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.
The US Dollar Index $DXY is violating its year-to-date trendline.
Is this it? Will the dollar finally follow the breakdowns in crude oil and interest rates?
The forex markets say, “Not so fast…”
Following yesterday’s breakout, the British pound is slipping back into the box as the greenback digs in its heels:
Fading the failed GBP/USD breakout earlier this spring proved rewarding. If you’re feeling spicy, you can take another shot at a mean reversion toward 1.25 – but only if the pound is trading below 1.2750.
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 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 this one, 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.
Despite some messy action from the broader market in recent months, risk appetite remains elevated.
How do we know?
The stocks that investors are betting against the most are making big moves... to the upside.
And we know just what to do in these environments.
We look to our freshly squeezed universe and find the most heavily shorted stocks. We wait for momentum to come into these names, and we ride them higher while the shorts get squeezed.
We got new short data recently, so let's talk about how we're playing it.
Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions. When a stock is shorted, it means incremental buyers are waiting in the wings to close out their bearish bets.
We love this, as new buyers are the one true catalyst for higher prices.
When shorts are proven wrong, they become buyers of the stock. In many cases, this happens as momentum flows into these names and fuels massive short-covering rallies.
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. 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.
While many precious and base metal stocks consolidate, let’s review the next group of mining names before they rip…
Check out the Junior Uranium Miners ETF $URNJ versus the Uranium Miners ETF $URNM:
Despite the significant overlap between these two ETFs, I view a breakout in the URNJ-to-URNM ratio as a clear risk-on signal (much like the relative strength displayed by junior gold miners).
No matter how you slice it, bonds are stuck in a downtrend.
Perhaps bonds are carving out a tradeable low. If so, we have our levels to trade against. But price is falling away from our entry orders, heading in the opposite direction.
You just can’t buy long-dated U.S. Treasuries right now…
Check out the U.S. T-Bond ETF $TLT:
TLT is trading beneath a downward-sloping long-term (forty-week) moving average and a yearlong downtrend line. Long-term averages and trendlines epitomize the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) approach to trend analysis because they work.
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're turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we're curating 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.
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended May 10, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation with The Minor Leaguers.
What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.
We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names.
There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.
