From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

Today’s most significant insider transaction is another Form 4 filing by Marcus Lemonis, director of Overstock.com $OSTK.

Lemonis reported an OSTK purchase worth $595,933.

OSTK also saw bullish flow in the options market.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

Today’s most significant insider transaction is another Form 4 filing by Marcus Lemonis, director of Overstock.com $OSTK.

Lemonis reported an OSTK purchase worth $595,933.

OSTK also saw bullish flow in the options market.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended October 27, 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 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 simply...

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...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Investors love a good gold debate.

"Is it a commodity, or is it a currency?"

I’d argue it's both.

But, today, I want to focus on gold as a currency in light of a series of new all-time highs versus fiat overseas.

The Junior Gold Miners appear to be temporarily stuck in the rocks. And with juicy options premiums to sell, we will take advantage of the range with a delta-neutral credit spread.

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Investors love a good gold debate.

“Is it a commodity, or is it a currency?”

I’d argue it’s both.

But, today, I want to focus on gold as a currency in light of a series of new all-time highs versus fiat overseas.

Gold priced in euro terms closed last week at its highest level in history.

The new all-time highs follow a breakout from an 18-month consolidation within an ongoing uptrend – an uptrend that commenced in March 2020.

I expect another leg higher for gold priced in the euro and the British pound. 

Check out gold versus the pound:

Gold priced in GBP resembles the gold/EUR chart, just not as clean.

Gold completed a decade-long base versus the pound in the spring of 2020. And like gold priced in US dollars, it consolidated for over two years.

The main difference: Gold priced in USD continues to contend with overhead supply while the path of least resistance leads higher for gold priced in British pounds.

It’s the same story for the Japanese yen.

Before you start throwing tomatoes, here’s what’s not making new highs versus...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

Today’s most significant insider transaction is another Form 4 filing by the executive vice president and CFO of M&T Bank Corporation $MTB, who announced a purchase worth $555,217.

The same MTB executive reported an MTB purchase in early June worth approximately $1.2 million.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

Today’s most significant insider transaction is another Form 4 filing by the executive vice president and CFO of M&T Bank Corporation $MTB, who announced a purchase worth $555,217.

The same MTB executive reported an MTB purchase in early June worth approximately $1.2 million.

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.

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Everywhere you look, commodities argue a strong case for the next supercycle.  

Live cattle, feeder cattle, sugar, cocoa, and orange juice are all amid historic rallies. Even gold’s resilience in an environment where it should struggle speaks to an underlying demand for raw materials.     

Well, perhaps not everywhere…

While orange juice busts loose on a parabolic advance and cocoa rips toward all-time highs, copper futures barely exceed their year-to-date lows.

On the bright side, it stopped falling.

Check out copper digging in at key pivot lows from earlier this spring:

I see a potential double-bottom taking shape.

Yes, it’s still trading below a multi-month downtrend line. Yes, momentum...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

It’s beginning to feel an awful lot like 2022.

Rates and the dollar are on pause, bonds can’t stop falling, and the major equity indexes are violating critical support levels.

But the 2s10s spread raised serious questions this week as it hit fresh 52-week highs. 

So, is the market environment changing?

Let’s find out…

Check out the 2s10s spread challenging zero from below:

An inverted yield curve (widely measured by the 2s10s and 3mo.-10yr. spreads) has cast a pall over capital markets, promising an economic recession for over a year. Yet the US economy remains strong.

The curve is now flattening to levels not witnessed since the summer of 2022.

Perhaps it will continue to steepen in the coming months. On the other hand, this could be nothing more...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

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.

Here's this week's list:

...

If/when the market can find it's footing, today's trade is in a name that I'd like to get aggressively bullish in for a long-term bet.

In the meantime, I'm not ready to be aggressive yet, but there is an opportunity for us to get paid to wait with a conservatively bullish bet that gives us room to be wrong.

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos

Today’s list is a short one.

A director of Five Star Bancorp $FSBC revealed a purchase of $101,019 in its latest Form 4.

We're over 3 and half months into a stock market correction that I keep being told is just the beginning of a major crash.

I'm just not seeing it.

This continues to look like a regular seasonal correction that we've seen so many times around this time of the year.

In other words, if the market was NOT correcting like it has been, that would actually be very unusual.

Here's what each of the sectors and major indexes have done since the new 52-week highs list peaked in July:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to The Junior International Hall of Famers.

With the goal of finding more bullish setups, we have decided to expand one of our favorite scans and broaden our regular coverage of the largest US-listed international stocks, or ADRs.

This scan is composed of the next 100 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 100 and are thus covered by the International Hall of Famers universe.

Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original International Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.

Let's dive right in and check out what these future big boys are up to.

This is our Junior International Hall of Famers list:

Click table to enlarge view