This is the video recording of the May 8, 2024, Hot Corner Insider Weekly Strategy Session.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Aon plc $AON director Lester Knight.

Knight reported a purchase of $2.7 million worth of AON shares.

Here are the returns of a series of country ETFs since October.

Notice how the ones from the U.S. are further down the list than you might expect.

At the top you've got Argentina, Peru, Colombia and Mexico:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Sensata Technologies Holding plc $ST director John Mirshekari.

Mirshekari reported a purchase of ST shares with a total value of $10.6 million.

The Small-cap Indexes in America have had a tough time for a while now.

Since the start of 2022, both of these Small-cap Indexes have actually produced a negative return.

The S&P600 Small-cap Index requires companies to have a track record of earnings in order to be included in the index.

The Russell2000 lets anyone in. It doesn't matter how much money you lose, if your market cap is above $300 Million, then you're in.

Both of them have been terrible.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Eli Samaha, founder and managing partner of Madison Avenue Partners LP.

Samaha and Madison Avenue reported a purchase of $13 million in Theravance Biopharma $TBPH.

It's amazing what price action can do to change sentiment.

We went from frothy optimism just a couple of months ago, to a much more pessimistic environment for investors.

This table below is a great summary of the different gauges we look at to measure sentiment and what they've done over the past month.

The blue diamonds are the current readings and the gray triangles represent where these were a month ago.

What's on your mind these days?

I'll tell you what I'm thinking about.

I'm used to a market where stocks struggle when the US Dollar are US rates are rising. And that's what we've seen all year.

And while the data certainly points to a market of stocks that have been grinding mostly sideways over the past few months, stocks haven't done nearly as bad as you'd think, considering just how strong the Dollar has been and how much rates have risen.

So the question for me is whether these consolidations are going to resolve higher or lower?

And what the implications might be....

A lower resolution here could be a massive tailwind for stocks.

Remember, during Election years, the market tends to bottom in May ahead of a very strong summer, particularly when there is an incumbent candidate.

If these resolutions are, in fact, to the downside, then that's exactly what I would expect to see happen:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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 Uber and Paypal.

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.

Here’s this week’s list:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our May Monthly Strategy Session earlier in the week. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today's list comes via two Form 4 filings by Liam K. Griffin, chief executive officer and president of Skyworks Solutions $SWKS.

Griffin reported a total purchase of roughly $1 million in SWKS shares.