the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

Aloha, everyone! After several years of sticking close to home, the whole family fled the freezing Northeast and hit Hawaii for a well-deserved vacation. For those of you who are still shoveling snow, you have my sympathy. When I introduced the new TradingStockAlerts Free Stock Screener , I mentioned that I'd soon be away from the office and that data on the new screener and on Trade-Radar would be going stale while I was out of the office. As it turns out, I have been able to update the data on both sites on the usual schedule thanks to a neat piece of software from a company called LogMeIn . Background -- LogMeIn provides solutions that allow you to remotely manage computers. In my case, I have a laptop in Hawaii and I am able to control the computer in the office that runs all the Trade-Radar analysis programs. I install a piece of software on the office computer which runs as a service. It waits for a request to access the computer and handles security (a password is requ...

If you're a regular reader of this blog then you've probably noticed that the posts have few and far between lately. Well, I've just been overwhelmed with behind the scenes activities and I haven't had the time for blogging. First, I realized that the Trade-Radar Stock Inspector software was not internationalized properly and our European friends encountered a fatal error each time they tried to display a chart. I've made the changes necessary to accommodate the European way of displaying currency but there is still further testing to be done before I can release the new version of the software. While I was in the middle of testing the Trade-Radar changes I was contacted by someone who wanted to sell me the Internet domain TradingStockAlerts.com. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to buy it and, of course, I couldn't resist diving in and creating a new web site. After messing around with the homepage I created what think is a pretty darn good s...

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...