As our Premium Members already know, we have a laundry list of scans that we run internally on an almost daily basis.
Different market environments, naturally, are more conducive to certain scans and less so to others.
For example, running our "Short Scan" right now is an absolute waste of time (which in itself is information about the current state of the market). On the other hand, our "Minor Leaguers" is perfect for the current environment due to its focus on Small-Cap stocks.
Our "Squeeze Scan" is also absolute gold for the current market. While Gamestop $GME is stealing all the thunder these days, it's not the only stock being propelled higher by short covering. It's happening more or less across the board in the most shorted names.
In fact, if you were to treat these hated stocks as a basket, they'd be outperforming even the strongest industry groups right now.
I think we can all agree that we learned something this week.
No matter who you are or how long you've been at this, we all learned SOMETHING after this week's events.
Some investors learned about short selling and short squeezes (my wife, for example). Others now have a better understanding of how brokers work and the fact that pretty much all of them sell their order flow. None of this is anything new to us, of course, but it is to a lot of other people.
I personally learned more about some of the Dodd Frank regulations, almost by osmosis. I mean, how could you not? But I realized that I officially care less about all that stuff than I did before. Talk about boring!
Anyway, the funniest part of the whole thing has to be the people screaming for more investor education to prevent this irrational behavior in the future. "We have to protect investors from themselves", "Brokers need to educate their clients"....etc etc
This is hilarious. They think that making people take some tests or answer questions is going to stop them from making reckless decisions????
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
The market is giving us absolutely no reason to play defense right now.
Regardless of the asset class, it's the risk-takers that are having their way in this environment.
Investors stretching out along the risk spectrum is a point we've been hammering home for some time now, particularly in our weekly RPP Reports - like this one.
Not only is this true on absolute terms, but we're also witnessing cross-asset relationships progress higher and in favor of risk-asset which can only be taken as a positive.
It's not often we see all asset classes in agreement with each other, but when we do, it's a significant driving force that supports the risk-on trade and suggests higher prices to come.
Our most recent Under The Hood report was packed with a handful of buying opportunities. As usual, these names are all exhibiting bullish relative strength and offering investors well-defined risk levels to trade against... and of course, reward profiles skewed heavily in our favor.
In an environment like this one... where areas far and wide are making new highs, and even the weakest corners of the market are participating, there is no shortageof strong stocks floating to the top of our bottoms-up scans.
In recent months, this column (as well as the Minor Leaguers) has been dominated by smaller-cap names as SMIDs and Micro-Caps have been where all the buzz is among investors these days due to their aggressive outperformance.
Something we’ve been working on internally this year is using various bottoms-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach. One way we’re doing this is by identifying 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.
We updated our Breadth chartbook a few days ago which Premium Members can check out here.
There are literally hundreds of charts with various breadth indicators from new high/low and overbought/oversold percentages to A/D lines, and more for not only the major averages and indexes but also each Large-Cap Sector SPDR.
What's this month's takeaway after spending a morning digging through our expanded workbook (that's right, there's more)?
Market internals continue to be a tailwind for stocks as we saw an improvement in the vast majority of our metrics again this month.
The Percent of global markets trading above their 50-day average is faltering. It's dropped to 78% (83% for Developed Markets & 74% for Emerging Markets). Below 70% is a warning for the market, below 40% is usually bad news.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
We continue to experience a bullish expansion in participation from stock markets around the world.
Just a few days ago we discussed buying Israeli stocks and explained how their strength at the index level was being driven by their heavy exposure to Technology.
Mega-Cap Growth and Tech stocks (we're including Communications and Discretionary here -- "Tech but not Tech" names such as Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, JD.Com, etc.) are also a dominant market force in China.
We wrote about this exact topic in November, and how strength from these names would likely continue to propel these Large-Cap Chinese Indexes and ETFs higher. The Chinese Tech ETF $CQQQ and iShares Large-Cap China ETF $FXI tacked on an additional 24% and 12%, respectively in the time since.
This week on the podcast, Jonathan Krinsky joins me for a chat about Sector Rotation. While the Mega-cap names like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft grinded sideways, or even down, since August, the Small-caps, Mid-caps and Micro-cap names have been the leaders. What happens if the Mega-caps break out of these bases to new all-time highs? Does the sector rotation continue? Or do we then rotate into the more defensive areas like Staples, Utilities and REITs, which currently keep making new relative lows?
The market had given us an indication of a weakening short-term momentum at the end of last week. We thought this would be a good time to go through the sectoral indices to identify strengths and weaknesses.
