From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It was a slow day today, as you might expect on a Wednesday after a Tuesday holiday in July, and I believe the rest of the week will be this way.

Looks and feels like most traders have taken the week off.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

The new highs list continues to grow as more and more stocks resolve higher from their consolidations.

The word “rotation” is being thrown around a lot these days as value and cyclical groups have risen to the top of the leaderboard over short timeframes.

While the action can be categorized as rotation, I think a better description for what’s taking place is a broadening of the current rally.

Every single sector was higher in the month of June. So it’s not that money is coming out of the leaders as much as it is going into the laggards at an increasing rate.

At the end of the day it’s just semantics. What this expansion in participation means for investors is more bullish chart patterns and more long opportunities.

Let’s talk about some new ones from our Hot Corner universe.

Today’s Hot List is a short one.

Director Richard F. LaRoche filed a Form 4 revealing a purchase of 2,100 shares of National HealthCare Corporation $NHC.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

The indices are lower this morning.

We have the release of the minutes from the most recent Fed meeting at 2:00 p.m. ET.

More and more "things" keep making new highs.

This is the sort of thing that happens in bull markets.

You can see Ethereum and Bitcoin both finding support the past year near former resistance levels from the highs in its prior cycle at the end of 2017:

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 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 Kimmy Sokoloff

I pointed out in the Live Trading Room how the market might pop first thing in the morning then flatline.

It did just that.

The most significant transaction on today's list comes in a Form 4 filing by White Mountains Insurance Group LTD, who revealed a purchase of $59.1 million in MediaAlpha Inc $MAX.

White Mountains increased its ownership stake in MAX to 37.50%.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

Happy Fourth of July!

After Friday's big gap up, the market is kind of flat this morning.

As investors, the first step in deciding whether to buy something or not is to identify the direction in which price is heading.

So many investors out there choose to skip this step.

I never understood that.

We know for a fact that asset prices trend. We know. We all have the data. It's just a fact.

So if we know that, then why wouldn't we begin our process by identifying which direction price is heading?

"Should we buy this stock?"

Well, is it going up in price? Down? Or sideways?

Trend recognition is also really helpful in identifying the type of market environment we're in.

"Are the majority of stocks going up? Down? Or sideways?"

At the end of every month we get a ...

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Alfonso Depablos @AlfCharts

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...