How I Got Started In The Stock Market

How I Got Started and How I Evolved
The year was 1996 and my mother told me my grandfather was giving my sister and I each $500 as an investment. He had to open the account in his name as I was only 15 at the time. He took me on the appointment to set up this investment account. We drove downtown to meet his stock broker in one of the city's few skyscrapers. The office suite was like one of those scenes from Oliver Stone's 1987 Wallstreet. We went to the stock brokers lush corner office and he and my grandfather talk a little. My grandfather emphasized he wants this to be "for the long-term." They talked a bit more and we were jettisoned to another office where his secretary took our information. My first stock broker has just split my $500 between two mutual funds. The first fund is called The Alliance Bierstein Technology fund and the second is the MFS Emerging Growth fund. Remember this is the mid 90s and the historic stock market gains from internet technology has barely even started. This is not a bad fund to be in at this time. Infact it couldn't have been a better industry.

My grandfather explained to me how I need to keep track of the ups and downs of these funds and you can check it in the newspaper. I didn't realize it at that time but what he was doing was teaching my sister and I a valuable lesson. The lesson was to start nvesting at an early age. I had little interest in these investments at that time. I guess he knew that didn't matter because simply being exposed was all that mattered. My parents sure would never have thought to teach me about investing. It might have even missed me my whole adult life.

Time passed. I checked the statements from time to time and my $500 turns into roughly $1000 in the bubble in 99' and 00.' I had taken some of this money out before this and eventually after the stock market crash of 2000 there wasn't much in the account. The question I asked is how did this happen? How did my broker let my account crash? I didn't know much of anything about stocks and investing but this was obviously a bad thing. So, I took it upon myself to learn some basics about mutual funds. I end up learning that all the stock broker did was pick a mutual fund on a best guess. Whoops! They were load mutual funds with high expense ratios. At this point I figure I can be a better investor than my stock broker. I have access to the same information on the internet and can see the same mutual funds in the newspaper. Little did I know then that brokers are salesmen. There is a fiduciary responsibility they uphold but they and their firm have to make money. 

The stock market has crashed and I'm getting interested in stock picking from reading all about it on the internet and seeing the ebbs and flows of stock and mutual fund prices in the daily newspapers. I'm reading great free beginner articles on this cool site called the Motley Fool. I spent hours and hours a week learning the basics of stocks and investing in companies. I'm learning everything about fundamental analysis on the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. Those Motley Fool articles and website taught me a lot. I started learning about these great stock pickers like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch. I'm hooked. I buy my first investing book called Beating the Street by Peter Lynch.

In 2001 I bought my first individual stocks. My first stock investments are purely contrarian plays. I see Lucent Technologies and Kmart's stock prices hammered. I understood their businesses and figure these two companies are going to weather the storm and recover. Things got worse before they got better though. Both Lucent and Kmart enter into bankruptcy. My investments become virtually worthless. It turned out later my thesis was good because after Kmart came out of bankruptcy they listed their stock on a new exchange. Kmart's stock went on to be a huge success. Very huge. It was a multi-bagger. The stock went up over 100%. The only problem was I was still holding the worthless shares on the old exchange.

 I started reading books on Warren Buffett. I became a big student of his. I probably read five Buffett books. This led me to Ben Graham and Fisher. I never cared much for reading about Fisher. I definitely preferred Graham. I read Graham's Intelligent Investor a few times. Around this time I took a financial accounting class in college and a couple other business classes which helped cement my understanding of basic analysis. In 2002 I read one of the investing newsletters my grandfather gave me from time to time when I would go over to his place. One of the authors liked this company called Fortune Brands. This powerhouse conglomerate sold alcohol, golf, home and office equipment. The big brands were Jim Beam, Masterlock, Titleist and Swingline staplers. The stock had a low PE and obvious stable growth prospects. I held onto Fortune Brands for over 4 years and the stock did well. The 2006 real estate collapse really hurt their home products. They would eventually spinoff the office products and the liquor business got bought recently. Some other companies I held for long periods of time were International Game Tech and Stryker.

