In this scan, we look to identify 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 behemoths they are today.
When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on Technology and Growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online...
I don't know about you guys, but it seems like every trader I know now trades options these days. And more and more newbies in the markets are skipping trading stocks altogether and jumping right into the options ring. One look at the continuing explosion of options volumes on the main exchanges backs this up.
It wasn't always this way.
For much of my early career, options trading was the "complicated" backwater of investing, reserved mostly for investors selling covered calls on their long-term holdings to derive some extra income in their portfolios.
Everyone’s an Options Trader Now—In Markets and in Life
Options trading has exploded in popularity. It seems like everyone, from Wall Street veterans to TikTok influencers, is placing bets on calls and puts. But this obsession with optionality isn’t just happening in the markets—it’s everywhere. Across industries and careers, people are structuring their decisions like options traders, seeking asymmetric rewards, hedging risks, and keeping multiple paths open.
This phenomenon raises an interesting question: Are people trading more options because they think like traders, or are...
I've got some good news, some not so good news, and some outright bad news.
Let's dive in.
First of all, these are all concepts that were discussed at length on our LIVE Monthly Charts Strategy Session last week, so check out the full video here.
As an update, here's the most bullish thing happening in stocks right now. Both Germany and Hong Kong closed the week at new highs. These are new 3-year highs for the Hang Seng and new all-time highs for the DAX:
If there was some sort of Global Crisis or Credit Event of any kind, my bet is NOT that these two major indexes would be breaking out to new highs.
These are not safe havens where investors can hide out and wait for the storm to pass. It's quite the opposite actually.
So strength out of these areas above points to bullish and healthy...
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, 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...
Today's trade is in a therapeutics name that continues to press into new highs in spite of all the bearishness that the broader stock indexes are suggesting.
And if you look at the implied volatlity in the options, it seems that traders are skeptical that the trend can continue.