Monday night we held our August Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.

Let’s get right into it!

The most significant insider transaction on today’s list comes in a 13D from Carl Icahn.

Icahn increased his ownership stake in the natural gas services company Southwest Gas Holdings $SWX from 7.6% to 8.7%.

My friend Patrick just invited me to talk markets on his Trendlines Over Headlines video series.

I had a blast chatting about some of my favorite charts and what we’re seeing in crypto, the major averages, small-caps, crude, and a lot more. We covered a lot of ground, hitting on some of the most important market themes right now.

You can watch it here:

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Dividend Aristocrats are easily some of the most desirable investments on Wall Street.

These are the names that have increased dividends for at least 25 years, providing steadily increasing income to long-term-minded shareholders.

As you can imagine, the companies making up this prestigious list are some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Johnson & Johnson are just a few of the household names making the cut.

Here at All Star Charts, we like to stay ahead of the curve. That's why we're turning our attention to the future aristocrats.

In an effort to seek out the next generation of the cream-of-the-crop dividend plays, we're curating a list of stocks that have raised their payouts every year for five to nine years.

We call them the Young Aristocrats, and the idea is that these are "stocks that pay you to make money."

Imagine if years of consistent dividend growth and high momentum and relative strength had a baby, leaving you with the best of the emerging dividend giants that are outperforming the averages.

By adding our...

The stock making its way to today's post is part of the Defense sector that has been performing well for a while now.

And guess what? We have a breakout! Do you know which stock we're talking about?

We retired our "Five Bull Market Barometers" in 2020 to make room for a new weekly post that's focused on the three most important charts for the week ahead.

This is that post, so let's jump into this week's edition.

Elliott Management is at it again.

Following the revelation of large stakes in Paypal $PYPL and Pinterest $PINS just last month, the activist fund was in the news again on Monday.

This time it’s targeting the healthcare space, with a large investment in Cardinal Health $CAH.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like duck, then it's probably not a chicken.

That's how I look at what is potentially year 3 of a new bull market.

Look at all the most important cycle bottoms in stock market history.

You'll notice the powerful thrust in year 1, followed by a messy digestion of those gains in year 2. And then all those bull markets resumed in year 3:

This is the video recording of the August 2022 Mid-month Conference Call.

We discussed:

• Seasonally, this is the time to buy stocks
• S&P500 above key support
• More new highs than new lows for the first time in 2022
• Is Year 3 about to get started? What do other Year 3s look like?
• Average NYSE stock is up 33%, average Nasdaq stock is up 42%
• Financials Bounce Off Pre-GFC highs
• Russell2000 & Nasdaq100 above AVWAP off Covid lows
• Gold & Silver Miners down near multi-year relative lows
• A little Dollar weakness sparked a huge risk-on rally
• New multi-month highs for Discretionary vs Staples
• Apple highest S&P500 weighting of any stock ever
• Free ride in Facebook through the end of the year
• Healthcare plans setting up: $UNH $HUM $CNC $CI
• Breadth Expansion in Industrials
• Indian Banks are the leaders in Banking
• Energy stocks below overhead supply - work to do
• Which coal stocks are we buying
• Lithium continues to act strong, in US and outside US
• Defensive Sectors...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

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, 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...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

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 the stock is about to move in...