 I called myself a value investor and solely used fundamentals. I figured that was the only way to go. I picked some bad stocks like Movie Gallery and a value trap financial. With Movie Gallery I had a gain at one point that turned into a loss. I guess after some of these bad choices I realized crunching the fundamentals of a company wasn't good enough. When do you sell for a profit? When do you cut a loser? Most value investors have no idea of risk management or managing a position. There can be a level of arrogance in simple value investing. The other question I asked myself is what is good investing? Peter Lynch called it an art and a science. Well if something is as much art as science I'm sorry that is pseudoscience and not predictable. Trading in stock markets has to be moderately formulaic and predictability is important. A lot of reasoning for stock investments is "a story." The story is they did this in the past and this is happening in the future. What about economic externalities? Government intervention? Unforseen bad management? Basic contrarian investing is probably better than most peoples definition of value investing. I'm getting off on bit of a rant so I'll continue were I left off. It was 2007 and I had made what appeared to be great value investments in Movie Gallery and this deep asset value financial. Movie Galleries stock fell apart and the financial didn't move up or down for a year.

I kept scouring the internet looking for new information. In 2007 I came across this blog by Tim Sykes. Tim turned $12,000 into over $1 million by the time he was 21. He had run the top short-biased hedge fund in one of the years he ran the hedge fund. He had just started the blog before I found it and he was re-creating his success by trading a small account of less than $30,000 with the goal of turning it into $1 mil again. He was transparent and posting all of his winners and losers on his blog. He was mostly using technical analysis and was winning roughly 80-90% of his trades. That caught my attention. Before that I was sure technical analysis was worthless. All the mainstream media and investment industry chicanery pointed to investing as the best approach in stocks. Warren Buffett even wrote that paper The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville!!! And Tweedy Browne's What Has Worked in Investing! What's going on here??

Seeing technical analysis work before me quickly changed my mind. Through Syke's site I stumbled onto another traders site. This guy had a daytrading chatroom. His name was Muddy and his wife Laura traded with him everyday. Also in the chat were some other great traders like Greg Simmons. I started following the chatroom during market hours in the Spring of 2008 in college. They only traded volatile equities. I watched and these people were making money everyday. During the summer I started trading a very small account, got a data feed and decent enough software platform to daytrade. I was using a Tradeking and Zecco brokerage account and DTN IQ Feed run on Quote Tracker. 2008 was an incredible time to be a day trader. During the summer and fall the banks were collapsing along with the market and the VIX was sky high.

Muddy would scan every night for stocks with the highest day range. You type this into Stockfetcher.com "show stocks where the average day range(10) is above 7 percent and close price is between 1 and 10 and volume is above 300000." The top day rangers would be down 30% and up 20% everyday. Very high beta stuff. I would look at my watchlist of 30 stocks at the end of the day and literally all of them would be up or down atleast 10%.  A monkey could have traded those. I'll never forget those stocks like Newcastle NCT, Ambac Financial ABK, General Growth Properties GGP, GFI GFIG, Fortress Investment FIG. As soon as a dayranger went to a new low of the day or red on the day from the previous close it was easy to ride for a gain. The trick is waiting for the momentum. You simply buy when it is going green and short when red. Nine times out of ten if it went green on the day it would keep going green and red would continue red. Just this knowledge was enough for about anyone to trade successfully in late 2008.

Armed with the knowledge that technical analysis worked I read some books on it. I read Darvas' How I made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market and Schwager's Getting Started in Technical Analysis. I read some other basic technical analysis stuff on the internet. Learning from a 30 year veteran trader Muddy was the best thing that could have happened to me. He described his trading style as "like a caveman." I was now more of a trader than an investor. I started another blog on my domain DynamiteStocks.com where I just put up charts and watchlists. I kept StockPursuit.com going with the deep value theme and would find some pretty cool value stocks with good technicals. A lot of these reader reviews on my blog were from around that time. My main focus had shifted to trading but I never abandoned contrarian value investing. You can combine fundamentals and technicals but they are just different. Today I call myself a discretionary momentum trader who also does contrarian and value investing. With fundamental investing in stocks I always prefer small and micro-cap deep asset values.

After all that in 2012 I started a career in sales in financial services with a top 10 financial company. I had to shut down all of my blogs. I got my series 6, 63, life and health insurance licenses. I did that for just over a year. Before I had to shut this blog down I was averaging 50 unique page views a day and bringing in a part-time income from affiliate advertising. I was getting a lot of Google "juice" in the search engine results pages and using search engine optimization very effectively in the discount online brokers niche. My passion for trading and investing led me into a lot of other ventures like working at the financial company and online marketing. I've come a long way since the 1990s and am very excited about the future.
  

