Welcomeback to our “latest Under The Hood” column for the week ended April 16, 2021. As a reminder, this column will be published bi-weekly moving forward, and rotated on-and-off with our new Minor Leaguers column.
In this column, we 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.
It was a 10 hour chart marathon of 24 presentations being live streamed to thousands of people all over the globe.
And it actually worked!
To be clear, I had nothing to do with the Technology behind all that. This was all our incredible team along with the partnership with Stocktwits.
So hats off to everyone who helped get this done!
My job was easy. All I had to do was talk about charts with a bunch of old buddies. I can do that!. It was everything else involved that makes it more complicated. But they got it done.
This week we're looking at a long setup in the Consumer Goods sector. We covered this specific trade idea in January and post the achievement of the target, it seems like a good time to update the levels.
We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in mid-July to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.
This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @GrantHawkridge
Following an onslaught of bullish initiation readings for US stocks last year, global equity markets began to register similar breadth thrusts earlier this year.
In this post, we'll take a look at those thrusts in addition to the current state of international stock market internals.
We'll even take a quick look at some of the differences we're seeing take place beneath the surface in various global markets.
Public investors finally have opportunities to gain exposure to the exciting new Space Exploration industry.
We've seen a handful of new pure-play Space IPOs and SPACs hit the market this year. Most recently one of our favorite fund managers, ARK Invest joined the party and launched their own thematic Space ETF, $ARKX.
There's obviously a ton of hype surrounding this emerging theme right now. But is this industry, in its current form, worth investors' time?
There was plenty of positive economic data this week, but the bounce in residential construction activity really caught my eye. This tends to be a leading indicator for the economy overall. Housing starts were particularly strong in March, surging to their highest level since 2006. This probably isn’t too much of a surprise for those who have been watching Lumber build on last year’s gains and move to new all-time highs this week. Not that I was trying to do channel checks during my break last week, but I did notice plenty of trucks on the road headed North and loaded with lumber and logs as I drove through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama (though they are not yet to the point of traveling in convoys surrounded by a security detail).
I have fond memories of my very first cellular phone in 1995. I was still in college and had a "job" selling advertising for the local arts & entertainment newspaper in town. One of the perks of the job was having a cellphone so I could be reached at any time.
In 1995, having a flip phone (that barely fit in my pocket), was pretty cool. Or at least I thought I was...
I'm headed down this nostalgic lane thanks to today's trade idea.
Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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.
Last night I popped into BNN Bloomberg to talk about what's going on in the market.
We're seeing new highs across a lot of major indexes, but what's happening underneath the surface?
We've been seeing the price of lumber soaring along with things like Steel and Rebar futures. It's the whole demand/building/growth theme that continues to stand out.
One thing that's definitely worth watching is the All Country World Index Ex-U.S., which is basically a snapshot of what the rest of the world looks like. And you'll notice that the index ETF $ACWX is stuck right between its 2008 highs and 2018 highs.
This puts the global stock market in quite a predicament. If you're bullish equities, you're going to want to see a breakout through those historic 2008 highs. If you're bearish equities, this is one you want to see break back below those 2018 highs.
