Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended March 18, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with our Minor Leaguers column.
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.
The highlight of today’s list is the Altimeter Capital Form 4, which revealed a $7 million purchase in the mid-cap software stock Confluent $CFLT.
Altimeter now owns 5,131,700 shares of CFLT.
There was also a significant Form 4 filing by Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha, detailing a purchase in the diagnostics and research company Natera $NTRA.
Botha purchased roughly $5 million of NTRA stock, bringing his total share count to over 1.3 million.
Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs. We’ve also sprinkled in some of the largest ADRs from countries that did not make the market cap cut.
These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.
It’s got all the big names and more--but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.
The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.
We take the largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.
Based on the market environment, we can also flip the scan on its head and filter for weakness.
Let’s dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.
We’ve talked a lot about the unusual options activity in commodity stocks like Freeport-McMoRan $FCX in recent weeks and months.
Yesterday, we saw more of the same, as options traders made some major splashes in April monthly calls for both the oil services giant Schlumberger $SLB and the British integrated oil and gas name Shell Plc $SHEL.
We debuted a new scan recently which goes by the name- All Star Momentum.
All Star Momentum is a brand new scan that guides us towards the very best stocks in the market. This time around, we have incorporated our stock universe of Nifty 500 as the base. Among the 500 stocks that we follow, this scan will pump out names that are most likely to outperform the market.
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.
