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 now, 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 order to...
The silver-to-gold ratio went from posting fresh six-month highs last Monday to hitting sixteen-month highs by Friday’s close.
Silver is ripping on absolute and relative terms, and this can mean only one thing:
Risk-on!
Check out Silver driving home an explosive resolution following a successful pullback:
The pullback is another name for a retest – a common feature following a significant breakout. (Some use the term “throwback” to distinguish the action following an upside resolution from a “pullback” that displaces a downside resolution. But they’re all pullbacks to me.)
Interestingly, top-flight international soccer uses the same term for a particular goal-scoring tactic—a player takes the ball to the touchline and then passes to a teammate at the top of the box, who waits to direct the ball into the back of the net.
Premier League Champions Manchester City and Runners-up Arsenal successfully applied the pullback in a match last week. (One can only hope Liverpool’s incoming manager, Arne Slot, is taking...
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 Uber and Crowdstrike.
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.
Now, silver is posting fresh decade highs, uranium names are triggering buy signals, and Dr. Copper is slicing through overhead supply.
Plus, increasing copper demand has caught the smart money offside.
Check out copper futures with the Commitment of Traders profile in the lower pane:
Fading commercial (smart money) positioning tends to produce pain.
But even the strongest hands can find themselves on the wrong side of a trade. It happened to commercial hedgers back in 2020, and it’s happening again today.
Copper experienced an explosive rally, adding a dollar-fifty as surging demand forced strong hands to unwind their shorts in 2020 and 2021.
If gold is heading to 5K, copper is making its way to eight bucks – but first, it must...
Gold did its part earlier in the spring, paving the way for the rest of the metals space.
Now, silver is posting fresh decade highs, uranium names are triggering buy signals, and Dr. Copper is slicing through overhead supply.
Plus, increasing copper demand has caught the smart money offside.
Check out copper futures with the Commitment of Traders profile in the lower pane:
Fading commercial (smart money) positioning tends to produce pain.
But even the strongest hands can find themselves on the wrong side of a trade. It happened to commercial hedgers back in 2020, and it’s happening again today.
Copper experienced an explosive rally, adding a dollar-fifty as surging demand forced strong hands to unwind their shorts in 2020 and 2021.
If Gold is heading to 5K, Copper is making its way to eight bucks – but first, it must exceed our rough initial target of 5.95.
Here’s a closer look at copper’s multi-year base breakout:
Dr. Copper is blowing through those former highs from 2021 and 2022 in a similar fashion to the 2020 rip-roaring rally....
Regardless of duration, the following bond charts present an identical tactical approach.
Two key themes dominate these trade setups: entry points designated by price reclaiming the February 2024 lows and initial targets set at the December 2023 highs.
Of course, there’s always an exception…
Check out the US 30-year T-bond futures:
Like the following charts, we can measure our risk at a key pivot low from late February.
I like buying T-bond futures against 117’27. But instead of targeting the December 27th high of 125’30, I prefer to aim at a critical shelf of former lows at approximately 122’30.
Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the two weeks ended May 10, 2024. This report is published bi-weekly, in rotation 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...