Dividend Aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street.
These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to long-term-minded shareholders.
As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.
Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That's why we've turned our attention to the future aristocrats.
In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we curate a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for five to nine years.
We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are "stocks that pay you to make money."
Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.
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.
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.
This market environment is not like others that came before it.
Remember people used to complain that only 5 stocks were driving the market?
Now they complain that those 5 stocks aren't working.
But many others are.
And that's the point.
With new environments comes new leadership. We've seen this happen over many decades.
And those 5 stocks that everyone used to complain were driving the market, have now been laggards for quite some time.
I think people just like to complain.
But if you're like us, and would rather look for opportunities to profit instead of just bitching all the time, then it's important to look underneath the surface.
A great way to visualize the broader leadership vs just a few names is in the equally-weighted chart of the S&P500. This eliminates those mega-caps from dominating the indexes.
Here's how that looks compared to the market-cap weighted version:
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts
Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.
These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.
It has all the big names and more.
It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. You can click here to check it out.
The Hall of Famers is simple.
We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.
Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.
We all learn how to fall – the sooner, the better.
As adults, we forget this is one of the first skills we learn early in life. For better or worse, my one-year-old reminds me daily.
He’s amazing.
Yes, I’m one of those proud, doting fathers. But his coordination and acrobatics keep both of us out of the pediatric ER (and me, the doghouse). He pops right up whenever he hits the ground and keeps chasing his older brother.
Pure gold.
Since my mind is always lost in the charts, his agility and doggedness remind me of gold’s resilience during the past two years.
You often hear us refer to markets correcting through price or time. It’s an important concept that can reveal underlying strength.
The dual-pane chart of copper and gold futures presents both:
Equity markets around the globe are getting rocked as we close out another rough week.
And then there's China, which is green on the day.
This isn't just a one-day thing. In fact, it's quite the opposite. China has been showing impressive relative strength since bottoming in late October.
Today is just a microcosm of what that leadership has looked like.
It's had our attention for a while already, which is why we're about to discuss the structural outlook for Chinese stocks and outline some long ideas in the strongest names.
Here's the performance of a basket of international equity ETFs since markets bottomed and ripped higher on Oct. 13:
