First and foremost, this is our last issue of 2024—next Monday is one of our two weeks off all year—so we want to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year. We’ll be back at it with a fresh Top Ten issue on January 6.

As for the market, things finished up with a nice rally last Friday, but that doesn’t undo the action of the prior couple of weeks as a whole, which saw many leaders take hits and many major indexes crack their intermediate-term uptrends. To be clear, we remain flexible, and if the buyers pounce on the recent weakness for a few days, we think there will be lots of “resumption” patterns among individual stocks. Still, given the near- and intermediate-term selling we’ve seen, we want to see buyers show up in a meaningful way first before putting a bunch of money back to work. We’ll leave our Market Monitor at a level 5.

This week’s list is once again very growth-y, which we do find encouraging. Our Top Pick showed exceptional power in November and has now rested for three weeks, offering up a solid entry point, though we advise starting small given the environment.

While the big-cap indexes were acting fine, we had been writing about an increasing number of yellow flags out there—it started with secondary measures like sentiment (which got buoyant in the weeks after the election), and early last week, we saw the first signs that some key leading stocks were coming under pressure. Indeed, we came into this week with our Market Monitor down to a level 6.