From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @Alfcharts

This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow.

In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish, but not both.

We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients.

Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Tough sledding today.

The market is caught between two levels, the eight-day moving average and the 21-day.

I traded small, and I'll do that the rest of the week.

The largest insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filed by Lloyd M. Yates, director, president and CEO of NiSource Inc $NI.

Yates reported a purchase of 40,000 shares of NI, equivalent to $1,057,600.

With stocks selling off this quarter, the bears are back.

Could you imagine still telling yourself that the rally we got in equities over the past year was a bear market?

What kind of serial killer thinks like that?

A 3-5% correction in some of the major Indexes can cause people to lose their minds.

Heck, you may be wondering yourself if this is the beginning of a huge move lower for stock prices. I certainly am.

Remember, every big move starts with a small one. But not every small move turns into a big one.

That's where Credit Spreads come in. If there is real stress in the market, you're going to see it in credit.

But as stock prices corrected this month, Credit Spreads only got more narrow.

Here's an easy way to view that, comparing the prices of High Yield Bonds vs US Treasury Bonds:

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It's the last week of August, and the market had a nice recovery on Friday.

We'll see if $SPY 440 holds for a move back to 444 or not.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Click here to check it out.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

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

Here’s this week’s list:

*Click table to enlarge view

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It was a very volatile Friday -- up, down, and all around.

That makes for tough trading, and I told the people in the Live Trading Room the best you can do is to NOT trade today.

That being said...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

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:

The largest insider transaction on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filed by Sanford Robertson, director of Cassava Sciences $SAVA.

Robertson reported a purchase of SAVA shares in the amount of $523,500.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Happy Friday!

We can expect some volatility today, starting pretty early, due to Jerome Powell speaking at the Fed Symposium in Jackson Hole.

If the market likes what the Fed Chair has to say, $SPY could push above 440.20. If not, we can potentially see 432.

Might be hard to get movement early this morning.

The most important groups of stocks are stuck below overhead supply.

That's not usually a characteristic of strong uptrends where investors are consistently rewarded for owning stocks. That was the first half of this year.

Today, it's almost the exact opposite.

In this type of environment, investors are rewarded for selling volatility and collecting income. Investors also tend to be rewarded for avoiding these types of sectors and looking for opportunities elsewhere, in less correlated areas.

Here are 4 of the most important groups of stocks all stuck below their prior cycle's peaks: