It's beginning to feel more and more like last week's volatility event was just a blip on the radar of a bull market. Great!

And if that's the case, then we'll get rewarded for positioning in the next set of leaders that carry the market higher. Rotation, baby!

So with this in mind, we're going to go after a potential short-squeeze candidate today.

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. New position in XLB.
2. No adjustments are needed today.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.

Let’s dig in!

We use sentiment to help put the behavior of the stock market into context.

When looking at markets, it's easy to see what stocks are doing. All you have to do is look.

But what are people thinking? That's what we want to know.

When everyone is bullish, it's hard for stocks to go up in price at the same rate. When everyone turns bearish, that's historically a great time to be putting money to work.

Coming into August, sentiment was running hot. The VIX was at 10, the put/call ratio was muted, newsletter writers were giving us some of their most bullish readings of all-time, and our sentiment composite was as complacent as it's ever been.

Boy did that change quickly.

We just saw the largest week over week spike in bears among individual investors since 2022, just as this bull market was getting started.

Look at that spike this week:

The most significant insider transactions on today's list are from Energy Transfer LP $ET co-founder Kelcy Warren and co-CEO Thomas Long.

Together, these insiders bought $47.35 million worth of ET shares, as per Form 4 filings.

Liberty 77 Fund L.P. revealed an acquisition of 2,054,228 shares of Lions Gate Entertainment Corp $LGF, equivalent to $17,185,962.

Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from August 13, 2024:

The CEOs of Elanco Animal Health Incorporated $ELAN, Lyft Inc $LYFT, and MRC Global Inc $MRC filed Form 4s disclosing purchases of their own company’s stock.

The executive chairman of The GEO Group Inc $GEO reported a $3 million purchase in a Form 4.

Director Thomas C. Erb revealed a purchase of 2,000 shares of the cereal maker in a Form 4.

POST is in a structural uptrend, as the stock has been stair-stepping higher ever since it...

These are the registration details for our LIVE Mid-month Conference Call for Premium Members of All Star Charts.

Our Live Call will be held on Monday August 19th @ 6PM ET. As always, if you cannot make the call live, the video and slides will be archived and published here along with every other live call since 2015.

Here are the details for Monday evening:

Our choice of investment vehicle in the crypto space isn't just limited to altcoins and tokens, but there is also of course a wide variety of publicly-listed companies to choose from.

I've talked at length about the Bitcoin mining stocks, albeit less in recent times. While many of these stocks have broken down, there could be an opportunity shaping up in many of these stocks.

Last week saw an incredible amount of investor panic.

Often, you want to take the other side of this emotion. But before we do this with any conviction, we need to see market trends shape up in more bullish fashion.

We entered Bitcoin long on bear's inability to hold the breakdown below 56,000 and Ethereum's retest of 2,000. But apart from this, I'm still maintaining a neutral short and intermediate term directional bias in the crypto markets. I would like to see prices shape up more definitively, which can take some time following corrections such as these.

Our longer-term bias is still firmly bullish.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Stocks with high short interest are proving resilient, even in challenging market conditions, as the bears struggle to drive down even the most hated names.

With this in mind, it's time for another Freshly Squeezed report.

Here's our approach:

We find the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. Then, we monitor these names for signs of upward momentum. Once that momentum kicks in, we ride them higher as the bears get squeezed.

We got fresh short data on Friday, so let's dive in and talk about it.

Our scan is quite simple. It is designed to identify stocks with the most aggressive short positions.

When a stock is shorted, it means incremental buyers are waiting in the wings to close out their bearish bets.

We love this, as new buyers are the one true catalyst for higher prices.

When shorts are proven wrong, they become buyers of the stock. In many cases, this happens as momentum flows into these names and fuels massive short-covering rallies.

For this reason, we pair short-interest data with short-term momentum overlays, as this...

In today’s Daily Digest, we’ll review the following:

1. New position in XLP.
2. No adjustments are needed today.
3. No exits since the last report.
4. Current status of open campaigns.

Let’s dig in!

Despite any selling pressure in stocks over the past few weeks, the Nasdaq Inc continues to push to new 52-week highs, again.

This is a trend that has been in place.

The Capital Markets stocks, which are part of the Financials universe, continue to be leaders in this bull market.

The most significant insider buy on today’s list comes via a Form 4 filing by Jerry Jones, the owner, president, and general manager of Dallas Cowboys.

Jones made an additional purchase of $25 million in Comstock Resources $CRK.

Cathie Wood’s infamous ARK Investment Management filed an initial 13G for 10x Genomics Inc $TXG revealing a 10.75% stake.

Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from August 12, 2024:

In another Form 4, Greenoaks Capital Partners LLC revealed a $21 million purchase in the South Korean e-commerce company Coupang Inc $CPNG.

MFN Partners revealed an initial stake of 6.30% in CNX Resources Corporation $CNX.

CPNG is on the verge of completing a primary trend reversal, as price reclaimed a critical level of interest:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Don’t believe the headlines.

It’s not all doom and gloom for the market.

Plenty of assets are trending higher, mainly those related to precious metals.

Gold is challenging all-time highs. Silver is catching a bid. Palladium is digging in at former support. (So much for those seven-year lows.)

And gold and silver mining stocks are ripping…

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 highs in order...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Don’t believe the headlines.

It’s not all doom and gloom for the market.

Plenty of assets are trending higher, mainly those related to precious metals.

Gold is challenging all-time highs. Silver is catching a bid. Palladium is digging in at former support. (So much for those seven-year lows.)

And gold and silver mining stocks are ripping…

When the storm is upon us, it's too late to purchase hurricane insurance. Nobody will sell it to you. Of if they will, the prices will be obscene.

Last Monday, when the VIX printed a 65 -- it was too late to buy downside protection. If you did, you were asking for your face to be ripped off. And it likely was.

Now that the dust has settled a bit, volatility has abated significantly, and the relative winners and loses sorted themselves out, we're seeing some good setups to position ourselves for any additional downside action.

Additionally, it offers me a good chance to balance out some of the risks I still have on the books in my long positions.

On today's Flow Show, me at Steve Strazza talked about a good setup in Advanced Micro Devices $AMD that fits our needs.