From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

Have you heard about the breakout in America's online marketplace?

Amazon is up 5% this week as it follows other mega-cap growth stocks to new record highs. Everyone is talking about it.

But there's more to this story.

Online retail is a burgeoning industry, offering investment opportunities in a variety of companies around the world.

These growth stocks provide some of the highest beta vehicles as they are direct plays on the consumer economy.

And Amazon doesn't dominate around the globe the way they do in America. There are other regional plays that offer investors exposure to higher growth markets outside the US.

With Amazon $AMZN making a decisive resolution to fresh all-time highs today, it is an opportune time to talk about the broader online retail space.

Let's dive in!

Following the path of other Magnificent Seven names, here's Amazon.com $AMZN surging to new all-time highs:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Last week, we held our April Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.

Let’s get right into it!

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Last week, we released a Freshly Squeezed report detailing long setups in some of the market's most heavily shorted stocks.

This week, we got fresh short sale data from FINRA as well as fresh breakouts from a growing list of stocks in our universe.

We thought it would be irresponsible not to do a follow-up report covering them.

This is just the environment we're in.

Here's what we're doing about it.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the highest short positions. When a stock is heavily shorted, 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. Many times, as this happens, momentum comes into these names and fuels massive short-covering rallies.

For this reason, we pair short-interest data with short-term momentum overlays, as this combination is needed to spark the moves we’re looking for.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

The animal spirits have returned to equity markets near you!

How do we know?

Take a look around...

Biotechs are putting the finishing touches on a massive base, suggesting a new bull market for these stocks is underway.

Speculative growth indexes like the suite of ARK ETFs are completing (or have already completed) trend reversals.

The Renaissance IPO fund is at its highest level since early 2022.

A growing list of emerging markets countries (outside of China) are making new highs.

Cryptocurrencies are mooning every night while we're sleeping.

Participation is broadening to new groups like materials, and funds are flowing back into energy and financials again.

The most-hated and lowest-quality stocks in the market are catching a serious bid.

So, what do we do?

This is the optimal market environment for our Freshly Squeezed universe.

The idea behind this one is to find the stocks that bears are betting against the most and take the opposite side as they squeeze higher.