Speculative technology stocks have been mooning in recent weeks. Many of these stocks have rallied over 100% in the last month alone.
Today, we're outlining a technology stock that rallied 700% in half a year after pivoting from blockchain infrastructure to high-performance computing. In other words, they pivoted from crypto to AI.
After consolidating for over a year, the stock put the finishing touches on a textbook basing pattern last week and is beginning a fresh leg higher.
But it's not just the chart that has us excited... the short sellers have gotten way too greedy, and we're going to exploit their weakness.
According to the National Retail Federation, 197 million Americans shopped over the 5 days from Thanksgiving weekend through Cyber Monday. There are only216 million Americans over 15 years old in the country. Even allowing for double-counting, that’s a good turn-out for a fake holiday with unexceptional discounts.
Who won?
Well according to our Retail and Consumer expert Jeff Macke,
"Abercrombie won the mall. Walmart won Discount. William Sonoma and Dick’s Sporting Goods have won Home and Sports so hard they’re running out of chains to compete with. Amazon is winning the world and barely seems to care about (or profit from) retail at all."
The S&P500, Nasdaq100 and Global100 Index each made new all-time highs yesterday.
This is among many other stocks, sectors and indexes around the world that are also making new cycle highs.
We've been buying stocks very aggressively, of course, because historically it pays much better to own stocks during bull markets vs doing the alternative.
We've gone back and done the work. It's just math.
Those investors with too much cash, or too few stocks in their portfolios, have been paying the consequences.
The pushback I get, and have been getting over the past couple of years, tends to revolve around valuation and how stocks are "too expensive".
I find that to be a hilarious reason to avoid buying stocks during a bull market.
Common excuses for fighting this powerful trend include, but are not limited to:
The 4th Highest Trailing P/E for the S&P500 in 124 years
US Stock Market Concentration is at a record high, when you add up the top 10 companies as a % of Total S&P500 market-cap
The New York Stock Exchange held its annual Tree Lighting Event this week. It was spectacular, as always.
But we're not here to talk about pine trees or LED lights. We're here to talk about commodities.
The NYSE has an array of vehicles to trade, most being equities.
They also have several commodity funds, which happen to offer asymmetric risk versus reward opportunities at current levels. Let's talk about them.
Our first setup is the Invesco DB Agriculture Fund $DBA:
The top five holdings are cocoa (14.8%), coffee (13%), live cattle (11.9%), sugar (11.6%), and corn (11.4%), several of which we've recently discussed.
It was another wild week in the market. Let's wrap it up with some portfolio maintenance and general thoughts about how we made out.
First, congrats to everyone who hit big with SoundHound.
These outlier trades are actually common with our system. And we need them because they pay for all the zeros.
If you let it ride, and you are up 25x today, fantastic.
If you didn’t. Pay attention and learn from this. It is so important to let our winners run. This is why we sell the double so religiously. It puts our minds at ease, and with the comfort of knowing we can’t lose, we are more likely to let positions go.
In the case of SOUN, the calls were cheap, so we could own more than just 2 contracts. Larger position sizes like this make our job easier. Use it to your advantage and scale out on strength in situations like this.
If we can consistently sell doubles, we should be able to hit big trades...
Seven of the ten biggest-ever options volume days have been in 2024, with the other three in 2023, according to this report in Traders Magazine.
It goes on to say: "...numbers that would be considered spikes ten or even five years ago are more like a current-day new normal."
I wouldn't have it any other way.
The growing popularity of options trading makes sense to me. No other product offers so much dynamic flexibility for traders to craft unique ways to express market opinions.
No other product gives us the ability to define our risks absolutely, while positioning ourselves with leverage to participate in theoretically unlimited gains.
We've seen some fast moving breakouts during the recent stage of this bull market cycle.
I'm not calling for the bull market to end. In fact, I think it continues for a while longer. But its highly likely the pace of prices increases slows.
With this in mind, today's trade is the perfect kind of play for such an environment
I was wondering myself. So I asked Retail and Consumer expert Jeff Macke to shoot over some results.
His answer?
"Abercrombie won the mall. Walmart won Discount. William Sonoma and Dick’s Sporting Goods have won Home and Sports so hard they’re running out of chains to compete with. Amazon is winning the world and barely seems to care about (or profit from) retail at all."
Man is he good.
Look at this chart of Abercrombie breaking out of this multi-decade base to new all-time highs:
Whenever I want to know what's going on in retail, Jeff is the guy I ask.
