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.
No setup gets me more excited than buying a fresh new all-time high.
There are no bagholders looking to unload their losing position to breakeven. Every investor or trader holding a long position is making money. And every trader holding a short position is losing money and the only way they correct that sad state of affairs is to buy stock to stop their losses.
In other words, blue skies above.
This doesn't guarantee success on a long trade here, of course. But these are the types of trades that commonly lead to my biggest gains.
Here's a weekly chart of semiconductor name Analog Devices $ADI:
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.
I'm used to a market where stocks struggle when the US Dollar are US rates are rising. And that's what we've seen all year.
And while the data certainly points to a market of stocks that have been grinding mostly sideways over the past few months, stocks haven't done nearly as bad as you'd think, considering just how strong the Dollar has been and how much rates have risen.
So the question for me is whether these consolidations are going to resolve higher or lower?
And what the implications might be....
A lower resolution here could be a massive tailwind for stocks.
Remember, during Election years, the market tends to bottom in May ahead of a very strong summer, particularly when there is an incumbent candidate.
If these resolutions are, in fact, to the downside, then that's exactly what I would expect to see happen:
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 Uber and Paypal.
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.
We held our May Monthly Strategy Session earlier in the week. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.
Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.
By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends.
This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.
With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.