#SwingTrading – 2-day swing ending with all bellwether stocks in black

Posted on by diogenes227

The technical end of this trade, started just yesterday on the open, is tomorrow’s open.

But as of today’s close all 12 of my bellwether stocks are in the black so there’s a good chance they will remain in profits barring any over-night news.

Regardless, it is a market signal that runs this strategy so no later than tomorrow’s open a sell for swing traders it will be (would be nice to have a gap up for that).

My “bellwethers” are TSLA, NFLX, AMZN, BID, TWTR, BIDU, AAPL, GS, FB, NVDA, FSLR, BABA. See chart panel below. The white flags on the lower right of each chart is the current profit per 100K committed to the trade (also correlates to a percentage gain).

The current swing is led by BIDU up 4.5%, followed by BABA up 3% and NVDA 2.9%. That’s in two days.

As a side note BABA is up eight days in a row so if there is market weakness tomorrow it is ripe for a day-trade scalp on the short side.

(click on the chart for a larger view)

#BellwetherStocks – End Of A Swing Trade

Posted on by diogenes227

The swing trade for buying stocks signaled by the market’s breadth indicators on the open of April 4th, thirteen trading days ago, ended on the open of trading today.

START OF THE TRADE

Despite a choppy market in which neither SPY nor QQQ rose as much as one percent, all twelve of the bellwethers were in the black for the trade and several on the list had rather stellar gains for 13 trading days — TWTR up 20.5%, NFLX up 19.3%, TSLA up 14.2%, AMZN up 13.1% and FSLR up 11.4%.

The Bellwether stocks with single-digit gains were FB, 9.7%; BIDU, 8.4%; BID 7.5%; NVDA 6.3%; BABA 6.6%; GS 2.3%; and last and least (remarkably) AAPL 1.4%.

Once again, market timing has been validated by the stocks even when the market is going no where.

On the charts below, the white flags on the lower left quadrant of each chart is the dollar gains for $100k invested in each particular stock.

Thirteen days…

(click on the chart panel for a larger view)

#BellwetherStocks – ten bull flags still flying…

Posted on by diogenes227

The general market took a hit today just when it appeared it could break out of its consolidation at recent lows.

All of this may be on news – Trump proposing a possible trade war with China, stewing over the Mueller investigation into everything from his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, to the crimes arising from his hush-money payoffs to a porn star and Playboy playmate, to his sons’ threatening reprisals for any foreign government not doing their bidding, to allegations everywhere of corruption, self-dealing and maybe even money laundering; and now he’s rattling missiles at Syria (which is to say, at the Russian military).

Is there an Archduke Ferdinand anywhere in Syria?

There was a time when the one thing almost certain in the stock market was that the market did not like uncertainty.

Well, Trump has been the poster boy for uncertainty since the election and yet, remarkably, the market has ignored that, focusing instead on the Republican tax cut and the ripping away of every sane and insane regulation there is. But it’s beginning to look as if it is not quite ignoring his inconsistency and incompetence anymore. Last year it was hard to get the market to go down. Now it’s hard to get it to go up.

Okay, enough of that. What about right now?

This is an update of this POST ON APRIL 5TH.

The top in place in January may have ushered in a bear market (which is my overall bias) but right now the market is trying to bounce, and maybe even rally.

Today was a setback in that effort and every day seems precarious but I want to point to my twelve bellwether stocks. Despite last Friday’s bloodbath and today’s drop, they have all held firm. In fact, ten of the stocks have bull flags (see the chart panel below). My bellwether stocks are: TSLA, NFLX, AMZN, BID, TWTR, BIDU, AAPL, GS, FB, NVDA, FSLR, BABA. All twelve are in the black from the beginning of this bounce on open of April 4th.

TSLA is leading the bounce up 17.8% , followed by NFLX up 10.%, TWTR up 9.2% and now FB, with Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress, up 9.1%.

As bellwethers these stocks are, so far, saying this market is going to have another surge to the upside soon. Probably by Friday (unless the news gets in the way).

(click on the chart panel for a larger view)

#MarketTiming – Swing trading the bellwether stocks…

Posted on by diogenes227

My swing signals, based on breadth, price and volatility, turned up in unison on April 3rd for a buy on the open of April 4th.

More importantly, short-term market breadth put in a divergent low in the midst of recent market thrusts to the downside. When that happens, the next step that usually confirms an upside swing is the upturn in long-term breadth. That confirmation came yesterday.

There was a previous discussion and chart of this yesterday HERE).

From stock trader’s or investor’s point of view, the purpose of market timing is tell when to buy. And once again, the bellwether stocks list proves that point.

My “bellwethers” are TSLA, NFLX, AMZN, BID, TWTR, BIDU, AAPL, GS, FB, NVDA, FSLR, BABA.

On the chart panel below, the white flag on the right axis is the current gain per $100k invested (also calculated for the percentage gain). At the moment, this upswing is lead by TSLA at 17%, followed by NFLX and AMZN, both up 6% plus. Remember when (three days ago) there was some dope speculating TSLA would go bankrupt and President Dumb-Ass was attacking AMZN like it actually owned the Washington Post? What a difference a day or two makes in swing trading.

(click on the chart panel for a larger view)

#MarketTiming – From follow through to follow through

Posted on by diogenes227

The general market, after Tuesday’s bounce, followed through today for big gains across the board, made all the more bullish by coming back from a deep gap down.

The Dow, or instance, was down 500 points at the open and finished up 230.

The question now, of course, can there be more tomorrow.

All indications are this correction is over with many of the indexes touching their 200 daily moving averages, with my nifty-50 list of momentum stocks triggering 30 buy signals in the past two days (Monday all but two of those stocks were down, today all but six were up), with CNN Money’s Fear and Greed Index finally lumbering up off a very low readings at 12 today (it got as low as six and can’t go below zero). That later index is still registering “extreme fear” which is the time a time for investors to be looking to buy stocks.

But most importantly (see the chart below), short-term breath put in a low above a low in negative territory, a divergence with the SPY Tuesday which needed a follow through into positive territory to turn the all-important long-term breadth up. The follow through came today.

All three of my swing-trading signals, based on price, breadth and volatility, are on buys now.

So this market bounce has more to come and could morph into a full-fledged multi-week rally.

Some notes. AAPL is probably the safest bet during a market bounce (emphasis on “safest”) but NFLX, NVDA and TSLA will probably out-perform among the big boys. Look at TSLA today, up 7.5% on the day and 13.7% from the open — there was some dope just last week predicting Elon Musk’s baby would go bankrupt.

(click on chart for a larger view)

#BellwetherStocks – markups in current upswing

Posted on by diogenes227

Since the current market rally began on the open of February 12th by my market-timing measure, my list of bellwether stocks are all in the black.

Once again, an example of the value of market timing – when the market moves almost all stocks move with it. And if a stock doesn’t, beware the next down swing.

NFLX leads the rally up 30% so far, FB lags up only 4%.

For the rest of the list, see the chart panel below.

(click on the charts for a larger view)

#SwingTrading – the top stocks on the nifty-50 list

Posted on by diogenes227

Just revised and sorted the stocks on my nifty-50-stock list – a powerful group they are!

I’m just going to feature the top 12 here because they are just too many moving too much. On the charts below the keys are the white flags on the lower right and lower left of each chart. On the lower right are the closed gains based on the 10 swing trades so far year-to-date and on the lower left are current open trade results using the short-term breadth signal as the trigger for the buys and sells.

Each trade is a $100K stock buy (so the cash in the flag is also the percentage return). For instance, QNST on the upper left of the chart panel is up 55.6% on trades marked up this year and the current open trade is up another 5.4%. VCEL, just below QNST on the chart panel, is up 66.5% on closed trades and down 2.1% on the open trade. And so on, and so on across the charts…

The stock trading here is entirely a market-timed swing system based on the basic idea that most stocks move with the movements of the general market. It is purely technical and what each company does is largely irrelevant. The measure of each stock is how well it tracks and how big it moves in accordance with each market swing.

Needless to say these and many more stocks are doing very well as the bull market so far continues.

(click on the charts for a larger view)

#MarketTiming – What a “long” glorious week!

Posted on by diogenes227

This is an update of this post in this link, made last weekend:

#MarketTiming – Time for a bounce…

Wow! The predicted “bounce” has turned out to have been an understatement to what happened in the market this week.

Remember the 1961 movie “The Absent-Minded Professor” with Fred MacMurray, which introduced the world to flubber? Well, this week was a FLUBBER OF A BOUNCE, and since today it turned long-term breadth positive it is a bounce that has likely turned into a rally.

If I had to guess, instead of just following along, I suspect the pause begins tomorrow. If it gaps up, the rest of the day will likely be flat as the monthly options expiration plays out. If it gaps down or opens flat, there’s a good chance it rises again to the close and starts the pause there.

Just guessing this stuff…

Regardless, it has been a truly glorious week for swing traders – among the leveraged index ETFs TQQQ is up 15.8%, TNA up 12.1%, UPRO up 10.7%, even SVXY in the blistered VIX complex is up 15.3%. The at-the-money monthly SPY 263 call from Monday’s open, expiring tomorrow, is up 179%. Among the bellwether stocks AAPL is up 9.2% (that is a heavy market-cap lift in an awfully short time), BIDU up 13%, NFLX up 11.2%. I’m going to update my bellwether stocks later but suffice it to say here all twelve as of the close today are in the black for the week.

