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From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The 2 to 100 Club.

In this scan, we look to identify 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.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on Technology and Growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online...

The no coiners are back.

Have you noticed how every chance they get, they'll try to convince you that this is a major top for Bitcoin and the ponzi scheme is officially over?

The no coiners are angry like that. Imagine what it must be like to not have owned Bitcoin this entire time? Ouch.

Here's the "historic top" they're trying to scare you about. 

You tell me, does this look like the end of a major bull market, or does this just look like a normal healthy consolidation within an ongoing secular bull market?

There are opportunities in this space whether you trade Crypto currencies or not.

You've got the ETFs that track the price of Bitcoin and other tokens. You have the Crypto Miners like MARA and RIOT and others, which have presented us with several year-making opportunities this cycle. 

And of course, you have the infamous Microstrategy $MSTR, where Michael Saylor continues to buy more and more Bitcoin with every rally or dip. He does not discriminate. He just keeps on buying.

Here's a zoomed out look at Microstrategy so you can see this was just the highest quarterly close in the history of the company, even...

Tesla wins again. 

Elon has done his job better than any other CEO in the world.

The role of a CEO is to increase shareholder value. Period.

How about a 3000% return in a couple of years, followed by a few years digesting those gains. And then another 180% return from the lows this Spring, adding an additional $800 Billion in market-cap...

Here is a chart showing the highest monthly close in company history. Highest Quarterly close in company history. And the highest annual close in the history of Tesla.

This is what winning looks like:

We're in the heart of whipsaw hunting season.

Now is the time.

Every year we see an extended trend, going into late December, that extends just a bit too much, and then completely unwinds once the new year begins and the big portfolio managers are back at their desks.

Look at what happened to US Treasury Bonds at the end of 2013. Look at what happened to Gold and precious metals at the end of 2015. And look at Large-cap Growth stocks at the end of 2022. 

These are just a few examples, just to give you an idea of the power of the end-of-year whipsaw.

So because of experiences like these throughout my investing career, I've made it a point to look for the leading candidates for this end-of-year period that I call "Whipsaw Hunting Season".

We're hunting for this year's epic whipsaw, like the bond ripper in 2014, the Rally in Precious metals in early 2016 and the historic returns of Large-cap Growth stocks in early 2023.

We don't know for sure until after the fact, but this year's leading candidate, to me, has to be the US Dollar.

We have an extended trend. The dumbest money in the world is betting on a stronger...

Silver relative to gold is the best intermarket ratio for precious metal investors to track.

The line goes up when the animal spirits are alive in the industry.

Earlier this year, the ratio broke a multi-year downtrend line. 

It looked poised to retest the neckline of a massive head and shoulders bottoming formation.

Instead, it's been a choppy mess in recent months, disappointing the gold bugs (including ourselves).

You need to see this zoomed-out chart of silver relative to gold:

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.

Nowadays, 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...

I've learned a lot of lessons over many years in the market and I've got war stories for days. 

But with what we do today, I just like to cut right to the chase. I'm going to share my worst defeats and hardest lessons so you can learn from them, just like I did, and hopefully sooner., 

We all have to learn one way or another. 

Today we're talking about the most important companies in America. But what exactly does that mean? Most important? 

It's so open ended and subjective. 

When I was a lot younger, call it 15-18 years ago, I hadn't learned to recognize the sum of the parts of the market. It hadn't hit me yet that it's a market of stocks. It's not just a "stock market". 

This really set me back at the time. I was being too narrow minded and focused on what the media was pointing me to. I wasn't running those numbers myself deciding what actually mattered and what was just noise. 

And when I finally understood that it takes stocks going up in prices to drive the indexes higher, I started to pay more attention to the prices of those stocks. 

But which stocks do we focus more of our...

It's been a historic bull market for stocks - One of the best periods to own equities in American history. I hope you participated along with us.

But believe it or not, the U.S. was not the biggest winner. There are other parts of the world that have actually outperformed U.S. equities - both the S&P500 and the Nasdaq100 returns. 

Look at the Tel Aviv 125 Index, for example, breaking out of this multi-year base to new all-time highs:

You may have heard by now. The so called, "Buffett Indicator" is flashing what we're being told are "warning signals" of an imminent market collapse.

It is the "Buffett Indicator" after all. And Warren Buffett is one of the all-time greats.

But let me fill you in on a little secret. The only people who actually care about this ridiculous excuse for a "market gauge" are journalists writing their glorified gossip columns and charlatans trying to do their best to scare you. 

That's it.

They claim that the "Buffett Indicator" is this magical signal based on a ratio between the total market-cap of U.S. stocks relative to U.S. GDP. 

It's so hilarious that even Charlie Munger came out and said that, "Just because Warren thought of something 20 years ago doesn't make it a law of nature. There is no natural correlation between GDP & Corporate Profits"
 

The "Buffett Indicator" is not a thing. Not even the guy who it's named after thinks it's relevant. 

Meanwhile, here's a chart of Berkshire Hathaway chugging along in a strong uptrend making higher highs and...

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.

Crude oil is setting up for a big move, and almost nobody is paying attention. In fact, sentiment in the energy trade couldn’t be more bearish right now. Everyone hates it, everyone. 

As Strazza said on our call yesterday, “Even Warren Buffett is losing money on this one.” That’s the vibe.

XLE keeps dropping, the bearish sentiment intensifies, yet producers are stepping in and buying. That’s a bullish signal if I’ve ever seen one.

There are plenty of reasons to start liking energy here, especially when headlines like these are flying under the radar of most U.S. investors. 

Sure, this crisis might trigger a short term pop, but I’m not in it for a flash move, I’m looking for a trend. 

And the pieces for a sustainable breakout are falling into place.

Let’s talk about seasonality. Most people think energy’s best season is summer. Makes sense, right? But the data tells a different story. Energy peaks in the summer, then drifts into bearish seasonals, until now.

The sweet spot for energy? It’s right...

Below is the 11th ASC Mastermind  Course. In this video, I dive into the world of mega-caps.

Mega-cap stocks are, by definition, the best stocks. You can't have a stock be worth hundreds of billions of dollars without it going up a lot. 

And yet, this does not mean that all mega-cap stocks go up consistently, or that once a stock reaches mega-cap status it stays there. 

We know this is not true. So we use our technical analysis framework to identify the best ones. This video will show you how we do it. 

Enjoy.