2 Stocks to Be Long on in December, in Song Form
Tesla and Newmont Mining are stacking up the quantitative signals
Keeping it short and sweet today. Hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving, watched some good games, and snagged some good Black Friday deals. Really excited to finish 2025 strong on here. I’m a sucker for end-of-year reviews, Best Of lists, and goal-planning for the next calendar year.
So while today’s content may be light on substance, the Patrick promise is we will deliver the goods in the coming weeks.
Digging through emails and data of the last week, two simple trading ideas popped up to keep on your radar in December, using our Expectational Analysis. But because we like to have fun around here even in low-vol weeks, I’ll put the two picks into “songs with December in the title” form.
Back to December (Tesla’s Version)
We called out Tesla’s double top a few weeks ago, and in general I’m skeptical of a company who pays its CEO that much and lets him spout off violent rhetoric on the regular.
But in the same way Taylor Swift wrote a beautiful, hand-to-heart apology to Taylor Lautner,
This is me swallowing my pride
Standin’ in front of you, sayin’, “I’m sorry for being bearish”
Double signals in a week is kind of a big deal around here, and is enough to turn heads. Senior Quantitative Analyst Rocky White always churns out a “Best Stocks to Target After Black Friday” piece before the holidays. TSLA is a historical outperformer the week after Thanksgiving, averaging a 1.5% return next week with a 60% win rate over the last decade.
And if that’s not enough, Tesla also outperforms in December, historically, in the last 10 years. The stock averages a monthly move of 4% and has finished the month positive in seven of the last 10 years. From its current perch at $426.91, a move of similar magnitude would erase TSLA’s quarterly deficit and fill the Nov. 13 bear gap.
The bullish signals are facing off with that double top formed in late October, but beneath its current perch by a considerable amount is $400, which stepped up as support already this quarter.
Another storyline to monitor is the overwhelmingly bearish sentiment; 25 of the 41 brokerages covering the equity maintain “hold” or worse ratings, while the consensus 12-month price target of $375.23 is a 12.3% discount to TSLA’s Friday perch.
Near-term options are actually attractively priced at the moment too. The 30-day at-the-money implied volatility right now is 46.5%, which lands in the 10th annual percentile, showing low volatility expectations around TSLA.
On the macro level, keep your ears to the ground about any robotaxi developments, and keep your fingers cross their cringe CEO stays out of the headlines.
tldr: While this isn’t an outright “BUY NOW” alarm, all those QA signals point to a Santa Claus rally maybe back up to that double top
A Long December (Newmont Mining)
Big Counting Crowes guy here. Was a staple in the college power hour rotation. Any time I’m away from the ocean for a while, I play A Long December.
It’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
I too can’t remember all the times I tried to tell myself this was it for gold.
Gold miners were last talked about here was in September, when their overbought nature was conflicting with a wicked strong uptrend.
The latter — as we predicted — won out; Newmont Mining (NEM) was trading around $74 at that time and is at $91.32 now. After a record high of $98.65 on Oct. 16, NEM pulled back sharply, with an RSI above 80 once more flashing a short-term top.
In the midst of that pullback was a 6.2% post-earnings drawdown on Oct. 24. But the report itself was a top-line beat for the third quarter, with a cash flow warning in Q4 doing the dirty work. On the whole though, that sharp bear gap looked a lot more like profit taking than a sudden tank after a dismal quarterly report.
Even after the October scaries, the shares stayed within the uptrend channel, and are now entering a historically bullish month. NEM averages a 3% return in December in the last decade to go with a 70% win rate, the only mining stock on the list.
Options traders have been quite put-focused, per NEM’s Schaeffer’s put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) of 1.33 stands in the 100th percentile of annual readings. But the stock also tends to outperform options traders’ volatility expectations, per its Schaeffer’s Volatility Scorecard (SVS) of 85 out of 100.
Macro tailwinds could come from a variety of factors. Bullion is still the preferred hedge against volatility, even more so now with volatile king Bitcoin (BTC) floundering. Rate-cut optimism heading into the December meeting should keep gold prices at an elevated state, an objectively good thing for gold mining stocks. And more broadly, White’s data also shows the VanEck Gold Miners (GDX) exchange-traded fund (ETF) averages a 1.5% return for December and a 60% win rate, the third-best of the ETFs tracked.
tldr: Too much going for gold right now. Being a contrarian doesn’t just mean doing the opposite, if the data doesn’t hold up
Keep on keepin on