Let me remind everyone what a bad idea it is to sell naked calls.
We don't do it.
I often want to do it.
Many times, it makes sense to do it.
But the answer is always no.
It's just not worth it.
Go ask around. The old timers will tell you.
"Don't do it kid"
But that doesn't mean that as a philosophy, we shouldn't approach the market with that sort of "naked call selling" mentality, at least for the foreseeable future.
As many of you know, something we've been working on internally is using various bottom-up tools and scans to complement our top-down approach.
It's really been working for us!
One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega-cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn't just end there.
We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point...
So Santa was a no-show this season. The Nasdaq 100, the S&P 500, and Papa Dow are still managing to post positive monthly returns heading into January’s close.
That's an auspicious data point for the rest of the year.
Beneath the surface, last quarter’s laggards are also playing catch up to the leadership groups…
I understand that some people are lazy and don't like to count.
I get that.
Also, journalists are NOT in the business of telling you the truth. The truth is just a commodity at this point, and that's no longer a secret. Word's gotten out. So it's either gross sensationalism or false information to get you to consume their content.
And then, of course, you have your standard charlatans who need to cherry pick data and manipulate anchor points so that they don't look as foolish for missing this entire bull market.
So what ends up happening is that if you're told something enough times, and you haven't actually done the work, you start to believe it.
"It's only Tech stocks that are driving this market"
Sound familiar?
But for those of you who actually take the time to look, you know it obviously isn't true.
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 now, 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 to...
From the Desk of Steve Strazza and Alfonso Depablos
The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a series of Form 4 filings by Elias Sabo, director and CEO of Compass Group Diversified Holdings LLC $CODI.
Sabo reported an aggregate CODI purchase worth roughly $2 million.
Last week, we held our January 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.
Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 150 largest US-based stocks.
These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.
It has all the big names and more.
It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Click here to check it out.
The Hall of Famers is simple.
We take our list of 150 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.
Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.
Here’s this week’s list:
*Click table to enlarge view
We filter out any laggards that are down -5% or more relative to the S&P 500 over the trailing month.
Then, we sort the remaining names by their proximity to new 52-week highs.