Expert technical analysis of financial markets by JC Parets
Late last week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reported the purchase of a variety of deep in-the-money call options in Apple $AAPL and Microsoft $MSFT.
The contracts expire in March and June of next year.
Over the past few years, Pelosi has made some very profitable trades using in-the-money calls in names such as Tesla $TSLA and Nvidia $NVDA.
This is the recording from the June 2022 Conference Call for Members of the Allstarcharts India! Before getting into individual stock ideas in India, we’re going to first start with the global macro perspective. Once we identify the direction of the underlying trends from a structural and broader view, then we’ll dive into the NIFTY Indexes on both longer-term and short-term timeframe. We want to look at Large-caps, Small-caps and everything in between before getting into the Sector and Industries themselves like Energy, Banks and Pharma.
This is when we finally break things down to the individual stock scenario with identified risk vs reward opportunities. That is what this is all about – aligning ourselves in the direction of the underlying trend while at the same time identifying where the risk is to make sure the potential reward is skewed exponentially in our favor. You will find that throughout this process we discuss Momentum, Fibonacci and Relative Strength. I encourage you to check out the Education Section so you know exactly where I’m coming from when you hear me mention these tools.
Here is the video in full:
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 new highs in order to focus on the best players.
But, instead of all-time highs, we’re sorting by 52-week highs these days, as we don’t want to discriminate against energy or other cyclical stocks.
The goal is still to catch the strongest names while they’re small and have serious upside potential. If any of these stocks ever climb the ranks to the big leagues, the returns could be huge.
We’re looking at up to 10x moves just to break into large-cap land!
Let’s dive into this week’s report and see what’s happening in some of the hottest stocks in the Minor Leagues.
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 their direction and make them a pretty penny.
Then we flip through our list of stocks flashing unusual activity and pick the best setups using many of the same technical filters we do for our other scans.
And, just like that, we’ll follow the money flow and fatten our own pockets along with some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
We held our June Monthly Strategy Session last Thursday night. Premium Members can click here to access the recording and the chartbook.
Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.
By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends.
This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.
With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.
Last week, Carl Icahn filed a 13D revealing an ownership position of 5,089,703 shares in the natural gas services company Southwest Gas Holdings $SWX.
Icahn first purchased the stock in the second half of 2021. After a recent acquisition of an additional 2 million shares, Icahn’s total interest is 7.6%.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza
From a technical perspective, this rocky market is offering us limited opportunities on the long side.
While we continue to approach most equities with caution, insiders are buying into the volatility aggressively. According to data from Whalewisdom, the ratio of insider buys versus sales hasn’t been this high since early 2020.
While this is bullish, we still aren’t seeing much in terms of price confirmation.
Something we are seeing is plenty of options to choose from on our Inside Scoop list.
But while insiders are buying hand over first, the current environment warrants us to be far more selective. We only want to be in those setups that are offering the best risk/reward opportunities.
This week, we have our eyes on a mid-cap materials name that is coiling just beneath all-time highs.
