the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

The Durable Goods advanced report for September 2011 was released on Wednesday. I like to dig into the Durable Goods report because it can be useful for seeing how tech in aggregate is performing and how the sector may perform in the future. I always focus on two particular measures: shipments and new orders. Let's see how it played out last month. Shipments --  I generally give less importance to Shipments since this is a backward looking measure reflecting orders that have been confirmed, manufactured and shipped. It's similar to earnings reports -- it's good to know but the data is in the past and we're more interested in the future. The following chart shows how September shipments looked for the overall tech sector: Results for the overall tech sector were a bit weak but take a look at the next chart which tracks the Computers and related products segment: Results here were actually quite good and, to make things even better, the previous month wa...

Since August, the market has been in a funk, plunging at the end of July and then range-bound, more or less moving sideways for two months. The top of the range is notated in the chart below by the horizontal magenta line in the daily chart of SPY, the S&P 500 ETF. On Friday, however, we finally got a decisive move out of the range and above the magenta line. The question on everyone's minds is: does this breakout have staying power? Activity in Europe is still the wildcard and is pretty much unpredictable so in this post we'll just stick to the the technicals as we see them. The view from Alert HQ -- For those readers who are new to TradeRadar or who don't remember what this is all about, the data for the following charts is generated from our weekly Alert HQ process. We scan roughly 6200 stocks and ETFs each weekend and gather the statistics presented below. In this first chart below we count the number of stocks above various exponential moving averages a...