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.
The bigger question for me is whether these new trends are here to stay, or if at some point the stock market reverts to those longer underlying uptrends that got us here.
Another question I have is which mining companies are going to lead their groups as metals continue to make new highs.
Here's a good way to view it. This is Gold breaking out of a decade+ long base to new all-time highs, resuming its secular uptrend from the 2000s.
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.
You can now add the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the list of indexes that are DOWN for the year so far.
I've argued many times that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is the world's most important stock market index.
And while I'm not going to get into all the reasons again today, I'll just show you the chart of the S&P500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average going back 60 years.
Stock market volatility is at the highest levels since October.
The majority of stocks are NOT in uptrends.
This market is NOT like it was last year.
In fact, coming into today, the majority of stocks on the NYSE are down for the year. Also 2/3rds of the stocks on the Nasdaq are negative for the year.
Go and count for yourself.
You'll quickly see that the majority of stocks in the Large-cap Nasdaq100 are down this year. Same for the Small-cap Russell2000 Index and the S&P Mid-cap 400.
Different markets call for different strategies.
Here's the $VIX hitting levels this week not seen since Halloween:
