The largest insider buy on today's list is a Form 4 filing by William Clay Ford Jr., the executive chair of Ford Motor $F, who reported a purchase of roughly $4.5 million.
Coliseum Capital Partners continues to build its position in GMS Inc $GMS, as it just filed its second Form 4 in the last week.
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 $1B 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.
The way we did this is simple…
To make the cut for our revised Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1B and $4B.
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.
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.
We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.
In this weekly note, we highlight 10 of the most important charts or themes we're currently seeing in asset classes around the world.
Is There Enough in the Tank?
Pretty much everything in the world of energy has been on fire for the last quarter. Crude oil and energy stocks have been the stand-out performers this year as both have enjoyed a swift leg higher since early January. Despite the impressive price action, both are at logical levels to do some consolidating. Crude Oil and the Energy Sector SPDR (XLE) are challenging critical levels of overhead supply at former highs. Both of these areas have acted as resistance in the past, so it would not be unusual for sellers to show up once again. While the primary trends are still very much intact for energy stocks and futures, a breather here and some digestion of the recent gains would be constructive. The next key piece of information should come in the form of how that digestion looks. Do we correct through price, or time?
Check out this week's Momentum Report, our weekly summation of all the major indexes at a Macro, International, Sector, and Industry Group level.
By analyzing the short-term data in these reports, we get a more tactical view of the current state of markets. This information then helps us put near-term developments into the big picture context and provides insights regarding the structural trends at play.
Let's jump right into it with some of the major takeaways from this week's report:
* ASC Plus Members can access the Momentum Report by clicking the link at the bottom of this post.
From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
Cyclical stocks are all the craze.
If you're doing well this year, it's because you own these stocks. If you're not, it's because you don't own these stocks.
Whether we're talking about energy, agricultural inputs, or industrial metals, these are the kinds of industry groups that are showing relative strength.
And, to be clear, this is nothing new. This theme has been in place for over a year now.
The only new development is that we're seeing upside momentum in these names pick up. As a result, the gap between these winners and the rest of the market has widened to historic levels.
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 which you can check out here.
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.
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.
