Searching for Buy Candidates in the Small-Cap Carnage

Here's something we haven't seen in 20 years: Small-capitalization stocks have come completed unglued from their large-cap counterparts.

These two extreme segments of the market have tended to trade in tandem, generally rising and falling together over time. This year however, data from Strategas Research Partners indicates that only 40 percent of the stocks in the S&P Smallcap 600 Index are currently in an uptrend, compared to 72 percent for the S&P 500 Index.