the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

We are about to begin another earnings season so I thought it might be a good idea to review how the most recent earnings season turned out. I have focused first of all on earnings growth; ie, the change in quarterly earnings on a year-over-year basis. The change was converted into a percentage growth calculation in order to compare growth rates across multiple quarters. For 4Q-2011 (results for 4th quarter 2011 as reported during 1st quarter 2012) the numbers are as follows: Out of our universe of roughly 5600 stocks that we follow (ETFs are excluded for the purposes of this analysis), 1445 companies showed earnings growth in the most recent quarter that exceeded the earnings growth registered in the previous quarter. This means that 25% of companies actually showed earnings growth acceleration. That seems to be to be pretty solid results. To widen our net a bit, I then looked at stocks who did not have accelerating growth but whose earnings growth year-over-year was at least st...

E*TRADE recently rolled out commission-free trading of a select group of ETFs from Wisdom Tree, Global-X and Deutsche Bank (db-X funds). No doubt, this is in reaction to a similar move that Charles Schwab made last year and that proved popular with investors and investment advisors alike. In any case, this is good news for investors who happen to have an E*TRADE account. Not only does this reduce trading costs, it provides a wide-ranging set of ETFs that can be used to construct highly diversified portfolios. ETFs include target date funds, currency funds, numerous single-country and global ETFs and an interesting set of style-based ETFs. Examples of the styles available include dividend focused, earnings focused, small cap, mid cap and large cap and combinations of the above. The one drawback is that U.S. sector funds are largely absent. For example, there are no tech ETFs available. The main question, though, is whether these ETFs are good investments. I can say that many...

The Durable Goods advanced report for September 2011 was released on Wednesday. I like to dig into the Durable Goods report because it can be useful for seeing how tech in aggregate is performing and how the sector may perform in the future. I always focus on two particular measures: shipments and new orders. Let's see how it played out last month. 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 September shipments looked for the overall tech sector: Results for the overall tech sector were a bit weak but take a look at the next chart which tracks the Computers and related products segment: Results here were actually quite good and, to make things even better, the previous month wa...

Since August, the market has been in a funk, plunging at the end of July and then range-bound, more or less moving sideways for two months. The top of the range is notated in the chart below by the horizontal magenta line in the daily chart of SPY, the S&P 500 ETF. On Friday, however, we finally got a decisive move out of the range and above the magenta line. The question on everyone's minds is: does this breakout have staying power? Activity in Europe is still the wildcard and is pretty much unpredictable so in this post we'll just stick to the the technicals as we see them. 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 a...

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 - ...