Who is this tiny person? And who will they aspire to be?
These are impossible questions to answer.
As you can imagine, the wifey and I were stumped upon meeting our baby girl earlier this week.
Every time I looked into her eyes, I could hear her plead, “Give me a name, boy!” A situation ten-year-old Ian never fathomed – even while watching The NeverEnding Story.
After a few days of deliberation, hours of snuggles, and the casual piercing gaze, I could only discern one thing: she smelled good.
So I offered up “Coco.”
It was on our shortlist. Plus, will we ever forget this year’s epic rally in cocoa futures? I certainly won’t.
Well, we ultimately landed on Cora, which suits her in some indescribable way.
But if I hadn’t cut technology this week so I could focus on my girls, I might have thrown "Cotton" into the ring.
We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.
However, when it comes to our latest project, it couldn't be any simpler!
With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US stocks.
Welcome to The Junior Hall of Famers.
This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.
There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That's good enough for us.
One of the things we've been monitoring closely over the past month is the new lows list.
I see very often how people love to just subtract random numbers from each other, mostly for the sake of subtracting.
There's really no reason for it.
For example, lately I'm sure you've noticed some traders and analysts taking the new 52-week high list and then arbitrarily subtracting the number of new 52-week lows from it.
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.
The only real safe haven out there continues to be the US Dollar.
That's it.
When money flows into the Dollar, stocks are under pressure. You may not always see it at the index level, but you can certainly see it when you count and go one by one across the stock market.
The US Dollar bottomed on December 27th. That was also the day that the Advance-Decline line on the NYSE put in its top. It was also the day that the Russell2000 Small-cap Index peaked.
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 held our February Monthly Strategy Session last week. ASC Premium Members can click here to watch the replay and download the chartbook.
Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.
By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends.
This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.
With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.
Healthcare continues to lead to the upside. While we already have a bullish bet on a sector ETF, it's time for us to drill in a little deeper in search of more beta if this trend is going to continue.
Today's trade is in a name that has been performing great off its December lows and has also been in a longer-term bull market. But only just recently has it begun to outperform against the broader stock market.
