more than 2.5%. We call this bullish follow-through.
So what’s next for precious metals?
Most likely… More strength!
Check out the daily chart of Gold, highlighting last Friday’s candle in addition to that of the Friday, Nov. 4th session:
Historically they’re all usually just making a big deal about things that are not a big deal.
It's their job to make noise. And in some cases, it's not even their job, humans just like to overreact and make a lot of noise.
As investors, it's our job to ignore.
We don't care about their fed policies. We're not interested in arguing about wars. I don't care who the president is. And a "bank crisis" is laughable these days, compared to what I had a front row seat to back in 2008.
They make noise. We ignore. It's that simple.
Late last week when people were panicking, I was right here telling you we wanted to buy stocks.
Why?
Because in bull markets, it pays well to own stocks.
Besides, the Dollar was falling apart. So if stocks were about to collapse and this was 1929 all over again (lol btw), then the Dollar would be ripping.
It was not.
That was the signal. It still is.
If the US Dollar index is below 105, we want to be buying stocks very aggressively.
The most significant insider transaction on today’s list comes in a 13D from Carl Icahn reporting an increase in his Southwest Gas Holdings $SWX stake.
Icahn now owns 12.64% of outstanding shares, a significant change from the 9.8% he reported on October 26.