Now for a few cautionary notes.

If there is any trouble with this, it is that it has been a straight up move since last Friday. All the major indexes and most of the sector ETFs are up five days in a row. Much of the market is wildly overbought on short-term basis. This up move has been crazy. It is easily three standard deviations of an average advance and done in five consecutive days! (See the histogram on the Nasdaq Composite chart below.) I can’t even remember the last time anything like that happened, and obviously not in the last six months of this huge bull market. Forty-seven of the stocks on my nifty-50 stock list are on buys with 31 overbought (see the swing trading signals below), and yet we are not at new highs. This is going to have to have a pause, some backing and filling, then a resumption of the upswing before one can be sure it is yet another bullish rally in the on-going bull market.

The trouble with rallies out of hard drops, like the one the market took before this bounce, is that by the time they are obvious, they are sometimes over.

In addition, if the fierce sell-off that has preceded this bounce was a shot across the bow of the bull market, it is possible the buying this week is the last leap into the market by those long-ago left behind — if so, and if this rally fizzles before new highs (or even at marginal new highs) then this could be an advance before a mighty, mighty big flop.

Whenever this ends, we are going to have one of the biggest bear markets in history. If you don’t think so, you must not know history or you think “it’s different this time.” History says it is never different this time.

Even flubber bounces had to come back to earth.

SWING TRADING SIGNALS:

LONG-TERM BREADTH: Buy (Day 1).

PRICE: Buy. (Day 5).
SHORT-TERM BREADTH: Buy. (Day 5).
VOLATILITY: Buy, (Day 5).

CONTEXT:

SPY CLOSE – 273.03
QQQ CLOSE – 165.70
CNN MONEY’S FEAR AND GREED INDEX: 11, falling, extreme fear level).
NIFTY-50 STOCK LIST: 47 Buys; 31 Overbought, 0 Oversold, 1 new buys today, 1 new sells.

(click on the chart for a larger view)

#IPOs – $FIT shows the first day’s range is sacrosanct

Posted on by diogenes227

As has been stated in a previous post here, buying into an IPO is actually one of the easiest decisions in stock investing but never let a broker con you into doing it the day of the offering.

Instead, note the high price and the low price on the first IPO is traded. Those are the lines in the sand or the Darvas box around the first day of trading (see the charts below). The time to buy, invest, is on a close above the high of the first day with a stop loss below the high of the first day. That is usually a low-risk trade since the real good news comes when the stock proves it can move up from all the hype surrounding the offering itself and if it falls back the stop to exit is close by.

So, with history on our side, let’s take a look back at one of the most famous IPOs of past couple of years – FIT.

FIT came public in 2105 at 30.40 and had a high on its first day of 31.90, a low of 29.50 and a close of 29.68. That would make the “sacrosanct” range from the 31.90 high to the 29.50 low (see the blue rectangle on the chart below).

The next day, FIT closed at 32.50. That was the buy signal as it finished outside the first day’s range. It then rallied as high at 51.90, a pretty nice rise in a couple of months.

I’m not one for fundamentals but how far did anyone think the company was going to go on a gadget product keyed to New Year’s resolutions and open to competition from virtually everybody?

Needless to say, like New Year’s resolutions themselves, the stock began to fade and by the end of the year 2015 it was violating its “sacrosanct” first day’s range. It started 2016 with a serious break to the downside on substantial volume making it a clear short in IPO trading and, as they say, the rest is history.

It has now dropped into the $5 range from its IPO low of $29.50 in the face of one of the greatest bull market’s in history.

This price action, long or short, is the same with every IPO.

By the way, history, me thinks, is the best market indicator of all.

(click on the chart for a larger view)

$SPY – Sideways to down?

Posted on by diogenes227

After four days up in a row most of the major indexes are due for a pause.

The market is overbought almost across the board. In my nifty-50 stock list, 29 of the stocks are overbought (that is a lot), of the nine 3x-leveraged ETFs I follow eight are overbought.

Given how much bullish momentum is in the market it is most likely it will be a sideways move, and if down, not down much (see chart of SPY below).

SWING TRADING SIGNALS:

LONG-TERM BREADTH: Buy (Day 14).

PRICE: Buy. (Day 4).
SHORT-TERM BREADTH: Buy. (Day 4).
VOLATILITY: Sell, (Day 2).

CONTEXT:

SPY CLOSE – 273.42
QQQ CLOSE – 160.92
CNN MONEY’S FEAR AND GREED INDEX: 75, rising, greed level).
NIFTY-50 STOCK LIST: 34 Buys; 29 Overbought, 4 Oversold, 6 new buys today, 3 new sells.

(click on this SPY chart for a larger view)