Skip to main content

Weekly Market Update: NASDAQ back in the saddle?

Weekly Market Call

It's been a pretty good week. Oil prices fell and retail sales were up. Earnings season kicked off and results thus far have been reasonably encouraging. Against this backdrop, the markets are back on track. The Dow and the S&P 500 continue in their respective uptrends with the Dow hitting a new high.

With the strong showing in retail sales this week, preceded by a strong jobs report last week, the market is now assuming that the Fed will not lower interest rates any time during the first half of the year. The market has managed to shrug off this concern and look to fundamentals. With commodity prices falling, margins should be increasing. Lower gas prices will put more spending money in consumers pockets. The housing downturn doesn't seem to be spilling over into the general economy. There are good reasons to bullish!

Now, on to the NASDAQ. After having TradeRadar flash the SELL signal for the last few weeks, the NASDAQ has started a turnaround and it actually managed to hit a new high, closing the week with a gain of 3.6% YTD, far outdistancing the Dow and the S&P which are sporting less than 1% gains apiece.

Is this enough to make the TradeRadar signal reverse from the SELL signal that was first flashed three weeks ago? (To see the TradeRadar SELL signal from 12/30/2006, click here) The TradeRadar system likes to see more than a few weeks of data between a buy signal and a sell signal but reducing the filtering does generate a new buy signal based on this week's activity.

On the other hand, though the chart tells me BUY, I can't help wondering if all this upside activity in tech and the NASDAQ is just a byproduct of the hysteria over Apple's new iPhone, introduced at this week's MacWorld. Is an expensive music-playing cellphone the most solid base to build a rally on?

TradeRadar Stock Picks

Taragon (TARR) can't seem to make up its mind as to which way to go. It continues to meander a few percent below the price where the TradeRadar BUY signal kicked in.

PacificNet (PACT) delivered some more upbeat news this week. They will be designing, building and supporting Sony's new e-commerce site. The stock spiked up and then immediately ran into profit taking. The trend remains up, however, and we continue to be holders at this point.

Generex (GNBT) had been a disappointment but the stock perked up this week and we are back in positive territory, with a 6.5% gain.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Brazil - in a bubble or on a roll?

A couple of years ago, no one recognized the real estate bubble even though it was under everyone's nose. Now, analysts and bloggers are seeing bubbles everywhere they look. One of them, they say is in Brazil whose Bovespa stock market index has doubled in the last 12 months. Does the bubble accusation hold water? I don't think so and here are 7 reasons why Brazil is by no means a bubble economy: Exports have held up over the past year thanks to demand from China for Brazil's soya exports and iron ore. This was helped by the the Brazilian government's drive to improve trade links with Asia and Africa. Export diversification, spurred by a more active trade policy and increased focus on "south-south" trade under current president Lula, helped mitigate the decline in demand from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries A "sensible" economic framework has been in place since the 1990's. This has included inflation

Trade Radar gets another update

Some of our data sources changed again and it impacted our ability to load fundamental/financial data. In response, we are rolling out a new version of the software: 7.1.24 The data sourcing issues are fixed and some dead links in the Chart menu were removed. So whether you are a registered user or someone engaged in the free trial, head over to our update page and download the latest version. The update page is here:   https://tradingstockalerts.com/software/downloadpatch Contact us if you have questions or identify any new issues.

Unlock Stock Market Profits - Key #1

This is the first in an ongoing series of articles where I discuss what I feel are keys to successful investing. It is based on a post that provides a summary of the ten keys that individual investors should use to identify profitable stock trades. ( Click here to read the original post ) There are two basic steps to investing. First, you need to find stocks that seem to have some potential. Then you have to determine whether these stocks are actually good investments. There are many stocks that at first glance look interesting, but further research reveals that there are too many negatives to warrant taking a position. This first post in the series starts at the beginning: getting good investment ideas. Key #1: If something special is happening to a stock, it will be reflected in some kind of unusual activity in the markets. As individual investors, we will never be the first to know; however, unusual activity can be an early sign that allows us to follow the Wall Street professional