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

While the major stock market averages remain a mess, we continue to find new setups in individual stocks we want to buy.

From a market internals standpoint, it is encouraging that bullish chart patterns are emerging from a variety of sectors and industry groups.

Today, we have two industrials, a fast-food operator, and a chipmaker.

We already know that institutions and insiders like these names. And now - with these charts pressing on new highs, we like them too.

Let's take a look.

Mario Gabelli's GAMCO Investors is back on our list.

GAMCO filed a 13D revealing an increase in ownership in Sinclair Broadcast Group $SBGI from 8.32% to 9.34%.

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...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Monday night we held our March 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 Form 4 from Carl Icahn.

Icahn bought $30 million worth of Southwest Gas Holdings $SWX, increasing his ownership stake from 12.64% to 14.44%.

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Bihua Chen, the CEO of Cormorant Asset Management.

Chen revealed a purchase of $16.7 million in MoonLake Immunotherapeutics $MLTX.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as "a market of stocks."

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions. But there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club.

We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports.

Now, we're also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

Welcome to the Short Report.

We...

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Steven Klinsky, a director of New Mountain Finance Corporation $NMFC.

Klinsky reported a purchase of roughly $1.1 million.

This is the video recording of the March 22, 2023, Inside Scoop Weekly Strategy Session.

The largest insider buy on today’s list comes in a Form 4 filing by Joe Craft, president and CEO of Alliance Resource Partners $ARLP.

Craft reported a purchase of roughly $2.7 million.

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 back to Under the Hood, where we're covering all the action for the week ended March 17, 2023. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated 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 options activity, or...