the Trade-Radar + TradingStockAlerts blog

End of an era! This site was started way back in 2006/2007 to showcase my blog posts and the Alert HQ buy signals and sell signals. Alert HQ grew to include other kinds of stock alerts including Swing Signals, Trend Busters, Trend Leaders, Cash Flow Kings and more. In the meantime, I built a sister site, TradingStockAlerts.com and I started using some of the same Alert HQ content over there. As a result, I am discontinuing the Alert HQ data here at Trade-Radar.com The good news, however, is that all the Alert HQ signals and stock screens are still completely free. In addition, the pages have been enhanced so that you can hover over a stock symbol and a small chart will pop up so you can get a quick look at the stock's recent price action. If you click on a symbol it will take you to a page with plenty of financial and technical analysis information (still free!) as well as a larger chart that you can play with in terms of adding or deleting indicators, moving averages, etc...

Yes, at long, long last a new version is available! I am very please to be able to announce that Stock Inspector Version 7 is here and it is guaranteed to make finding Buy and Sell signals simpler. The major new features in this version significantly improve the ease of use of the program and add valuable new functionality. Here is a quick overview:  New Watch List and Watch List Reports plus Automated Data Download and Signal Generation Watch List functionality has been added: Click a checkbox on the Dashboard screen to designate a stock to be on the Watch List Ability to run unattended Batch Load updates for all Watch List stocks - downloads latest stock data and fundamentals and automatically generates up-to-date Buy/Sell signals viewable in Watch List reports Two reports have been created to monitor the results of data loading and signal analysis Watch List – All Signals Report : shows the result of analysis from the point of view of bo...

I wanted to provide warning that the Alerts Plus+ feature on this site will be discontinued by the end of this month. The content, however, is currently available and will remain available at our sister site TradingStockAlerts.com For those of you who follow the Dividend and Value alerts (Reasonable Value Trend Busters, Dividend Growers, Reasonable Value Dividend Growers, etc.) or the Special Reports (Over-Valued Over-Bought, Ebb & Flow Report, Value and Growth, etc.), you will be happy to know that they are all still running at  TradingStockAlerts.com . The alerts and reports listed above are all under the "Stocks to Watch" menu item and you can go directly to them at the PremiumAlerts Stocks to Watch page. Alerts Plus+ also has a selection of alerts dedicated to ETFs. These have also moved to TradingStockAlerts.com. They can be found under the "ETFs" menu item and are all listed on the PremiumAlerts ETF Analysis page. The good news here is that ther...

You may know that Trade-Radar Stock Inspector uses financial data from Yahoo! Recently Yahoo! started adding nearly up-to-the-minute price and volume data to its historical data download. Later in the evening, after the trading day is over, Yahoo! seems to add a second entry for the same day (maybe it's after-hours trading data, they don't say). In any case, all this can cause some inaccurate results in Trade-Radar. Download the fix right away! We've built in a way to get around this problem and the new version of Trade-Radar Stock Inspector is now working as it should. Plus we've fixed a couple of minor bugs while we were at it including the dreaded Error 9 (Subscript out of range) error related to occasional problems in the trend analysis functionality when viewing the charts . Just go to   this special download page   and get the newest version now. Some readers who are signed up for the Trade-Radar Software Users Group will be receiving an email with this same i...

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...