the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

Was it just a couple of weeks ago that the market was shooting upward and all was right with the world? Putting it mildly, it appears we've done a bit of an about-face. It's regrettable but all those reversals and swing signals we identified recently that were screaming BUY! are now looking a little worse for wear. Before tossing in the towel, though, let's take a look at where we stand from the perspective of the overall stock market's performance. Our moving average and trending analysis charts should provide some useful insights. 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 and count the number of moving average crosso...

The Durable Goods advanced report for June was just released and we can now see how tech in aggregate is performing. I have been of the opinion that tech is under-valued and this could help determine whether the sector deserves better or whether it tech stocks should remain in the doghouse. I always focus on two particular measures: shipments and new orders. 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 June shipments looked for the overall tech sector: This next chart shows just the sub-category of Computers and related products. This chart is for the Information Technology Industry. Unfortunately, the numbers for this sector are not broken out in the advance report but I thought it might b...

Lately tech has been coming out of the doldrums. That's good news for tech investors and the market as a whole since tech is often the sector that leads the market out of a downturn. Here is a list of seven tech stocks that are both profitable and whose 50-day exponential moving average (EMA) is just turning bullish. Note that this is the result of Tuesday's action (7/26). Symbol Name Industry PE Ratio Price to Sales PEG Ratio Cash Flow Yield Enterprise Value to EBITDA BRCM Broadcom Corporation Semiconductors 17.61 2.69 0.81 6.08% 15.33 ININ Interactive Intelligence Group, Inc. Computer Software: Prepackaged Software 43.36 3.77 1.37 2.79% 19.08 KFRC Kforce, Inc. Professional Services 26.3 0.57 0.52 (3.57%) 11.17 SFN SFN Group, Inc Professional Services 36.88 0.34 1.04 2.72% 10.16 SIMO Silicon Motion Technology Corporation Semicondu...

You may know that Trade-Radar Stock Inspector uses financial data from Yahoo! Well, just this past weekend Yahoo! started having an intermittent problem transmitting some of the data that our software uses. You've probably noticed the effect: Stock Inspector just quits, blows up, goes away... Download the fix right away! We've built in a way to get around this problem and the new version of Trade-Radar Stock Inspector is now working as it should. Plus we've fixed a couple of minor bugs while we were at it. Just go to this special download page and get the newest version now. Some readers who are signed up for the Trade-Radar Software Users Group will be receiving an email with this same information. This update is so important I wanted to cover all possible channels to get the word out. As always, this update is free for all users.

Most of the issues we encountered over the weekend have been corrected now. Trade-Radar.com and TradingStockAlerts.com are both reflecting the latest data. There are still some anomalies here and there that you will see in some of the reports and alert pages. In particular, Exchange, Market Cap, PEG, Price-to-Sales and sometimes even Price seem to be the fields that are randomly messed up. The database in many cases was been corrected after the HTML pages were generated and deployed to the web sites. The results in the TradingStockAlerts.com Free Screener and Premium Screener should be much more correct. Once again, I apologize for the delays and any inconvenience this may have caused. I will be working diligently to prevent a recurrence.

We're running late at Trade-Radar.com and at TradingStockAlerts.com, too. Usually we have our weekend screens and alerts available by sometime on Saturday morning. This weekend, however, I was out of town and just came back to find that the software hit some kind of glitch and aborted. The end result is that the web sites have not yet been updated with the latest info. The process is running now and should be complete sometime this evening (East coast time). I apologize for the delay and any inconvenience this may have caused. Stay tuned. We should be back on the air soon.

In poking around through the various stock screens on my site I came across the following interesting situation. Let me take you through my journey... I started out looking at the Sector and Style Scorecard here at Trade-Radar. I noticed there were two Consumer related ETFs in the top eight: the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Consumer Index Fund (IYC) and the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Consumer Goods Index Fund (IYK). Interesting factoid but so far no clear investment ideas. I popped over to the Industry Inspector at sister site TradingStockAlerts.com and set up the screener to look for industries where more than 50% of the stocks in an industry were above their 50-day EMAs and had bullish MACD. This resulted in a modest sized list of industries. Toward the top were some of the industries that have been quite popular lately including Precious Metals and Pharmaceuticals. Down the list a ways, in the Consumer Services sector (and with a less than descriptive title) was the "Other Con...

Here's another batch of interesting looking stocks that we found using the Premium Stock Screener at our sister site TradingStockAlerts.com This is one of my favorite screens because it tends to highlight solid profitable companies that appear to be starting sustainable bullish moves. This screen starts out by looking for those stocks that I refer to as "Reasonable Value." In other words, they are profitable, PE is not too high, Price-to-Sales ratio is low and Enterprise Value to EBITDA ratio is also fairly low. We are also looking for low Debt-to-Equity ratios. To these criteria we add a set of technical analysis indicators. The stocks need to be above their 50-day exponential moving average. They also need to have Trend Performance Scores that are only somewhat bullish but have just recently registered a strong improvement in Trend Performance Score. This combination of technical criteria tends to find those stocks that are just beginning to move so you will not fi...

Two months of pessimism almost completely erased in one week! That's what a melt-up rally can do. When I wrote my last Weekly Market Update a couple of weeks ago I said that hints of a bottom were accumulating. I anticipated a basing process before a significant rally would take place. I guess I was too pessimistic myself. Let's see where we are now... 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 and count the number of moving average crossovers, as well. We then plot the results against a chart of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY). What is so surprising here is that we now see roughly two thirds of all stocks are now above...