Another Santa Claus Rally is officially in the books.
This year the S&P500 rallied 0.80% during the period, which is more than 3 times the historical returns for all the other 7 day periods throughout the year.
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.
Doing some basic math, the odds continue to favor a strong year for stocks in 2023.
There are some people out there who think the Nasdaq is the stock market. There are others who "only buy growth stocks".
I don't know what kind of masochist you need to be to think that way, but both of those are very foolish approaches to life.
The Nasdaq is full of growth stocks. And growth stocks historically underperform and make little progress when interest rates are rising. I'm not sure if you heard, but interest rates have been rising!
Since the Stock Market bottomed in June, the majority of stocks and sectors are up and to the right. It's only the biggest losers that are down, and there aren't that many of them. It's really just those nasdaq / growthy stocks that the masochists are focused on.
From a seasonal perspective, Pre-election years are historically some of the most bullish years we have in the market. Here's what the 4-year cycle looks like as we head into 2023:
