This pick list highlights constituents of the Morningstar US Large Cap Index that we believe offer investors the best risk-adjusted return prospects. Stocks of large-cap companies where neither growth nor value characteristics predominate. Stocks in the top 70% of the capitalization of the U.S. equity market are defined as large cap.

Snowflake is a cloud-native data warehouse company. The company leverages the large public hyperscale cloud services to provide its Data Cloud to customers, enabling them to unify disparate data sources for the purposes of data engineering, and the development of artificial intelligence, applications, collaboration, and cybersecurity. Snowflake went public on September 16, 2020 at $120 per share. The company derives 23% of its revenue outside the U.S.

Insider sentiment continues to improve, in keeping with the trend over the past several weeks and with multiple sentiment indicators from Vickers Stock Research taking part. Vickers' overall Insider Index, which had deteriorated steadily from late 2023 through mid-2024, has now logged numerous weeks of improvement, coming in at -17.10 this week versus -17.32 last week, -17.53 the week before that, and versus a low of -20.98 in early August. While the index is still far from the reading of -7.79 recorded in November 2023 (just as the market began a notable rally), it still signals a positive change in mindset from insiders. Elsewhere, Vickers' Total One-Week Sell/Buy Ratio has improved to 3.82 from last week's reading of 5.06, while the Total eight-week reading has improved to 3.80 from last week's 4.02 -- reflecting an increase in buying activity among insiders. The current Total readings also represent alignment among shorter- and longer-term sentiment, with the one- and eight-week ratios almost identical. With these readings comfortably within our neutral zone of 2.00 to 6.00, we will be watching to see if sentiment continues to improve in the weeks before insiders are again heavily restricted from trading stocks due to the start of earnings season. On a sector basis, insider buying outpaced selling in the Real Estate sector, with shares valued at more than $20 million purchased versus roughly $400,000 sold. On the flipside, selling by insiders was notable in Consumer Staples and Energy, with shares valued at $460 million and $198 million, respectively, sold. Selling was also evident in the Industrials, Financial, Healthcare, and Communication Services. This week, analysts at Vickers highlighted insider transactions of interest at Broadcom Inc. (NGS: AVGO) and Nvidia Corp. (NGS: NVDA).

This pick list highlights constituents of the Morningstar US Large Cap Index that we believe offer investors the best risk-adjusted return prospects. Stocks of large-cap companies where neither growth nor value characteristics predominate. Stocks in the top 70% of the capitalization of the U.S. equity market are defined as large cap.