From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Today's the day: Will the Fed raise rates for one last time this year?

We'll see at 2:00 p.m. ET.

$GOOGL had a nice move after hours.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

We had decent movement in the indices today.

We'll see how $GOOGL does after the close.

The indices are flagging, but I think it all depends on tonight.

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by the former chairman of FB Financial Corporation $FBK, James W. Ayers.

Ayers revealed a purchase of 12,000 FBK shares, equivalent to $393,600.

Here's something you don't see every day.

European Financials hitting new 52-week highs?

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

$GOOGL kicks off Big Tech earnings tonight.

We'll see if this name is a precursor for other tech names.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The market is kind of drifting and seems to be in an indecision mode.

This week could be tough trading with earnings and the Fed.

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...

Crude Oil futures are pushing up against new 3-month highs just as investors have given up on the commodities trade.

No one I speak to thinks Energy leads the way in the 2nd half of 2023.

And I speak to a lot of people who got the past year very right. Even they don't believe...

Here's what I see: Former resistance for Crude Oil in 2018 turning into support throughout the past year:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended July 21, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with The Minor Leaguers.

What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names.

There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks that are seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether we’re measuring increasing interest based on large institutional purchases, unusual options activity, or...

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by SRB Corporation.

The advisory firm revealed a purchase of $2.1 million in Safety Insurance Group $SAFT.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It's a busy earnings week, and we have an FOMC decision coming on Wednesday.

Futures are up some this morning.

Technical Analysis is the study of the behavior of the market and its participants.

So while identifying price trends is our ultimate goal, sentiment plays an important role in that process.

Prices don't move up or down because of "fundamentals" or "the economy". The price of assets move based on positioning.

When investors are all positioned one way, and are at a consensus, who's left to drive prices further in that direction?

Last summer we saw some of the most pessimistic sentiment towards stocks in history.

Some of that sentiment has started to shift a bit, like in the AAII and II polls. We're back somewhere towards the middle in those. You need, at least, some bulls to buy stocks to have a bull market.

But when it comes to Fund Managers, Cash is still their largest position, and they're most bearish on equities.