May 19: US Equity Futures are red, but we may have found some runners

May 19, 2022


Jeffrey Cohen, Investment Advisor Representative
US Advanced Computing Infrastructure, Inc.

• If you are asking yourself whether Is XYZ stock a good buy at $ABC.DE?
• It might be, but the odds are that the price will drop further in the next 1-2 weeks.
• FOMO is a cost effective strategy in this market. It doesn’t hurt to wait before you buy a downtrodden stock.

We are looking for potential runners today (the bottom line) as well as doing a top-line market scan.


Top-line:

Yield curve still positively sloped, but yields are down. Short UST bills yield less, lowers bank account interest. 30 year UST bonds had a pretty big drop, almost 10 basis points or 0.1%

Corporate fixed income: Strong day yesterday for investment grade. More new lows than new highs, dramatically more.

US Dollar has stabilized with the Euro. Euro/Dollar has been flat lately at 105.36

No material news. New jobless claims up slightly to 218k. We expect this number to spike if recessionary fears come to reality. As companies have lower profitability, they will layoff employees.

Futures for US Equities more RED than when we started the video, over 1% down for the three main indices, SPY, IWM and QQQ.

High VIX at 32.30, and it is up pre market. Fear gauge is high.

Gasoline came way down. $3.57, or down $0.43 in the past few days. This is good for US consumers, for Main Street, but not sure how this happens.

Europe and Asian markets were down pre market. Lots of markets down 2%. China mainland was up 0.3%.
Jakarta, Indonesia has been strong the past few days in a relatively tight range. Worth a look.

We think big money is putting the puts back on after having taken them off earlier this week.

Commodity futures are down in energy and cotton. Good news for the regular investor.
Gold, silver, platinum are up. Bond futures up (yields down)

Overall: Equity Factors, growth was down more than value yesterday. Less to fall, less belief in stock prices for value than growth. Tech, consumer discretionary, and consumer staples are all down 5% to 10% yesterday. Growth is down.

Melvin Capital shut down voluntarily, they were running MEME stocks. We expect other money managers will have to drop out as well, as equities and fixed income drop. This type of volatility is not good for money managers who are caught on the back foot.

Crypto looked ok, up 1%. Wale Tokens are down 50% since we started following them. You can buy 20 billion wale tokens for less than $4,000.


The Bottom Line:


High Volume, Low Price:
Search for money losers on volume up (4x average volume) and price down more than 66.66% vs. the 253 day simple moving average. Down and active. No academic justification for this filter.
We found five to look at. $EMBK $CMRX $ENDP $BRDS $OTMO


$BBAI Big Bear AI
BBAI no shares to borrow
Up on heavy naked short volume
Last 2 days
Volume up yesterday, up 10x
On the Bottom Line


BBIG Vinco Ventures
Longs loaded up heavily yesterday. Zero shares to borrow
On the Bottom Line


AMC AMC Entertainment Holdings
Definitely an imbalance of shorts to longs.
AMC GO APES!
13 short days
2 even
3 out of 5 accumulation days
Moderated yesterday.
Volume is up a little
Very few shares to short
On the Bottom Line?


$LWLG  Lightwave Logic, Inc.
Being accumulated.
Worst stock in the model, too volatile without anything behind it.
Very little volume. Sleepy. Accumulation phase for this stock. 300k shares available to borrow.
In accumulation phase, 300k shares available to borrow
Not a lot of volume. No conviction.
Price is towards the bottom.
On the Bottom Line?


$BRDS Bird Global, Inc.
It’s a SPAC that started at $10. Big shorts 2 days ago. Heavy short on very light volume.
$BRDS Only 55k shares available to borrow to short.
​This stock has seen tremendous selling pressures.
BRDS SPAC from $10 to .78
This stock has significant short pressure for the past two weeks and the stock is down 92.2% from the IPO price.
On accumulation volume, short short short
55k shares available to short
280,949,068 shares fully diluted. 270M basic shares.
They earned 4 cents and grew their business.
Borrowing money and used up cash. They are cash flow negative.
Bird is a micro-mobility company engaged in delivering electric transportation solutions for short distances. The Company partners with cities to bring lightweight, electric vehicles to residents and visitors in an effort to replace car trips by providing an alternative sustainable transportation option. Bird’s offerings include its core vehicle-sharing business and operations (“Sharing”), and sales of Bird-designed vehicles for personal use (“Product Sales”).

They have 240M shares of class A (1 vote) and 34.5M shares of Class X (20 votes per share).

Since our first shared ride in 2017, we have facilitated over 140 million trips on Bird vehicles through our vehicle -sharing business. Today, Bird offers riders an on-demand, affordable, and cleaner alternative for their short-range mobility needs in over 400 cities worldwide. We believe that Bird is uniquely positioned to capture share in this market due to (i) our founder-led, visionary management team, (ii) our advanced technology and data platform, (iii) aligned incentives in the mutually beneficial operating model in which we utilize third-party logistics providers (“Fleet Managers”) to store, charge, maintain, and repair our vehicles, and (iv) our strong year-round unit economics.

On the Bottom Line


VRM Vroom Inc. is up 4% on average volume.
Short volume has been mixed, long, then short, then long, then short then long. No commitment. Big volume days were flat, then short yesterday on typical volume.
Positive gathering yesterday, accumulation. Almost no shorts left.
Up 2.5%
Close to a bottom.
Almost nothing available to short. Probably going to run. 45k shares to borrow short now.
VRM (to $3) from $1.36
Short volume dropped at this level. Looks like minimal volume to acquire it. Big load on May 10, smaller loads May 13 - 16.
​
On the Bottom Line

$MKD Molecular Data Inc., just announced another 100M shares in ADR for a maximum offering price of $0.05 per share.
This is dilution. Could be to enable trading and liquidity in the stock.
MKD just had 4 distribution days where shorts were 55% up to 60% short volume.
Very high volume on 5/17. I wonder if someone knew the 100M ADRs were coming, as 37M shares traded in the FINRA dark pool. Probably yes, they shorted forward.
350k shares now available to short, down from 2M in the past 30 minutes. This must have been shorted to the moon on the news of the dilution.

Not on the Bottom Line due to dilution.

Raw analysis: No Bottom Line assessment:

$BKKT Bakkt Holdings, Inc. is in accumulation phase on lower volume. 6 days, and the last day was the weakest. 200k shares available to borrow.
Stock is up 1% on low volume.

$CRBP Corbus Pharmaceuticals is not at risk of a short squeeze.
CRBP shares available to short rose from 900k to 1.3M.

$RIBT Yesterday's thoughts.
Looks poised for liftoff. Low of $0.30, then $0.40, now $0.72 on significant volume.
Looks like the shorts piled in last week on volume, and yesterday was the first day of even trade. 800k shares available to short into AH.
30.58M market cap, 50.25M public float. Loses money.

$INDO Indonesia Energy Corporation Limited Yesterday's thoughts.
Big dark pool volume lately, and shorts > 50% the past 2 days on high volume.
Low volume today

$UPST Upstart 
UPST is down 6.5% on average volume.
​
Closing things out. We are still red in all US equities.
Run away…VIX is up, dollar down, gold and silver up.
Some of the stocks we looked at have a chance to run (either up or down).