From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Minor Leaguers.

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 new highs in...

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...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

That was a very slow day, with a healthy contraction in the afternoon.

$SPY is sitting outside the Bollinger band.

I'd think we can see 423 sooner versus later.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

What will it take for gold to make new all-time highs?

A weaker US dollar and falling real yields are likely candidates for leading catalysts.

We can also add a significant unwind in commercial positioning to the list. 

Meanwhile, it’s a range-bound mess.

Let’s stick to the basics. Uptrends – at the core – come down to more buyers than sellers. And risk-on/risk-off intermarket ratios provide excellent tools for tracking whether bulls or bears dominate a particular market.

After the recent bout of selling pressure, one precious metal risk ratio is approaching a potential inflection point…

Check out the Silver Miners ETF $SIL versus the iShares Silver ETF $SLV:

The SIL/SLV ratio speaks to the risk appetite in the same vein as the Gold Miners ETF $GDX versus the Gold ETF $GLD.

SIL/SLV simply sits further out on the risk curve than GDX/GLD.

(A rising line indicates a risk-on environment, while a falling line implies de-risking behavior.)

The last time this ratio traded at these levels in early 2016, gold put in the low of its current decade-long base. And...

It appears to me the broader markets have declared their intention to rally this summer. As such, I want to be positioned to take advantage.

And what better way to position for a summer rally than in a company with exposure to solar energy projects?

I love it when the stars align.

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

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

The largest insider buy on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by Ben Tisch, senior vice president of corporate development and strategy at Loews Corporation $L.

Tisch reported a purchase of 330,000 shares, equivalent to $18,781,400.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The S&P 500 almost touched the 4,300 mark, and we're becoming a tad bit extended.

A lot of names that have been dead wood finally started to come to life on Friday.

We'll see if that continues.

Thursday morning I was in New York City chatting with Maria Bartiromo about the ongoing Bull Market in Stocks.

Maria and I have been talking about this topic pretty regularly since she looked at me like I was crazy last October.

A lot has happened since then as both the Nasdaq and S&P500 just closed out back to back months at the highest levels in a year.

The market got the sector rotation it needed as we entered 2023.

And now we're looking for that rotation back into those original leading sectors off the lows last summer.

I believe we already started to see it get going right after we finished up our conversation Thursday morning.

Here's the interview in full:

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 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 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.

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...