How to Find the Winners in a Narrow Bull Market
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Having choices is usually a good thing.
But choosing from too many options can start to feel like a burden.
Whether you’re standing in a supermarket looking at 30 different types of shampoo or scrolling through dozens of movies and series on Netflix, too many choices can start to feel paralyzing.
The psychological term for this is “the paradox of choice.”
And one Bloomberg news item this week brought that home in a big way.
The story cites reporting from Morningstar that there are now more than 4,300 ETFs, passing the number of stocks available, currently around 4,200.
The glut of investing choices raises the risk that you’ll spend time staring at 8,000+ choices with no way to decide the best place for your hard-earned cash.
But the truth is only a few stocks are leading the gains in this market … so how do you find the right ones?
Today, we’re going to talk about how to overcome the paradox of choice and share one stock perfectly set up to benefit from all the options now available to retail investors.
ETFs Are a Double-Edged Sword
ETFs can be great investment vehicles, because they can offer low-cost access to almost any market niche.
You’re probably familiar with the Invesco QQQ Trust ETF (QQQ) that focuses on cutting-edge technology stocks. But you can also invest in sectors like the ProShares Pet Care ETF (PAWZ), focused on food and services for pets. Or you can invest in the AdvisorShares Vice ETF (VICE), a fund that invests in bad habits, such as tobacco, alcohol, gambling but also milder things such as chocolate.
But broad exposure to a sector isn’t always an advantage. It can even be a detriment when a narrow bull-market run makes focused stock picks your best choice.
How Narrow Is This Market?
Consider this: the Nasdaq 100 (NDX) hit an all-time last week, after recovering rapidly from the market meltdown associated with Trump’s Liberation Day press conference in April.
But the great majority of the gains were driven by only a few stocks. According to Bloomberg, just seven stocks in the index hit their 52-week highs the day of the record.
The takeaway is simple: in a market this narrow, broad exposure is not an advantage. In fact, it’s a liability.
If you spread your money across hundreds of stocks through ETFs, you’re likely to get weak returns. Sure, you might feel safe because your money is diversified across a broader array of investments, but in reality, you’re missing the best gains from the select few that are driving all the returns.
Louis Navellier has been hammering this home to his readers. If you’re a regular reader of Accelerated Profits you’ve undoubtedly heard him say, “this is not a sector-based market.”
In a stock-pickers market, the winners pull away while the pack simply treads water.
So, how can you succeed in a stock pickers market?
Louis’ quantitative stock picking system has been helping folks achieve market-beating returns for more than 30 years.
His Stock Grader system filters through thousands of names every week to get past the noise and zero in on the fundamentally superior stocks that the big institutional money is just beginning to buy.
In other words, it provides a way out of the paradox of choice — not more options, but the right ones.
A Stock Pickers Pick
The number of people moving money into investment accounts has risen several times the norm from the mid-2010s, according to a recent report form JPMorgan Chase. Services such as Robinhood (HOOD) saw a surge of activity during the 2020 COVID pandemic that began to normalize in 2022.
By early 2025, however, the number of people moving money from checking accounts to investment accounts reached its highest level since 2021, and the dollar amount hit a record peak.
That activity has charged up HOOD’s business, and why it became an “A” in Louis’ Stock Grader. You can see in the Stock Grader screener below that HOOD has been a sustained “A” since the beginning of the year.
Since Louis recommended Robinhood to his Accelerated Profits subscribers in March, the stock is up more than 147%!
As great as that is, it’s important to remember that Louis isn’t just riding market trends. He only invests in fundamentally superior companies.
Here is Louis’ summary of the HOOD’s latest earnings announcement from July 31:
Robinhood Markets, Inc. (HOOD) exceeded analysts’ second-quarter earnings and revenue expectations on Wednesday evening. The company noted that monthly active users increased to 12.8 million, compared to 11.8 million in the same quarter last year.
Second-quarter revenue rose 45% year-over-year to $927 million, topping estimates for $913.33 million. Transaction-based revenue accounted for $539 million, while crypto transactions accounted for $160 million.
Second-quarter earnings more than doubled year-over-year, coming in at $386 million, or $0.42 per share. Adjusted earnings were $0.50 per share, which beat the consensus estimate of $0.35 per share by 42.9%.
Beating earnings estimates is a surefire way to get more institutional money pouring into a stock – which is continuing to push HOOD higher.
HOOD is a still buy in Accelerated Profits under Louis’ limit price of $136.
Louis has been warning investors about this narrow bull market for months.
His Stock Grader system has revealed five under-the-radar companies with the same characteristics that drove past 10-baggers like Nvidia and Microsoft. He believes these stocks could surge as much as 1,000% once the “$7 Trillion Trump Shock” kicks off on September 30th. You can get the details in his urgent briefing right here.
A key to overcoming the paradox of choice is to focus on your decision-making process.
Louis’ stock grading system can make it easy.
Limit your choices to the stocks with an “A” grade, and you can home in on the limited number of stocks driving the market.
Enjoy your weekend,
Luis Hernandez
Editor in Chief, InvestorPlace
