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.
We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.
What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.
And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think...
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended December 8, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation 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.
Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.
Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual...
Spotify is trading in the spot where we can get paid on follow-thru back toward all-time highs. But we don't necessarily need it to get all the way there for us to earn profits on today's trade.
From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos
The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Julie J. Durr, the co-trustee of the Ann S. Gerdin Revocable Trust, which owns 10 percent of Heartland Express $HTLD.
Durr reported the acquisition of 182,268 HTLD shares, equivalent to $2,501,143.
Whenever we want to gauge animal spirits in the precious metals space, we resort to our trusty intermarket ratios.
Two weeks ago in our Gold report, we covered the notable bounce we were witnessing in the Silver/Gold ratio, pointing to brewing risk appetite within this space. And this week, we outlined a bullish trade in the iShares Silver ETF off the back of this recent momentum.
But when we take this relationship one step further, we see a similar situation in the relationship between Silver and Gold mining stocks.
Here's a long-term weekly chart of this ratio:
Silver mining stocks are at their lowest levels since the inception of the fund relative to their less-volatile and lower beta Gold mining counterparts. This would be a very logical place to see a bounce in this ratio. Especially with momentum diverging on these most recent lows, if there were ever a place for Silver miners to see some relief on a relative basis, this would be it.
Credit spreads have tightened a good deal since October.
I can't help but think this is just more classic bull market behavior.
As the major US equity indices have been rallying into year end, we've seen confirmation out of a number of credit ratios we track to gauge risk appetite within fixed income markets. Specifically, the the iShares High Yield Corporate Bond ETF $HYG is trading at 52-week highs relative to the iShares 3-7yr Treasury Bond ETF $IEI.
This ratio ultimately gives us an inverted chart of credit spreads. Check it out:
Notice how both the S&P 500 and the HYG/IEI ratio are pressing back through their summer highs.
It's hard to have a bull market in equities if the bond market is positioning defensively. Think about it; the players in the market with the deepest pockets require an incredible amount of liquidity.
And they're not going to get that liquidity in small-cap stocks.
And most of the time, they're not even getting enough in large-caps.
Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.
We've also sprinkled in some of the largest ADRs from countries that did not make the market cap cut.
These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.
It's got all the big names and more–but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.
The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.
We take the largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.
Based on the market environment, we can also flip the scan on its head and filter for weakness.
Let's dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.
The bull market continues to last longer than most people have expected.
Some investors don't even realized that stocks have been in a bull market. They haven't bothered to look.
So while the glorified gossip columns are telling you that only 7 stocks are going up, we keep seeing broadening participation in stocks all over the world.
It's the exact opposite of weak breadth.
Look at the German DAX, for example, going out this week at a new all-time high: