As many of you know, Steve Strazza and I are touring South East Asia this month. We're hitting the homestretch of our trip, with about a week or so left. We're currently in Hong Kong and this city is beyond description. I don't even know where to begin. It's a cliche to say "you have to see it to believe it." But it is 100% true in this case.
As you can imagine, it's been a bit of a logistical challenge to keep up with the U.S. markets when we are on the other side of the globe. U.S. trading hours in Hong Kong are 9:30 pm to 4:00 am. Lucky for us, many of the positions we have on have been performing well. We've been positioned for a continued bull market and we're definitely being rewarded over the past few weeks.
We're currently positioned long in stocks like $AAPL, $MARA, $KBH, $GXO, $CARR, $VRRM, $ABNB, $IONQ, $DKNG, and more.
I mention this because as I'm looking at candidates for new long trades that we like, I am frustrated that most report earnings over the next 1-2 weeks. And as you know, I don't like positioning when a stock is so close to reporting earnings. I don't like the binary risk.
We interrupt this raging bull market to update you on some historic positioning in the bond market that is sure to impact your portfolio, whether you like it or not.
Even if you don't trade bonds, this is really really important.
You see, I know it's easy to sit back and chill out with the S&P500 making new 52-week highs, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Dow Transportation Average making new 52-week highs and, of course, the Nasdaq100 making new 52-week highs after posting its best first half to a year EVER.
Market breadth continues to expand and sector rotation is frustrating the hell out of anyone trying to short this market.
The thing is, what even changed?
What happened that stocks have absolutely been ripping higher since last year?
Positioning.
It's not the economy that drives stocks. It certainly isn't fundamentals.
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 US Dollar Index’s $DXY break toward fresh lows resembles a defiant crawl more than an earnest march.
An image of dragging my children away from the toy aisle flashes across my mind.
(Actually, I let them walk around the store with their toy of choice. And then, we ditch the item before checkout after a couple rounds of negotiations. It works quite well – no screaming involved.)
But while the DXY drags its feet, the individual currencies that comprise the index are picking up the pace.
The Swiss franc is ripping. The euro is posting fresh 52-week highs. And the British pound is hitting our upside objective.
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.
It's hard for me to have a conversation about the stock market without bringing up what's happening in bonds.
Think about it like this, the market cap of all US Stocks is somewhere around $40 Trillion. For the bond market it's over $120 Trillion.
Volatility in bonds tends to trickle down to other asset classes, especially stocks.
US Stocks really got going in the 4th quarter last year, once the US 10-year Note stopped falling in price.
I don't believe that was a coincidence.
But at this point, Large Speculators have on their most aggressive short position in bonds ever.
So in other words, what is historically the "dumb money", particularly at turning points, are betting more aggressively than ever that bond prices are going to fall and rates will now continue higher:
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 which you can check out here.
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.
Crude oil is breaking to multi-month highs. Copper is approaching the 4-dollar level. And Silver is ripping!
I’ll have more on the precious metals front Monday with your weekly Gold Rush.
Today, I’m focusing on the grain and livestock markets. The dropping dollar has helped line up a long list of fresh trade ideas: potential failed breakouts, possible failed breakdowns, and critical levels to trade against…