Biotech Stocks List

A lot of markets are at crucial areas here. The US major indices are probably going to decide which direction longer term they want to go. They could continue range bound for awhile longer though unless the Patriots get a hold of the air in the futures markets. They are at the top of the trading range here. You can especially see this in the Nasdaq. I was going through some scans and medical stocks kept showing up in large numbers. Biotech is one of the hot industries right now. So, I am putting up some of the best biotech charts I found. If the Biotech ETF IBB is not good enough for you these are some potential trade ideas. These are all momentum stocks in bull flags or breakout plays. This is purely from a technical analysis standpoint. SCMP that I put up a couple days ago was pretty cool because it was nice technically and with fundamentals. It's breaking out again up 6% yesterday. I don't know what is up with the value stock JVA technically. It has some crazy prints the past couple days. It looks like it could be going a lot lower now. Well, good for us value investors. As I'm typing this it is very early Tuesday morning the 27th. Let's get to the list.

First we have Dicerna Pharmaceuticals (DRNA) which has formed a triangle consolidation on light sell volume. Well formed triangles are one of the most reliable patterns. If it breaks out there should be a lot more on the long side but also if it breaks down from the triangle there will likely be more downside. Long bias on this one though but we shall see.

Next we have Athersys (ATHX) This one just broke out off of trend support. It did a hammer first on trend support and is running again.

We have ZIOPHARM Oncology, Inc. (ZIOP) next. This is a cool one because it gapped up, consolidated into a bull flag and is coming off the flag with a hammer.

Last is (Agenus AGEN) which is very similar to ZIOP. We have a gap up on very strong volume, a flag on light volume and we are testing the gap now.

Bottom Up and Top Down Stocks

I went through some scans I typically go through and thought I'd post some that caught my eye. The first one bottom up is Sucampo Pharmaceuticals SCMP.  The chart was cool because it just broke out of consolidation on very strong volume. It's also at a 5 year high. I looked at it some more and this is just under a $700 million dollar company with a diverse portfolio of pharmaceuticals it sells. The good thing I see here is the earnings revisions. Next quarters earnings estimate is $.11 up from $.05 90 days ago. The current years estimate is $.47 a share up from $.22 ninety days ago. Next years EPS is currently $.60 up from $.40 ninety days ago. It's always great when earnings are revised up. With the stock at $15.66 this gives us a forward P/E multiple of 26. With earnings growing about the same rate the stock is conservatively fairly valued. However, the next 5 years are expected to grow more giving the stock a mere .35 PEG multiple(price to earnings growth). Lots of bullish stuff going on here.


SCMR New high on volume

 

 I found this coffee company called Coffee Holding Company ticker JVA. It is a small company with a mere $34 million dollar market cap. Coffee companies are usually good businesses especially if you are selling beans wholesale, which they are. They are profitable and I see no reason the stock should trade around net tangible asset value. Roughly $20 million is net tangible asset value and the market cap is just above it at $34. It's around technical support and just had a wide ranging day up 7%.

that is technical and fundamental support

The top down one is oil. I think it is a good time to start scaling into crude oil long. Everybody knows the ETF USO. USO is a terrible way to invest in oil. It's because of the way it rolls the contracts. It has to turnover futures contracts thus resulting in a lot of decay. The futures themselves CL is ideally the best way to trade oil. There are better ETF's like 12 month Oil ETF USL . USL holds longer term contracts and thus more closely resembles the actual price of oil. I'm long some USL now. Full Disclosure: long USL

Natural Gas Setup Emerging

One of the best patterns to trade is a breakout from a tight trading range. Such a fat pitch has been developing in natural gas lately. The channel lines are drawn out in these charts below. Whether it breaks out or breaks down there should be some significant follow through. Right now price is congesting at the bottom of the channel and looks poised to breakdown and plunge lower here. I have a buy stop set at 4.60 a share on DGAZ the 3X inverse natural gas ETF to short natural gas.  There may very well be whipsaw and this could be a fake out or failed signal but with energy getting hammered and a rush to liquidity in markets natural gas looks right to go much lower.

A Short Biased Watch

I posted IFON on the blog not that long ago when it traded at 1.54. It is now at 2.92 incredibly. I have another short sell watch. The same kind of setup as CDTI that I posted on awhile back. The ticker is GFOX and the company is Grey Fox Petroleum. It trades on the OTC and I'm not sure there are currently any shares available anywhere to short. This is a good short setup forming though. It is up this month from $.80 a share to $2.24 currently. It barely even traded any shares before November. It also has zero revenue. Buy volume is getting exhausted.

