From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts
We love our bottoms-up scans here at All Star Charts. We tend to get really creative when making new universes as we want to be sure they will deliver us the best opportunities the market has to offer.
However, when it comes to our latest project, it couldn't be any simpler!
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 stocks.
Welcome to TheJunior Hall of Famers.
This scan is composed of the next 150 largest stocks by market cap, those that come after the top 150 and are thus covered by the Hall of Famers universe. Many of these names will someday graduate and join our original Hall Of Famers list. The idea here is to catch these big trends as early on as possible.
There is no need to overcomplicate things. Market cap is a quality filter at the end of the day. It only grows if price is rising. That's good enough for us.
One of the better indicators of a healthy bull market is when you see Consumer Discretionary stocks (the things we want) outperforming Consumer Staples stocks (the things we need).
The ratio between Discretionary and Staples is one we look at during bull markets, to confirm what the indexes are doing, as well as in bear markets to find divergences that may turn before the indexes themselves (see '08-'09).
This really has been one of the more reliable indicators for many years.
And wouldn't you know it, as pessimism spikes, volatility pops, and the permabears begin to pound their chest again, Discretionaries are putting in higher lows relative to Staples.
This is classic sector rotation we see during healthy market environments:
This has to be one of the world's most important trends right now. How could it not be?
You hear all this nonsense about the S&P493 and how it's only 7 stocks going up.
But those are just lies. That's not how the market works, and that is certainly not what's been happening this year.
The real trend here is in the outperformance of the largest companies, particularly mega-cap growth, relative to other indexes with more diversified sector exposure and market-caps.
This is the Nasdaq100 making new all-time highs relative to the much broader Russell3000 Index: