From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The most significant transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Farhad Nanji, director at RXO Inc $RXO.

Nanji revealed a purchase of 747,424 RXO shares, equivalent to $15 million.

Market breadth can be a funny thing.

People think it's easy. People think they can just pull up some indicator and it's always going to tell them whether market breadth is good or bad.

But that's not how it works. Some indicators are more valuable in certain environments than others.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The most significant transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett and Berkshire reported another substantial purchase in Occidental Petroleum Corp $OXY, this time with a total value of $245  million.

Another day goes by in the market, and more selling came in.

Investors are making a habit of this whole selling thing.

You notice?

In yesterday's trading we saw the fewest amount of stocks in longer-term uptrends since mid-December. We also had the fewest stocks in short-term uptrends since mid-November.

You may not see the selling pressure as much at the index level, but for those of you who actually take the time to count what the stocks themselves are doing, you know.

Take a look at the new highs list, essentially non-existent throughout the month of January, even with the S&P500 and Dow hitting the highest levels ever.

You can also see the divergences in Consumer stocks, Small-caps and Emerging Markets currencies:

This is the video recording of our February 5th Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended February 2, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation with The Minor Leaguers.

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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes via Form 4 filings by Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett and Berkshire reported additional purchases in The Liberty SiriusXM Group  for a total amount of $55,438,736.

The market wasted no time starting to sell off in the month of February.

Remember, this is historically one of the worst months of the year to own stocks.

Also, the best 3 month period of the year (Nov-Jan) just came to an end.

So if stocks weren't selling off, that would be weird.

Stocks move first, and then the indexes follow.

It's a market of stocks, remember?

And while the S&P500 may have just had its 4th consecutive weekly gain of at least 1%, the stocks themselves are NOT doing that.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

Here's this week's list:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a series of Form 4 filings by Maha Katabi, director of Vera Therapeutics $VERA.

Katabi reported a purchase of 161,290 VERA shares, equivalent to $5 million.

February is one of the worst months of the year to own stocks.

Is that why we've been seeing all this rotation into defensive sectors?

Think about it, we haven't seen any rotation at all into Consumer Staples this entire bull market.

Until now.

And if you go back and study the history of bag holders, you'll notice that they love buying stocks when Consumer Staples finally start to become leaders.

This is classic rotation you see quite often ahead of a tough time for the market: