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...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We saw a nice gap up on the $SPX today, but we weren't able to hold on to 4,000 or 4,017.

The market decided to close the gap down, which is all fine and well. But I'd like roughly that area held at 3,980 or so.

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Kelcy Warren, co-founder and executive chairman of Energy Transfer $ET.

Warren reported a purchase of roughly $17 million.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The $SPX had about a hundred-point drop in a span of a week's time.

It'll take a bit of proving if this market wants to rally.

In some market environments Technology, and other sectors full of growth stocks, tend to outperform.

Usually interest rates are falling in that type of market.

You got a good dose of that for about decade.

US Stocks were the global leaders while Europe and other parts of the world, without that exposure to growth, made little progress.

See here.

And now with interest rates rising, other sectors have emerged as leaders. Industrials, for example.

This is all perfectly normal for this type of environment. We've seen it before, and to expect...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Earlier this week we held our February Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each

Let’s get right into it!

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market was straight down most of the day.

We saw a little bounce, but nothing that impressive.

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 the trailing month. 

Then...

This is the video recording of our February 24, 2023, Inside Scoop Weekly Strategy Session.

The largest insider transaction on today's Hot List is a Form 4 filing by Samuel Cowley, general counsel and secretary of Insight Enterprises $NSIT.

Cowley reported a purchase of $853,065 in NSIT.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market is jittery this morning as we await more economic data, more importantly inflation data.

In January, Fridays were very strong. In February, Fridays have overall traded higher but very lackluster.