Oil and Drug Trades

I'm long a couple position trades. After stalking oil for awhile I put a buy stop for UCO the oil ETF in at 29.75 a share a couple days ago. I got filled on UCO and am now long. I'd like to keep this on for weeks. I also bought ZLCS a pharma company. I got filled in the 1.90s a share. Couldn't have asked for a better print on the day. A nice hammer. I expect this to run a lot after it hits over 2.00.

Some Quick Charts: Metals etc.

Last week the high beta stuff was back in play. The rare earth elements and metals. Oh, and don't forget the shippers. If I've been right about anything lately it was that the shippers had bottomed. DRYS is very correlated with the index. It's a good one. One of the stocks I've had my eyes on lately is former net-net Infosonics IFON. The stock is usually very thin but a few days ago I noticed it was in-play as the volatility and volume suddenly appeared. So it's no longer in net current asset territory, however, it's moving lately. They got a notice of failure to maintain the Nasdaq'a minimum price per share above $1. Other than that I don't know of any significant news around the time the surge began.

Another flag is starting as it consolidates from that huge run the other day.

ENG is consolidating and this looks like a long flag here. The stock is up so much over the last 6 months that it seems like buying would be chasing. This is just such a perfect flag here that any break above it could get some good follow though I would imagine. We'll see though. ENG has a nice balance sheet.

Tasman Metals TAS is a junior resource company engaged in the acquisition and exploration of rare earth elements and tungsten in Scandinavia. TAS has a great chart going. It's in a nice slow uptrend and just tested trend support and held on volume. This is going higher. Over 1.10 soon.

What I Use for Stock Screens and a Trading Watchlist

Everyday after the market has closed I try to run though atleast 80 to 100 charts with my custom scans on Stockfetcher.com. I just use pure technical and statistical screens. I don't screen any fundamentals on Stockfetcher. For fundamentals these days I just us Graham Investor and look at NCAV stocks.

A perfect scenario when I'm scanning is to find a good looking chart first on Stockfetcher that also is a net current asset stock or deep value around net tangible assets. There continues to be a lot of stocks moving in the alternative energy industry. I've had Plug Power PLUG keep popping up in scans but I missed the last big run. I'm still watching it though. Fuel Cell FCEL has a good chart going too. If I were going to be daytrading tomorrow I would have ETRM on watch with a long bias. This is a very clean flag right here.

For possible position trades

I really like Vapor Corp VPCO. They sell electronic cigarettes. Electronic cigs are a winning industry of the future. It looks poised to breakout here again.

Delcath Systems DCTH is hovering right around net current asset value. On the balance sheet there was about $25 million in net current assets. The market cap is right around there here at $.24 a share. It's in breakdown mode so more lows look like they are coming.

Star Scientific STSI has had some bad news lately. I see it as a contrarian play in the low $1 a share area. This stock in the 10 years I pulled up price history in yahoo has always bottomed around $1 a share.

MEET Flag Setup

I've had MeetMe Inc. ticker MEET on my watchlist since it made that big run about a week ago. It's started a flag on Fridays run with light sell volume on the flag and looks poised to continue to run again. I am going to put a buy stop order in at 1.87 a share. I also added LEE XXII JKS to the watchlist.

Dry Bulk Shipping Stock SHIP

Hello folks. I put this shipper Seanergy Maritime Holdings Corp. (SHIP) up on Twitter about a week ago after the dry bulk shipper post. SHIP is a low floater. It has a small float and it only has a market cap of $26 million. It has run especially well along with all the other shippers. It's a really good one to trade because of how volatile it is. Very high day range. It had a huge run in January from $1.20 to $2.70 a share. It just printed a hammer off this new flag. Right now it definitely looks like another flag because of the decreasing sell volume I drew the red lines over.

Old Net-Net Blonder Tongue BDR On The Move

Former net-net Blonder Tongue Labs (BDR) has 5.5 mil in net current asset value and a market cap of 9.6 million. It has always been one of those perennial net-nets. Always below and around net current asset value. Unfortunately I wasn't watching it lately. It has bottomed out as this chart shows. I circled the failed breakdown. The stock then was in breakdown mode until the lower low turned into a spike bottom. Confirmation of the failed breakdown is where I drew the arrow. Failed signals can be very powerful. The second chart is the beautiful flag it printed. The chart is real bullish here still even though I missed the perfect setups and price. I'm long biased on BDR.

