After the incredible recovery in late April and early May, stocks have slowed down a touch in June.
The headline indexes are largely pinned just a few percent below their all-time highs, and many former (and potential) leaders are running into overhead resistance and getting rejected.
In an environment like this, counterintuitively, it’s actually easier to spot the clear winners.
Cabot Growth Investor’s Mike Cintolo uses relative performance, and Cabot Options Trader’s Jacob Mintz likes to target stocks that are seeing a lot of bullish call buying.
But the end goal for each of them is the same, to identify the next batch of winners. After all, the stocks that are experiencing ongoing accumulation by big investors are the most likely to lead the next leg higher.
Strong relative performance and big-time call buying are tried and true methods for identifying potential winners, but today I wanted to use a simpler method that takes little more than a few seconds and a stock screener.
Simply put, we’re going to look for stocks hitting all-time highs.
Obviously, you’ll want to do more research before buying any names that you identify this way, but it’s an excellent way to fill out a watchlist.
Before we get started, I should note that we’re going to limit our screen to just large-cap stocks.
The rationale for filtering for large-cap stocks is two-fold:
- Small- and mid-cap stocks are more susceptible to false breakouts and overreactions. Major spikes higher in lower-volume stocks are very susceptible to mean reversion.
- Large-cap stocks have been the best performers of the latest bull phase (up 100% in the last five years, compared to a 79% return for mid-cap stocks and a 66% return for small-cap stocks). Although they’ve historically underperformed small caps over the long haul, the performance (at least for the time being) is what it is.
So the first element of our screen is large-cap stocks or larger.
The second element is straightforward: we’ll simply screen for stocks hitting all-time highs using Finviz (our preferred free screening tool; all-time highs is one of their “Technical” criteria).
We’ve run this screen periodically over the last several weeks, and it’s typically generated around a dozen stocks each day.
In many cases, repeated screens will result in the same names showing up over and over again as all-time highs beget further all-time highs, and any one of them is probably worth paying closer attention to, but I want to focus on three names that stand out in particular.
Netflix (NFLX)
Netflix is the hands-down leader in the streaming game and likely needs no introduction. It’s also a stock that I’ve been bullish on for a long time.
From a technical standpoint, shares look pristine, reliably pushing to new highs after finding solid support at their 2025 lows. Plus, unlike many other names out there (and the headline indexes), NFLX never cracked its 200-day line.
Shares are just a bit below the most recent all-time high, but, as you can see from the chart, this is a much-needed breather that’s giving the 50-day line some time to catch up. Long story short, Netflix looks like it can keep running for as long as the bull market is intact.
GE Vernova (GEV)
We wrote up GE Vernova a bit last year due to its impressive performance relative to its utility peers, and the stock has just continued to run from there.
The company is a product of the split-up of General Electric, which was finalized in April of last year. The company operates in three segments (Power, Wind and Electrification) while also emphasizing research on potential “breakthrough” technologies in energy storage, hydrogen, carbon capture, small modular nuclear reactors, advanced wind turbines, and electrification software.
Energy was an incredibly popular trade on Wall Street due to the AI/data center power demand angle but took a major hit in January on news of China’s DeepSeek (lower-power AI model).
And GEV shares took a major beating, losing 38% of their value in less than two months, but shares bottomed in April with the market as a whole and have rebounded hard to tag new highs.
With a trailing PE of 70(!!!), it’s definitely an outlier for utility stocks, but the momentum is undeniable.
CoreWeave (CRWV)
CoreWeave is a new name on Wall Street (probably the most anticipated IPO of 2025), but it’s obviously been a big winner.
Tyler Laundon highlighted it back in January, but in a nutshell, the company rents Nvidia-chip-equipped computer services to artificial intelligence (AI) app developers. This gives CoreWeave a GPU-as-a-service business model and makes it a competitor to the big cloud computing mega-caps, like Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG) that have begun to build their own AI accelerator chips in order to reduce reliance on Nvidia.
Shares have only been public for about two months, but in that time, they’ve essentially gone vertical, rising 359%.
The company isn’t profitable (yet), and all the risks of recent IPOs apply, which might make CRWV a bit hot to handle.
Nonetheless, shares shook off their post-IPO droop (falling while the broader market was recovering) and have since gone on a high-volume run. This is one of those names that’s persistently shown up on our screen, and although the shares may be a bit overheated, they’re not showing any sign of slowing down.
My favorite name on this list remains Netflix, but as you can see from the momentum, the market loves all three of them.
