the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

Stocks went on another wild on Thursday (window-dressing?) and in an interesting turn of events the Dow finished up over 1% while the NASDAQ 100 finished down 1%. This was surprising to me since tech has been trading in a much more positive way than most other sectors or indexes. This could mean there is a buying opportunity coming up for the following stocks. These five companies are all profitable and their 50-day exponential moving averages are in the process of turning up. (Note that we found these stocks using a freely available preset for the Premium Stock Screener at TradingStockAlerts.com) Here are the five stocks, all of which were trading above their 50-day EMA as of the close on Thursday. I have included a quick take on their financial status, current valuation and technical outlook. CommVault Systems, Inc. ( CVLT ) -- This company has solid financials but is somewhat over-priced. Nevertheless, the stock is in an up-trend. It could be a buy on a pullback if you are co...

Here we go again. At the beginning of August SPY crossed below its 200-day moving average and made brutal downward move. Since that time, the ETF and many other indices and their associated ETFs have been tracing out what is know as a "bear flag" on their daily charts. This week SPY and the rest broke below the bottom line of the flag pattern. Here's what it looks like: The blue lines show the flag. The black oval shows where we ended the week. Despite a rally on Friday, SPY is clearly on bearish side of this pattern. Furthermore, a sizable gap was opened up on the way down. In addition, the bottom line of the flag pattern, formerly support, now becomes resistance. The expectation now that the breakdown has occurred is that SPY could fall another 10 to 15 points. With SPY about to test the low for 2011, we should see what some of our Trade-Radar market measures are telling us. The view from Alert HQ -- For those readers who are new to TradeRadar or who don...

As I was poking through the Alert HQ results of the last few days, one company’s name seemed to keep popping up: Standex International Corporation (SXI). Standex showed up on the following screens/reports at TradingStockAlerts.com : Reversal Alerts based on Daily Data   Value and Growth Report   Trend Buster Report    Reasonable Value Trend Buster Report   Furthermore, if you enter the symbol into the Stock Search function on TradingStockAlerts.com , you will see that Standex comes up as a BUY there, too Background -- Standex International Corporation is a small-cap diversified manufacturing company with the following five divisions: Food Service Equipment Group - manufactures commercial food service equipment for restaurants, convenience stores, quick-service restaurants, supermarkets, drug stores, hotels, casinos, and corporate and school cafeterias, as well as serves health science and medical markets.  Air Distribution Products Group - ...

Here is a quick list of value stocks that are breaking out in a bullish direction over their downward sloping trend lines. Symbol Name Sector Industry PE Ratio Price to Sales Price to Book PEG Ratio Enterprise Value to EBITDA CPX Complete Production Services, Inc. Energy Oilfield Services/ Equipment 13.92 1.19 2.46 0.66 5.24 FLL Full House Resorts, Inc. Consumer Services Services-Misc. Amusement & Recreation 8.52 1.13 1.26 0.43 3.07 HELE Helen of Troy Limited Consumer Durables Home Furnishings 9.47 1.04 1.3 0.84 8.38 HRS Harris Corporation Capital Goods Industrial Machinery/ Components 8.77 0.84 1.99 0.87 5.18 SUTR Sutor Technology Group Limited Capital Goods Steel/Iron Ore 3.81 0.12 0.27 0.22 4.73 TSTC Telestone Technologies Corp. Consumer Durables Tele- communications Equipment ...

The Durable Goods advanced report for July was released on Wednesday and the headline number surprised to the upside. This helped the market tack on some further gains beyond Tuesday's big advance. Besides its effect on a day's action in the stock market, the Durable Goods report is useful for seeing how tech in aggregate is performing. As of this report, the situation is mixed. I always focus on two particular measures: shipments and new orders. In July, the two measures were not consistent and this is worrisome. Let's see how it played out in July. 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 July shipments looked for the overall tech sector: Results were actually quite good and,...

With the market practically crashing again I wondered if there were any industries hiding stocks with strength. Poking around in the Industry Inspector at our sister site TradingStockAlerts.com actually did yield a little theme in an unexpected area. I sorted the list of industries according to percentage of stocks above their 50-day moving average. At the top of the list was the Consumer Services/Automotive Aftermarket industry which contains only one stock: Monro Muffler and Brake (MNRO). Re-sorting to look for industries with stocks showing bullish MACD and up near the top was the Consumer Services/Motor Vehicles industry. Among the three stocks in this segment is Midas, Inc. (MDS), otherwise known as Midas Muffler. These stocks seem barely affected by the recent downturn but the simple reason is strong earnings. Both companies rolled up increases in sequential revenues and earnings. On a year-over-year basis, Midas disappointed a bit on revenue but shined on earnings while...

After a week of epic volatility, stocks ended the week on a positive note; nevertheless, it wasn't enough to turn a loss into a gain. The S&P 500, for example, still ended the week down 1.63%. Last week I reviewed the moving average and trend analysis charts and declared that we were at bearish extremes not seen since the March 2009 market lows. Let's see what they say this week. 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). The number of stocks above their 50-day EMA (yellow line) has impr...