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.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Junior International Hall of Famers.

With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.

This scan is composed of the next 100 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 100 and are thus covered by the International Hall of Famers universe.

Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original International Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these future big boys are up to.

This is our Junior International Hall of Famers list:

They're out there telling me that the stock market is due for a correction this quarter.

But the stock market just had a correction last quarter.

Look at the Equally-weighted Nasdaq100 Index making zero progress since the start of March.

Remember that correction we were looking for back in Q1?

Well we got it:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended July 19, 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 @Sstrazza

Last week, we held our June Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.

Let’s get right into it!

The Dow Jones Industrial Average just had its highest weekly closing price in history.

Meanwhile, this week we also saw the highest reading of NYSE stocks above their 200 day moving average during this entire bull market.

Do you know how many times we saw a new 52-week high for the Dow in 2021 along with these breadth readings also hitting new cycle highs?

Zero.

It didn't even happen once.

That's because back in 2021, market breadth was deteriorating, not expanding.

See the difference?

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Breadth has expanded in a big way since last week, with more and more stocks finally joining in on the bull market as big-cap tech leaders take a breather.

At the sector and industry group level, our list of indexes that are in uptrends continues to grow.

Some notable new members on this list include regional banks, small-caps, and various speculative growth funds.

After years of basing in accumulation patterns, these groups are just now completing primary trend reversals.

What does this mean?

In its simplest form, it means there are more ponds we can fish in for long opportunities. There are more stocks -- and groups of stocks -- that are in uptrends.

It’s just more options for us.

One of the groups that has broken out with authority recently is the biotechs.

Regardless of what index you're looking at, the path of least resistance is now higher for this health care subsector.

We’ve identified some of the strongest biotech stocks with asymmetric risk/reward setups and clear levels to trade against.

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:

Is it bearish when the largest component in the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaks out of a multi-year base to new all-time highs?

To be clear, we're talking about the world's most important stock market index here. And UnitedHealth represents over 8.5% of the entire Papa Dow.

Look at this chart. While people are telling you that the market is in a bubble, things are parabolic and this is unsustainable, the largest weighting of the most important stock market gauge hasn't even done anything for years.

Until now...

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.

Counting is a lost art.

Humans love their short cuts.

Rather than taking the time to actually go one by one counting each of the stocks that are going up, down, or sideways, humans would rather skip that altogether in favor of their favorite Index or some kind of statistic.

 You don't need any sophisticated math skills in order to count how well or poorly the stock market is doing.

It's actually incredibly simple. 

Humans just don't want to do it.

And that's the arb.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

The stock market is in the middle of one of its fiercest multi-day rallies in recent history.

Since last week, there has been a notable expansion in breadth, with areas like small caps, regional banks, biotechs, and speculative growth joining the bull market party.

Long story short, investors are beginning to move out on the risk spectrum and embrace some of the riskiest stocks the market has to offer.

Another way to see this offensive positioning is by analyzing the performance of the stocks that investors are betting against the most.

Names with sky-high short interests continue to work in this environment.

As such, it's time to run it back with another Freshly Squeezed report.

Here's how we do things...

We find the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. We wait for momentum to come into these names. And then we ride them higher as the bears get squeezed.

We got new short data last week, so let's dive in and talk about it.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions.