From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

As most of you know, we use 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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Cary Grace, president and CEO of AMN Healthcare Services $AMN.

Grace reported a purchase of almost $1 million in AMN shares.

From the Desk of Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

When assessing the overall market, we are always asking a lot of the same questions. One of the more common ones is, "how are the laggards doing?"

Many times, these will be the culprits of the last bear market. Other times, they are former leaders that have lost their way.

For a healthy and sustainable bull cycle to take place, we eventually need these laggards to participate.

For the 2021 and 2022 bear, speculative growth was the poster child. 

We’re talking about biotech, the ARK funds, the IPO index, online retailers, etc. These groups were absolutely decimated. 

Not only did they experience some of the worst bear market drawdowns, but in 2023, when new leaders emerged, and many areas of the market began to move higher, these laggards continued to struggle.

Fast forward to today, and these groups are still repairing the technical damage from the prior cycle. With that said, the seeds have been planted for some epic bearish-to-bullish trend reversals.

A lot of the major US Stock Market indexes have been having a hard time making much progress this month.

That makes sense to me because there are simply fewer and fewer stocks that are going up in price.

It's a market of stocks, after all right?

The way I learned it was, "Don't fight Papa Dow".

As you can see below, Dow Futures are at the same levels they were on February 2nd. We start March this Friday.

Also, you can see momentum continue to roll over very aggressively, particularly as any new highs in the indexes failed to hold:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The biggest item on today’s list is a filing by Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

The former Speaker of the House bought call options in Palo Alto Networks $PANW worth between $600,000 and $1,250,000.

Remember when Apple was the most important company in the world?

Wasn't that like just a few months ago?

How convenient that it is no longer relevant, now that the stock goes down in price every day.

Apple closed yesterday at the lowest levels since early November...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend Aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street. These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to long-term-minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That's why we're turning our attention to the future aristocrats. In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we're curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for five to nine years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are "stocks that pay you to make money." Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes via a handful of filings by Michael K. Hooks, executive chair of Malibu Boats Inc $MBUU.

Hooks reported a purchase of $535,250 on his one stock.

Small-caps have had a really hard time this year.

Almost every Small-cap sector is down since the highs in late December. That was 2 months ago.

The day the US Dollar Index bottomed was the exact day that Small-caps stopped going up in price.

That was also the same day that the US 10yr Yield bottomed.

I don't believe that was a coincidence.

You're welcome to.

What I see is a group of stocks struggling to make any progress. It's hard to underperform the Small-cap indexes, but somehow Financials found a way.

Here are Small-cap Financials, which are loaded up with regional bank stocks, rolling over and making new 4-month lows relative to the Small-cap 600 Index.

Are you paying attention?

This market is not like the one we were in back in November.

Have you adapted to this environment?

Or are you still doing the same things you were doing 3 months ago?

Take a look at High Beta vs Low Volatility going out for the week at the lowest levels since mid-January:

This is the video recording of the February 2024 Mid-month Conference Call.