From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos
Today’s Hot Corner is a short one.
The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by David Naemura, CFO of Neogen Corporation $NEOG.
Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
by David
From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos
Today’s Hot Corner is a short one.
The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by David Naemura, CFO of Neogen Corporation $NEOG.
by David
This is the video recording of the October 11, 2023, Hot Corner Insider Weekly Strategy Session.
From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.
As many of you know, something we’ve been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach.
It’s really been working for us!
One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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 Retail, Solar, etc.
Then, like any good technician, we filter the list down to those closest to new highs.
This allows the cream of these strong groups to rise to the top and helps streamline our mission to identify technical breakouts in the top-performing stocks.
by David
From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos
The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Cormorant Asset Management.
The hedge fund reported a $3.5 million purchase of MoonLake Immunotherapeutics $MLTX stock, increasing its ownership stake to 15.20%.
From the Desk of Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts
As the market has been sending mixed signals since July, we’re seeking information from our risk appetite indicators to try to gauge the next move.
One of our favorite ways to measure risk appetite is to compare the consumer discretionary sector with consumer staples. This tells us whether market participants are positioning themselves defensively, or embracing risk.
Discretionary stocks include automobiles, retailers, and homebuilders, among other things. Theoretically, we’re talking about products and services consumers buy with their discretionary incomes.
Meanwhile, staples are what “consumers” will buy regardless of how bad economic conditions get… things like food, toothpaste, cigarettes, etc.
When this ratio points higher, it illustrates a healthy degree of risk-seeking behavior among investors. Alternatively, when it points downwards, it speaks to a defensive tone and typically occurs during bear markets.
by David
From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos
With investors and executives scrambling to figure out what the geopolitical events of the weekend mean for their portfolios and companies, all was silent on the insider filings front.
There were no Form 4s, Form 13s, or political reports that meet our materiality threshold.
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.
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.