Yields on sovereign debt are chopping sideways across the globe.
The US, France, Germany, Spain, and UK benchmark rates are well below their respective 2023 peaks.
But in Japan, the JGB 10-year yield is hitting its highest level in over a decade.
Check out the Japan benchmark rate cruising above 100 basis points:
Earlier in the week, the Japan 10-year yield reached 1.10 for the first time since July 2011.
While the Bank of Canada, the Swiss National Bank, and the European Central Bank began cutting rates this year, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) may hike later this month.
You can blame it on a plummeting yen or the BoJ’s Yield Curve Control policies.
As most of you know, we use 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.
Last night was the big LIVE Event that I host at the beginning of every month.
There is no better way to start a new month, and in this case a new quarter, than going one by one and identifying the direction of primary trends for the world's most important stocks and assets.
Just for perspective, here are the S&P500 and Nasdaq100 Quarterly Candlesticks making new all-time highs, again.
As you can see, these are the types of things you tend to see in bull markets. You do NOT see them in bear markets.
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 now, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.
We saw some of the most bullish sentiment readings in years. And this sentiment came after a historic rally for equities throughout the 4th quarter last year that couldn't miss. Everything was working.
But things can't just go up forever. They need to rest eventually, and reset some of that excessive optimism.
That's exactly what happened.
Despite some of the growth indexes making new highs, a lot of the most important groups of stocks have done absolutely nothing since February.
Look at Consumer Discretionary, Financials, Industrials and Healthcare trading sideways to down this entire time:
