the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

The Tech Trader Daily site had a post today that nicely laid out the slide in e-commerce sales growth this year on a month-by-month basis. The data comes from Comscore and looks like this: April: +15% May +12% June: +11% July +8% August: +6% September: +5% Clearly, it's not a pretty picture; especially for an industry that is used to growing at double digits. What about the all-important Christmas shopping season? Will e-tailers be able to show enough growth to overcome the weakness in the months leading up to the holidays? Don't count on it. As the evidence increases that consumers in general are reluctant to spend, estimates for the holidays are coming down. Despite the fact that the percentage of shoppers using the Internet continues to increase, it appears we are hitting a speed bump. The following chart is from eMarketer and it shows that growth in holiday online sales will be the weakest in years. The folks at eMarketer are expecting a mere 10% growth...

Today we have another list of links to posts by other bloggers that are writing about ProShares ETFs. As usual, this week's list is comprised mostly of posts from Seeking Alpha. I recommend that you click through to the authors own sites after reading these posts on the Seeking Alpha site. Thu, Oct 30 DXD Options Trader: Thursday Outlook at Seeking Alpha Thu, Oct 30 DIG DUG Really Diggin' DIG at Seeking Alpha Wed, Oct 29 SKF UYG Three Areas of Opportunity for the Bold at Seeking Alpha Wed, Oct 29 FXP QLD Options Trader: Wednesday Outlook at Seeking Alpha Wed, Oct 29 SKF Can Capital Expansion and Fed Action Co-exist? at Seeking Alpha Tue, Oct 28 TBT Markets/Irrational/Longer/Solvent at Seeking Alpha Mon, Oct 27 USD Six Months, 17 Metrics: A Week by Week View at Seeking Alpha Mon, Oct 27 SSO The Power of the RSI at Seeking Alpha Sun, Oct 26 SSO Leveraged ETFs: Not For Long Term Investors at Seeking Alpha Fri, Oct 24 DUG OPEC's Cuts Can't Fight Global Recession He...

The US Census Bureau just released the advance Durable Goods report for September. It shows that the tech sector took another beating. At a summary level of Computers and Electronic Products , Shipments were down sequentially 2.1% and New Orders were down 1.4% . This was after a terrible August number where shipments were down 5.6% ; therefore, we are seeing further declines in September from an already bad number. Looking at the sub-categories, first up we have Computers and Related Products . In this sector we see Shipments were finally up slightly at 0.8% after two bad months in a row but New Orders were down 2.1% . Given that New Orders were down 13.1% in July and up only 0.7% in August, we again have further deterioration from a prior run of bad numbers. We have mixed results in the Communications sector where a 2.6% gain in Shipments was recorded while a big 14.6% drop in New Orders was registered. Finally, we have Semiconductors . New Orders are not tracked in this sector...

When the going gets tough in a particular industry, the companies involved go to the government. When competitiveness has been lost, the non-competitive want to dump their pension plans. This means they march to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, known as the PBGC. Back around 2002 it was the steel industry. The following companies went to the PBGC to unload their pension plan responsibilities: Bethlehem Steel (one of the biggest plans to be terminated), National Steel, Northwestern Steel and Wire, Weirton Steel, Kaiser Steel and more. Many of these companies declared bankruptcy and shut down plants. Whatever was still valuable was sold off or merged into the remaining bigger, stronger steel companies that were still standing. More recently, the airlines pulled a similar move: United Airlines, TWA, Aloha Airlines and US Airways all terminated their plans and turned them over to the PBGC. The difference in this case is that some of the companies had no intention of closing their ...

Questions of the day: Is the cup half full or half empty? Have we hit the bottom or is there more pain in store? Should we buy or sell? This past week saw continued improvements in the credit market with Libor declining and slight glimmers of activity in commercial paper now that the Fed is backstopping that market, too. Commodity prices fell again. For those who are inclined to the optimistic side, this is good news for consumers. For those inclined to be pessimistic, this is a further signal of demand destruction and another indicator of how long and deep the recession will be. Earnings season proceeds apace. Optimists point to the greater than expected number of companies that are beating analyst expectations. Pessimists point to the almost uniform negativity of forward guidance provided by nearly every company and the increasingly common announcements of job cuts. Further evidence that decoupling is a myth was provided when the UK reported a 0.5% decline in their third quarter GDP,...

This post is to announce that the latest list of free stock alerts is up and available at Alert HQ . Each week we scan over 7200 stocks and ETFs looking for fresh BUY and SELL signals. We apply a combination of proprietary and standard technical analysis techniques to identify those stocks that are beginning to move. Our goal is to identify stocks or ETFs that are undergoing reversals, either to the upside or to the downside. This week, major indexes gave up more than they had gained in the previous week. Concerns over global recession hit markets worldwide and the U.S. was sucked into the vortex like everyone else. To my surprise, we didn't even get the dead cat bounce that I was expecting; investors just continued to drive the markets down. As can be expected, against this very negative backdrop we have few BUY signals. We also see that the number of SELL signals is decreasing as so many stocks have already rolled over to the downside. Here is the breakdown for this week: based o...

Merrill Lynch just released their latest installment of the RIC Report, the periodic update from their Research Investment Committee led by well known investment strategist Richard Bernstein. Among other things, the report makes the point that "extreme volatility always signals a change in leadership". We are certainly seeing extreme volatility these days with the VIX hitting records left and right. To determine who the new leaders will be, it is necessary to identify who the former leaders were and why they attained leadership. The RIC Report specifies the following: Our theme continues to be that every growth story of the past 5-10 years has been based on the credit bubble. Whether it is China, Emerging Market infrastructure, energy, commodities, residential real estate, hedge funds, or private equity funds, the similarity they all share is that they are extremely capital or credit intensive and had easy access to cheap capital. The days of easy access to cheap capital are ...