Last Friday I sat down with Aaron Task of Seeking Alpha for a fun chat about today's market environment. Aaron and I have known each other for years from his days as the Digital Editor of Fortune as well as Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Finance. We also have a lot of friends in common.
It's always interesting talking to someone from the media about how little media I consume. In addition to the benefits of following price, and ignoring the "news", we discuss the current sector and market cap rotation we're seeing, the next direction for Bitcoin and Crypto Currencies, as well some other important tools and strategies that we're incorporating right now.
It's always fun to catch up with Aaron. He just serves me alley-oops.
It's not a secret that Chinese Tech stocks have been breaking out all over the place to new all-time highs. We've been on this for a while. I remember specifically in the depths of the market crash in March last year, Chinese Technology was actually breaking out to new multi-year highs relative to the S&P500. This was happening during the worst part of the crash!
I remember thinking, "What the heck???"
And so they've been ripping ever since. But the market had already tipped its hand.
The difference today is that we're now seeing signs of structural outperformance. It's now Chinese Technology leading the way here bigger picture, no longer U.S. Tech.
Here's the Chinese Tech Index Fund $CQQQ breaking out of a mulit-month base to new all-time highs. You'll also notice how it's breaking out relative to the U.S. $QQQ representing the Nasdaq100 Index:
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
At the beginning of each week, we publish performance tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching in order to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
As we mentioned last week, the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly lies in favor of the bulls.
We're seeing rotation supporting this move higher in equities; a sustained bid for SMIDs and Micro-Caps while Large-Cap indexes slowly work higher is all very constructive for the early innings of bull markets.
This environment is also providing bulls with an increasingly wide selection of areas to allocate capital - from Industrials, Technology, and Cylicals, and now Financials.
In a further effort to identify individual equities that fit within our larger more Macro thesis, we couldn't be happier to roll out and share our latest bottoms-up scan: "The Minor Leaguers."
We'll also be writing a post every other week where we outline some of our favorite setups from the watchlist. This is the first edition.
Moving forward, we'll be rotating this column with "Under The Hood" each week.
In order to make it onto our Minor League list, you must have a market cap between $1 and $2B. There are also price and liquidity filters.
Then, we simply sort the stocks by their percentage from new highs. Easy.
I've been waiting for Europe to break out since I was in high school. That was over 20 years ago. And people have the audacity to tell me that stocks are in a bubble.
This one comes up a lot. "JC, what has you concerned?".
This morning I was on the Alpha Trader Podcast with Aaron Task, former Digital Editor of Fortune and Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Finance. It was fun. I'll post the link when it's up next week.
But that's what he asked. What has me concerned?
And what's interesting is that nothing really "concerns" me. Because I don't really care. I'm too old for that shit. I can't worry about the economic and social implications of the market going up or down.
Stocks can get cut in half from here. Or they could double. I'm good either way. Bitcoin can go to zero. Not my problem. Gold can go to $100,000, or $100. Doesn't matter to me.
So I'm not "concerned" about anything. I just take it how it comes, when it comes. As investors, we have no choice. Well, as open-minded investors, anyway.
We update our 2-to-100 club universe every quarter as stocks will come on and off of the list as their market cap fluctuates above and below our criteria of about 2 to 30B.
There are also newly public stocks that need to be added and changes based on our technical criteria, among other things.
A lot of stocks grew above the $30B mark this year and unfortunately left the 2-to-100 club. On the other hand, there weren't too many that left due to falling below $2B.
This makes sense as all the stocks in the club are from tech/growth industries, many of which performed incredibly well in 2020.
As we get into 2021, the same question keeps coming, "JC, when are we going to see a correction in the market?"
While it is true that some stocks have gone up, and others have gone up a lot in recent months, the biggest stocks of them all have not.
Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are the 4 biggest companies in the world. Throw in fellow behemoths Facebook and Alibaba, and now we're pushing $8 Trillion in market cap. That's big time money.
And you know what those stocks have done since September 2nd?
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.
