From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff
The indices are lower this morning.
We have the release of the minutes from the most recent Fed meeting at 2:00 p.m. ET.
Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
by David
From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff
The indices are lower this morning.
We have the release of the minutes from the most recent Fed meeting at 2:00 p.m. ET.
by JC
More and more “things” keep making new highs.
This is the sort of thing that happens in bull markets.
You can see Ethereum and Bitcoin both finding support the past year near former resistance levels from the highs in its prior cycle at the end of 2017: [Read more…]
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 the stock is about to move in their direction and make them a pretty penny.
Then we flip through our list of stocks flashing unusual activity and pick the best setups using many of the same technical filters we do for our other scans.
And, just like that, we’ll follow the money flow and fatten our own pockets along with some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.
From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.
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.
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 highs in order to focus on the best players.
But, instead of all-time highs, we’re sorting by 52-week highs these days, as we don’t want to discriminate against energy or other cyclical stocks.
The goal is still to catch the strongest names while they’re small and have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climb the ranks to the big leagues, the returns could be huge.
We’re looking at up to 10x moves just to break into large-cap land!
Let’s dive into this week’s report and see what’s happening in some of the hottest stocks in the Minor Leagues.
by David
From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff
I pointed out in the Live Trading Room how the market might pop first thing in the morning then flatline.
It did just that.
by David
The most significant transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by White Mountains Insurance Group LTD, who revealed a purchase of $59.1 million in MediaAlpha Inc $MAX.
White Mountains increased its ownership stake in MAX to 37.50%.
by David
From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff
Happy Fourth of July!
After Friday’s big gap up, the market is kind of flat this morning.
by JC
As investors, the first step in deciding whether to buy something or not is to identify the direction in which price is heading.
So many investors out there choose to skip this step.
I never understood that.
We know for a fact that asset prices trend. We know. We all have the data. It’s just a fact.
So if we know that, then why wouldn’t we begin our process by identifying which direction price is heading?
“Should we buy this stock?”
Well, is it going up in price? Down? Or sideways?
Trend recognition is also really helpful in identifying the type of market environment we’re in.
“Are the majority of stocks going up? Down? Or sideways?”
At the end of every month we get a fresh batch of monthly data that goes a long way in helping us identify these trends.
On Friday we just got the highest monthly close for both the Nasdaq100 and S&P500 in over a year.
This is now the 3rd consecutive month that they do that: [Read more…]