Three names, and three is the ceiling: every one of the five leading sectors is decelerating, so the leadership gate caps the list. The market regime recovered to neutral 59 from Thursday’s record-low 32 — enough for a half-size list, not a full one, and every name here had to show an institutional footprint to earn its place.
Every input behind the names below refreshed this morning between 10:19 and 11:01 ET. Two secondary feeds are unavailable today — the bull-put-spread screener and the central-bank rates feed — and neither contributes to the selection. Where a number is missing rather than zero, this page says so.
| Sector | Momentum | Accel | 1M | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shipping · BOAT | +12.22 | −20.73 | +17.05% | Still the leader, decelerating hardest |
| Commodities · DBC | +8.40 | −9.04 | +10.10% | Second, fading |
| Energy · XLE | +6.47 | −10.95 | +7.47% | The ledger’s best sector, fading |
| Natural Gas · FCG | +5.86 | −7.75 | +7.19% | Fourth, fading |
| Agriculture · DBA | +2.87 | −8.17 | +4.35% | Fifth, fading — Gate 2 fires here |
| Nuclear · URA | −0.02 | +4.30 | −0.92% | Flat but accelerating — UROY sits here |
Eleven of 39 sectors carry positive momentum (28.2%). Only six of 39 are accelerating at all, and five of those are in negative momentum — that is a tape rotating out of leadership rather than into anything new. Airlines (JETS) remains tagged OUT.
The only finalist with a specific, named catalyst: 100% Small Refinery Exemptions across its refineries, a Q2 beat that cleared consensus by a wide margin, and pending small-cap index inclusion. All-time high, SATA 10/9, Mansfield RS 64.05 and rising nearly ten points a week. Unusual Whales shows three blocks of 178k–238k shares between Sept 1 and Sept 8 ($13.0M, $17.0M, $13.8M) plus a 69k intermarket sweep — roughly 10–13% of daily volume each, and a sweep is an urgency marker. Analyst target sits 11% below the price, which by this ledger’s own inverse finding is a point in its favour rather than against.
Best raw funnel score in the book today: 66.6, SATA 10/10, at its 52-week high,
relative volume 1.28, and the only name converged on all three lists with is_breakout
true. It sits in Shipping, the highest-momentum sector. Three near-identical ~105k-share blocks on
Sept 3, 4 and 8 at $43.28–$43.74 read as one institution working an order; the stock is now well
above all three. Two counts against it, both from this desk’s own track record:
analyst upside of +23% has been the strongest inverse signal in the book, and names converging on three lists at
once have underperformed those that did not.
It is the best-looking name and the one the evidence most distrusts.
Read the caveat first: UROY reported earnings yesterday and fell 6.3% on it ($4.80 → $4.50). Gate 3b passes only on a technicality — the next print is 96 days out. This morning’s +3.9% in the 10:19 snapshot has already faded to +0.3%, so the funnel score of 58.7 was computed on a price the stock no longer holds. What keeps it on the page: it is the only finalist that is genuinely early (6 weeks in Stage 2 against 66 and 70), the least extended (+35.6% YTD against +98% and +154%), it carries a TipRanks Smart Score of 10 and an insider score of 0.71, and uranium is one of only six sectors accelerating at all. Dark-pool prints are persistent but small — 2–4% of daily volume — so the confirmation here is the weakest of the three.
The order is recorded, not recommended. This desk ranks its finalists so the ranking itself can be scored — and so far the top-ranked names have underperformed the lower-ranked ones in every session measured. Read the order as a hypothesis under test, not as a sizing instruction.
Neither the cash-secured-put screener nor the bull-put-spread screener offers a setup on DK, TEN or UROY today. This is the normal outcome rather than a gap: the premium screeners look for high-implied-volatility large caps, and the Stage 2 funnel produces mid-cap momentum. The two systems rarely overlap.
With breadth at 28% and every leading sector decelerating, the absence of a defined-risk overlay is worth weighing. There is no premium-selling structure on offer here to express these names at lower risk.
| Cohort | Mean alpha | Median | Beat SPY | Best | Worst |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-31 · 7 | −0.40% | −1.72% | 2/7 | CVI +20.41% | ESTC −17.06% |
| 2026-09-01 · 7 | −3.33% | −0.86% | 2/7 | VLO +9.46% | PRGS −13.76% |
| 2026-09-02 · 3 | −3.47% | −2.77% | 0/3 | VET −0.93% | HP −6.71% |
| 2026-09-03 · 3 | −3.34% | −3.42% | 1/3 | CRGY +3.95% | ZYME −10.54% |
| 2026-09-08 · 3 | −0.23% | +0.22% | 2/3 | MTDR +0.80% | CVE −1.73% |
| All 23 | −2.06% | −1.72% | 7/23 | two worst names carry 65% of the total drag | |