From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as a market of stocks.

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions… but there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club. We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports. 

Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to The Short Report.

We’re probably not going to follow Nancy Pelosi into American Express $AXP or PayPal $PYPL.

And Warren Buffett’s recent purchase of a large stake in Occidental Petroleum $OXY doesn’t necessarily indicate an opportunity for us, either.

Moves by these big names are just good information.

We don’t typically track small transactions by members of Congress, those in the $1,000-to-$15,000 range.

But a recent move by Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a Republican from Georgia, is worth noting.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended March 4, 2022. This report is published biweekly 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.

Not many people know this, but I used to be a gold bug way back in the day.

Mid-2000s and into the financial crisis and beyond?

I was Mr. Gold Bug.

Any good technician was. That's how price told us to behave.

But then a funny thing happened. A combination of price and common sense proved that being a gold bug was no longer a good idea. That was about a decade ago.

And you know how humans are. Many of those angry little buggers stuck around and held other people's bags this entire time, while stocks and other risk assets have ripped making everyone rich, except for gold bugs.

It's funny how life works.

Because I think we might be back.

It's hard not to be in the Rocks > Stocks club these days.

Here's a good chart showing what's going on:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our March Monthly Strategy Session last Tuesday. Premium Members can click here to review the video recording and download the slide deck.

Non-members can see some highlights from the call 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.

Metals have been gaining more strength with every passing day and have certainly been outperforming the market at present. We have a long setup from the Metals sector this time around as well.

Let's take a look at the trade for this week!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow. In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish, but not both.

We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients.

Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.

Warren Buffett is making his first appearance on The Hot List, as Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.A purchased more than 90,000,000 shares of Occidental Petroleum $OXY last week.

OXY explores for and produces crude oil and natural gas. It’s actually the largest producer of natural gas liquids in the United States.

It's happening.

Investors are bearish.

Especially American ones with a ton of Growth exposure!

Want to know what a bag holder looks like? I encourage you to take a look at your typical American portfolio with a ton of Technology stocks in it, Consumer Discretionary stocks and virtually no exposure to Commodities and Latin American equities.

Of course sentiment is bad. It should be bad!

But this bad?

More Bearish Financial Advisors than Bullish ones?

That doesn't happen very often.

It's always fun dropping by the Ritholtz office in New York City.

Basically what happens is we yell at each other for about an hour, and then we go out to eat and drink until we pass out.

It's pretty great.

On this episode of the Compound and Friends, I sit down with Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, and my old pal Dan Nathan joined us this time as well.

As usual, we ripped through some charts, but we also discuss the best burger in New York City.

I thought my answer was the right one. But it turns out Dan Nathan was right all along. I trust this man with my life.

Hope you enjoy!