Our International Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.
We've also sprinkled in some of the largest ADRs from countries that did not make the market cap cut.
These stocks range from some well-known mega-cap multinationals such as Toyota Motor and Royal Dutch Shell to some large-cap global disruptors such as Sea Ltd and Shopify.
It's got all the big names and more–but only those that are based outside the US. You can find all the largest US stocks on our original Hall of Famers list.
The beauty of these scans is really in their simplicity.
We take the largest names each week and then apply technical filters in a way that the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.
Based on the market environment, we can also flip the scan on its head and filter for weakness.
Let's dive in and take a look at some of the most important stocks from around the world.
Below is the 10th ASC Mastermind Lab. In this video, I'm joined by Brian Shannon. Brian is the founder of Alphatrends, and also wrote two of the most influential technical analysis books: Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes, and Maximum Trading Gains With Anchord VWAP.
Brian Shannon has written two of the most influential recent books on technical analysis, and moving averages are at the core of both.
In this Mastermind Lab, Brian and I discuss the flaws of traditional moving averages, and why VWAP is itself essentially another form of moving average.
Moving averages are generally meant to allow investors to analyze assets across multiple timeframes, and Brian literally wrote the book on multiple timeframe analysis. So when I want to talk about this stuff, Brian is one of the first guys I call.
The most significant transaction on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing featuring both the CEO and the CFO of Dorchester Minerals $DMLP.
Together, they purchased almost $1 million worth of their own company's stock.
When two top executives with the deepest insight into the company’s operations and financial health simultaneously make significant insider purchases, it indicates the stock is undervalued or that upcoming developments could positively impact the performance.
Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from December 5, 2024:
In another Form 4, director Dirk J. Debbink bought 1,000 shares, equivalent to $157,188 in Cincinnati Financial Corporation $CINF.
We only have 7 trading days left of this current breadth thrust regime.
That's Monday week!
The breadth thrust regime I am talking about is when 55% or more of the S&P 500 stocks are at 20-day highs, and once this is triggered, the regime lasts one year!
Here’s the chart:
(right-click and open image in new tab to zoom in)
Let's break down what the chart shows:
The gray shading highlights the breadth thrust regime.
The black line in the bottom panel shows the percentage of S&P 500 stocks at 20-day highs.
The red line in the bottom panel is the trigger for a breadth thrust.
The blue line in the top panel is the S&P 500 index price.
The Takeaway: A breadth thrust regime points to healthy leadership conditions and indicates that the stock market may more easily move up and to the right.
I rely heavily on the breadth thrust regime. It’s not an all-clear signal or a guarantee that the market...
Traveling is one of life's greatest joys—getting to know new places, cultures, and food never gets old.
I've been lucky to visit some incredible spots like the UK, the south of France, Chicago, San Diego, Madrid, Rome and my all-time favorite: New York City. As a 27-year-old Venezuelan, I feel that place is just electric.
But travel isn't just fun—it's also a hot theme in the market right now.
Travel stocks have been some of the biggest winners since the market bottomed this summer, showing how strong the consumer economy is.
These are the kinds of stocks that thrive when the economy and markets are doing well.
The Defiance Hotel, Airline, and Cruise ETF $CRUZ does a great job of illustrating the recent strength in this area.
The ETF has been ripping in a near-vertical line in recent months, breaking out of a massive base to fresh all-time highs.
Speculative growth has been one of the hottest corners of the market in recent months.
At the group level, it’s a brand new uptrend for this risk-on basket of stocks.
The ARK Investment flagship fund ARKK is my favorite barometer for the spec-tech space, and it just completed a trend reversal with a bang.
But it isn’t alone.
A growing list of indexes are completing textbook reversals and embarking on new mark-up phases.
Alfonso pointed out the Retail Index $XRT as a good example of this theme the other day. Retail stocks are resolving from a rounding bottom and hitting their highest level in years.
Retail is a heavily bifurcated space. There have been some big cycle winners already. And there is an even...
Today we held our Breakout Multiplier Weekly Strategy Session. If you’re not a member, click here to join us.
We do this every Thursday at 11 a.m. ET for Breakout Multiplier members, where we discuss new trades ideas, open positions and answer questions from the chat.
One of the key benefits of buying cheap call options on low-priced stocks is the flexibility they provide when managing and scaling out of positions. This becomes especially valuable when we hit a big winner.
Take our $SOUN 1/17/25 $7 calls, for example. We...