Back in the late 1800s, Charlie Dow was a journalist in Springfield Massachusetts.

His job was to write about the stock market. But when he would go knocking on doors asking companies questions, they would tell him, "Our business is none of your business".

So how could poor Charlie do his job then?

Well, he concluded that there was a better way to do this.

He recognized that there were a select group of stocks that, "Made the goods", and he called those the Industrials.

And then there was the group of companies that, "Delivered those goods". At the time, they were the Railroads.

If one of these groups of stocks were going up in price, and so was the other group, then things are moving in a positive direction together. Those were good signs for the market.

It was specifically when one of those groups were...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to Under the Hood, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended February 16, 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...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Gold’s beginning to attract some attention.

Not because it was shooting higher but because it kept trading while most respectable markets closed in observance of Presidents Day.

US stocks, grains, and other god-fearing commodities did not trade. So investors needed something to talk about other than Bitcoin. 

But as gold stole the headlines, no one was talking about platinum.

I like that platinum isn’t attracting too many eyeballs right now.

Here’s why…

And we're back...

The new all-time highs in the S&P500 and Nasdaq100 earlier this month have been well documented.

What they don't tell you is that the equally-weighted versions of those market-cap weighted indexes are just now getting back to their late 2021 highs.

They never even broke out. In fact, they're finally just getting back to where they started.

We discussed this yesterday and what we're doing about it. I highly encourage you to watch yesterday's Emergency State of the Markets Livestream.

Here's the S&P500 Equally-weighted Index running into those former highs:

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 Friday February 23rd @ 3PM 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 Friday afternoon:

As usual, the market is giving investors a set of mixed signals.

That's par for the course, isn't it?

Let's get into it.

First up:

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 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:

...

From the Desk of Ian Culley @IanCulley

Naming a newborn is tough.

Who is this tiny person? And who will they aspire to be?

These are impossible questions to answer.

As you can imagine, the wifey and I were stumped upon meeting our baby girl earlier this week. 

Every time I looked into her eyes, I could hear her plead, “Give me a name, boy!” A situation ten-year-old Ian never fathomed – even while watching The NeverEnding Story. 

After a few days of deliberation, hours of snuggles, and the casual piercing gaze, I could only discern one thing: she smelled good. 

So I offered up “Coco.” 

It was on our shortlist. Plus, will we ever forget this year’s epic rally in cocoa futures? I certainly won’t.

Well, we ultimately landed on Cora, which suits her in some indescribable way.

But if I hadn’t cut technology this week so I could focus on my girls, I might have thrown "Cotton" into the ring.

I mean – it’s the “fabric of our lives!”

Check...

Volatility continues to pick up. We're seeing bigger prices swings for stocks, in BOTH directions.

But of all the things I'm seeing out there, this former darling, and market bellwether absolutely has my attention.

On Thursday, Apple went out a yet another new low relative to the rest of the market. Here's what Apple looks like vs QQQ:

This is a completed top and potentially disastrous break.

The next chart below is what Apple looks like vs the S&P500 and the absolute price laid over it.

$AAPL stock has been falling all year, despite what some of the indexes have done during this period.

It's not just the declining new highs list that we've seen the past 2 months, the next question is do we see an expansion in new lows?