the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

In the wake of the November elections and the State of the Union speech, the differences in outlooks between the Democrats and the Republicans are clear. With respect to the economy, the Republicans contend reducing government spending will lead to prosperity while the Democrats fear a significant reduction in spending will hurt the economy at a time when it is still fragile. Republicans and Democrats alike might do well to keep an eye on England. Fourth quarter GDP was just reported by the U.K. and it was surprisingly weak, down 0.5% after expanding 0.7% in the previous quarter. Analysts had been expecting 0.4%. Factors in play -- Some say the quarter was so bad due to the severe snow storms and cold weather that the U.K. at the end of 2010.  That could be true but it does remind me of how retailers always blame the weather when they have a bad quarter. Other analysts, politicians and even some members of the Bank of England worry that the decline in GDP is the result the ...

Certain investment themes become so well known that they merit their own acronym. One of those is the BRICs - shorthand for the popular emerging market countries Brazil, Russia, India and China. There are some investors and analysts, however, who are always looking for the next big thing. As Brazil, China and India become victims of their own success and begin to raise interest rates in order to cool their over-heated, inflation-prone economies, many investors are looking elsewhere to deploy their emerging market portfolio allocations. So prepare yourself for a new acronym: CIVETS For those people who are well versed in zoology, you may know that a civet is a nocturnal, cat-like, mostly arboreal mammal native to the tropics of Africa and Asia. But for our purposes, CIVETS stands for a group of countries that some analysts feel represent the next wave of emerging markets. They are: Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa. The CIVETS owe their acronym to the ...

I have been playing with a new stock screen lately. The objective is to identify reasonably valued stocks with good growth potential. I look for stocks that have solid earnings, high Return-on-Equity, good earnings growth expectations based on PEG and a low Debt-to-Equity ratio. These characteristics are reminiscent of GARP, growth at a reasonable price. If you are not familiar with it, the GARP strategy is a combination of both value and growth investing: it looks for companies that are somewhat undervalued and that have solid sustainable growth potential. To get into the details, the screen looks for stocks with PEG less than 1.2, ROE greater than 25, positive cash flow over the trailing four quarters and a very low Debt-to-Equity ratio. A further requirement is that the stock's performance has been no worse than 10% below that of the S&P 500. I put the result on Alert HQ Premium as the Profitable Growth Stock Report . At this point, I'm running the report on a weekly...

Back on December 11 I wrote that, to my surprise, the financial sector seemed to be staging a real comeback. At that time I pointed out that the ETF Trend Performance Report indicated that a group of financial ETFs had shown the biggest improvement in trend scores for the week. Feeling some skepticism about the financials I was not surprised to see them pull back the very next week. After running tonight's Alert HQ process, the Thursday ETF Scorecard shows that the financials have not only rallied since then, they have established strong bullish trends. Six of the top 10 are financial ETFs and there is another one at position 19. The following ETFs have registered the strongest possible trend score (6 out of 6) indicating solid bullish trends in progress: FAS Direxion Daily Financial Bull 3X Shares IYG iShares Dow Jones U.S. Financial Services Index Fund RKH Merrill Lynch Regional Bank HOLDRS UYG ProShares Ultra Financials ETF VFH ...

Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) popped up this weekend on one of our screens at Alert HQ Premium . It was on the short list of stocks that had just raised their dividend and that showed value stock characteristics. CSC just increased their dividend by 33%, going from $0.60 to $0.80. The valuation measures are quite attractive: trailing PE less than 10, PEG = 1.12, Price to Sales less than 0.5, Enterprise Value/EBITDA less than 4. Better things on the way? First, the technical picture. CSC appears to be in the process of breaking out. It has pushed above its 200-day moving average. In addition, its 50-DMA has achieved a bullish crossover above the 200-DMA though, truth be told, by only one penny. The chart below shows the situation. Another half a buck and the stock will be breaking above the previous recent high. That higher high would be a confirmation of a bullish trend.. = Looking back at the company's financials over the course of the last year, the results have not shown...

A big part of overall technology industry profit is driven by spending in the Information Technology sector. Information Week recently released the results of a survey that provides a glimpse into 2011. The following chart summarizes the results of the survey: The good news is that a total of 55% of of the 552 respondents do expect to see budgets and spending rise next year. Last year the number was 45% so we see continued improvement. Only 19% expect to cut IT budgets compared to 24% of respondents in the previous survey. Finally, 26% expect to keep budgets flat compared to 30% previously. The biggest increase was seen in the group expecting to increase spending to rise 5% to 10% which went from 16% up to 27%. Supporting these budget expectations is the fact that 59% of respondents report growing demand for IT services at their companies. This next chart shows where IT investments are expected to be made: In general, every category is expected to see a modest increase. At the ...

One of the stocks that popped up on Alert HQ earlier this week is a tech stock that looks a lot like a value stock. I'm talking about Intevac (IVAC). Intevac is a small cap stock that has broken out in a big way. It's up over 50% from its most recent low in mid-September. The question is, however, is it now over-priced? First, let's take a look at the weekly chart: You can see that it's gone from around $9 to almost $15 which is a sizable move. A pull-back seems almost inevitable. Yet, after that potential pull-back runs its course, there could be room for further gains. Here's why: The basic scenario is that this stock currently looks like a value stock. If it is perceived to be a growth stock, then there is opportunity for its multiple to increase. Let's take a look at the financials and establish its value qualifications. Here are some valuation characteristics: Trailing PE is 11.48, which is quite reasonable for a tech stock. Forward PE is 17.61 ...