Macroeconomic Stock Plays

I have been writing a lot about macro trends from monetary metals like gold and silver, oil to rare earth element stocks. Outside of the precious metals I haven't included that many individual stock picks. So, today I'm going to look at a couple of stocks.

Rare Element Resources (REE) mines for rare earth elements and gold. REE has a market cap of only $568 million at yesterdays close of $13.17 a share. Their Bear Lodge property looks to have a substantial amount of rare earths. I think this major is a good addition or alternative to other majors like Molycorp (MCP).

If you are interested in rare earths here is some information from the US Government Accountability Office on rare earths in the defense supply chain. One interesting tidbit from the report is that once a company gets the capital to begin a mine it can take from 7 to 15 years to get a property fully online due to regulatory procedures.

This next stock is currently my favorite setup at the moment. It is a natural gas company called Union Drilling (UDRL). While there is roughly $200 million in net tangible asset value and only a $237 million market cap I'm more interested in the chart play. The $10.40-$10.50 area has become a resistance level and as it stands today it is still consolidating around these levels. This is bullish consolidation currently and I see UDRL heading higher if it can print $10.61.

I expect a significant move higher either today or the next couple trading days.

A Final Thought
I believe that a top down approach continues to be one of the best strategies in this current environment. I want to continue to look at the oil and gas drillers, commodities and the precious metal miners. The writing has and should continue to be on the wall in regard to these areas outperforming.

There's Still Time To Buy Commodities

I want to talk a little about the macro situation in this article. More importantly I want to share my thoughts on crude oil at the moment. I also have a silver stock that looks interesting.

I won't go deep into the thesis behind the bullish case for commodities because I talked about that before. I still think it is important to be allocated in hard and soft commodities at this time. There is going to continue to be "dollar" inflation and this should allow certain assets like stocks and especially commodities to continue higher. It's essentially a Cantillion Effect. The rise in prices we have seen across the board really can't be totally explained otherwise.

Commodities Gains

Crude Oil At The Moment
Oil looks particularly bullish fundamentally and technically still. In the big scheme of things it won't be good at all if oil takes off like it did in the 70s or 2008. Some of you probably know the story from the late 70s but if you don't there was a severe oil crisis. There was also very significant inflation that was only struck down by Paul Volcker getting interest rates up to a whopping 19%. This saved the dollar but it also brought a recession.

Oil has gotten particularly volatile lately. Part of this is uncertainty about supply following the revolutions. There was a news story about what might happen if Libya and Algeria shut down supply.

Technically, there has been some congestion following the big spike day. It looks like bullish consolidation. It's starting to be confirmed as there was just a pop out of it. If we continue hitting new highs I think there may be some more explosive momentum. There definitely is more upside.

3 month chart of crude oil

As far as holding oil for any time period the best instrument is the futures themselves (CL). The US Oil Fund ETF ticker (USO) is a terrible way to play oil. It's because of the way the contracts roll. The ETF must buy oil futures contracts and sell them before expiry. As a result there is decay in the ETF. The natural gas ETF (UNG) is a good example of the dynamics of these ETFs. Natural gas has been pretty flat but the ETF has performed even worse because it bought the expensive monthly contracts and had to sell them cheaper right before expiration.

I think United States 12 Month Oil (USL) holds longer contracts than USO. USL has outperformed USO over long time frames.

Teucrium WTI Crude Oil Fund (CRUD) is also another alternative as it tries to buy contracts on three different maturities to offset decay.

Silver Mining Stocks
Here are some ideas in the mining sector. As silver continues hitting new highs I like this Canadian junior miner Aurcana Corporation (AUNFF) here. It's a smaller company and in the penny stock range. Some other larger market cap names that are worth a look include Hecla Mining (HL), Silver Standard Resources (SSRI) and Pan American Silver (PAAS).

Silver Analysis

Even after this run-up I see some very bullish signals setting up in the price action recently.

Fundamentally, the bullish case also remains as Ben Bernanke and the FED has pledged to keep rates low for some time and also because they have embarked on QE 2. I think it is very likely we will see QE 3,4,5 etc. eventually. Especially considering Japan is still back at a zero interest rate policy and doing even more QE here now 20 years later. There's also a lot of stories going around on JP Morgan's possible short covering going on and just how big some of these traders positions are. Whether or not there is a massive short squeeze taking place or about to take place I'm not sure but it certainly would just add to the bullish case.

