From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

I left gold bugs an urgent message last week.

“This mess could turn downright ugly for the entire precious metals space if buyers don’t step in and support higher prices in palladium – and fast.”

I am many things, but “alarmist” isn’t one of them. I simply find it hard to believe gold will post new all-time highs while palladium falls to fresh five-year lows.

Call me crazy, but those two puzzle pieces don’t seem to fit.

Perhaps we’ll never know for sure, as buyers showed up right on cue, driving palladium higher ahead of the three-day weekend. 

Last week’s strength bodes well for all metals, industrial and precious. So I’ll reiterate critical levels to trade against in palladium.

But I also want to share a strong correlation between this multifaceted metal and a market I would never have guessed…

The Nasdaq 100 $QQQ!

Check out these charts Bartelloni shared with JC, revealing the relationship over a decade ago.

(Big thanks to Jan for bringing the article to my attention!)

The next new position in our Paid-to-Play portfolio is:

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

The most significant transaction on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Donegal Mutual Insurance Company.

The firm reported a $2,279,836 purchase in Donegal Group Inc $DGICA.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We had a nice contraction on Friday, and we're indicating lower this morning.

I'll watch to see how $SPY handles the 435 area.

I was promised a crisis. Maybe even a recession.

Instead all I got was the best start to a year for the Nasdaq100 ever.

You want to talk about ignoring the news and focusing on price?

This is why.

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.

And it doesn't have to be a Russell component — it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our universe.

The same price and liquidity filters are applied. Then, as always, we sort by proximity to...

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.

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.

What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind.

And they’re doing so for one reason only: because they think...

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

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.

We...

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

We filter out any laggards that are down 5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month. 

Then,...