Silver Chart Analysis

There was a much larger consolidation from May through August that came before the big run we've experienced recently. This recent one is a lot smaller and tighter. Old resistance has been retested successfully where the arrow points. There was major resistance at those levels. Another bullish thing is there has been a flurry of hammer and small doji candles here around trend support. In the past months there would be hammers off trend support right before big runs.

Some potentially bearish technical things about the chart are that trend support was broken. Silver was trending very well for months but that cracked. After such a run though trend support widens so this isn't a hugely bearish signal. It is more of a neutral one at this point.

In final, if silver can push up a bit from here and hit 29.57 I see significant upside. If it fails to follow through I'll switch and be short biased.

Gold Technical Analysis

Gold is pushing up around resistance in the 1,000's. This area it is approaching has been rock solid resistance as you can see from the first chart. A technician that uses normal trend lines and not an internal trend line will fail to read this market correctly in my opinion. That first line is way to high and was a result of momentum and emotions in the market. The arrows show a range that it tends to trade in. A resistance level it finds easier is in the second chart with the top resistance line.

Of course to clear all this resistance though it is going to have to take out all these spike tops. The grand daddy chart is last. You don't want to miss this.

This chart below is the chart to be looking at on gold.

This chart sends a powerful signal. It is saying that it is more than likely that gold the commodity will continue higher. Let me rephrase that. Very likely. Let me explain what I see.

The bottom red line is golds support trend line. In lamens terms the price keeps bouncing off of it and it goes higher. This is bullish and good for buyers. Price was consolidating off that trend line. The interesting and important thing here is the triangular consolidation that has taken place.

I want to wait a week or two to see what happens as gold tests its former highs. Any congestion would be bullish. If it breaks out I think it still would be a good idea to put on a position or with stocks or ETF's. There is a possibility that this could be a failed signal. In that case it would be a good short on a move to the low 900's. But the technical picture right now is buy, especially on a new high in the low 1,000 area. I'm not sure how the fundamentals support a major run. I feel like the best time to play it is if we see hyper-inflation. I can't ignore market forces though with the technical analysis. China and other foreign countries who hold US debt could up to something?



full disclosure:no positions in gold commodities or stocks at time of writing

Penny Stock CIT Triangle Trade

CIT which is now a penny stock got some news on Friday and subsequently the stock took off. CIT broke out of the days trading range and hit $.93 before people started taking profits which jolted the stock quickly down to the $.70s. CIT began to consolidate.

Here are some other triangles.

This is an ascending triangle.

A longer time frame triangle .

And another intraday trade triangles.




full disclosure: no position

How To Trade Triangles

There have been a lot of bio-tech and pharmaceutical stocks in play lately. It is time consuming and very hard to make a good long-term trade in these companies. Luckily, if you can just recognize chart patterns and use basic technical analysis it can take just a couple of minutes or even seconds to get a read on the next direction for the stock.

There's the triangle and key resistance levels. Three times the stock couldn't budge above 5.00. One time the resistance was even 4.99.


full disclosure:no positions

Small-Cap Stock MSN

Emerson Radio MSN is still doing very well and just reported second quarter results which were pretty good from looking over the press release. Quarterly revenue wasn't that great but overall on the year they are doing well. The stock only has a market cap of about $50 million and being a small-cap this size there probably isn't a line of institutions ready to pile on. I think it could continue to trade higher slowly though as it has all year.

In the next couple days though I think it could pull-back toward the upper bollinger band like it did after the last huge pop.



full disclosure:no position

Watch List Adds

Just added these stocks to my watchlists

Long Bias
TLR PLUG RAME RDCM ZYTC HDVY ICOP ROIAK-still a top watch

Short Bias on breakdown
AWSL AUTC VRMLQ

AWSL is looking pretty supernova. Could be good long if continues too along with AUTC

Shorting Financials

I'm shorting financials over night. I'm long FAZ at 19.85. I had thought about shorting as soon as they filled the gap about two days ago but it didn't seem safe enough then. Financial stocks look like toast here. We've got a bear trap. A really ugly bear trap. A break of support and a shooting star here as it looks like everybody hit the panic sell button or either program trades triggered. When it cracked that support around 15.00s there was a pretty big move and no flag. That's why I feel pretty good holding overnight. I'm not trying to get much more out of it. I should be selling tomorrow if there is anymore weakness. The maximum potential downside for XLF is 14ish though. I like this set-up.




full disclosure:long FAZ