US Dollar Update

I've been bullish on the US dollar for sometime now and have been holding the dollar ETF UUP. Fundamentally with the rest of the world debasing their currency and cutting rates its not surprising to see the tremendous run we have seen in USD. I don't know how much longer this will keep up though. How are we in the US going to raise rates when the rest of the globe is cutting? The other thing is the technical side. Looking at the dollar index it has skyrocketed and is going vertical now. This can't keep up forever. I'm happy to trim off 3/4's of my UUP position into this strength on Monday. Selling 3/4's of the position will lock in the bulk of the 10% gains it gave me. I'll have a stop loss on the remaining shares.
It's very interesting to see the continued pressure the dollar strength has put on commodities, especially oil. Oil looks poised to test the lows of the winter.

Healthcare, Dollar and More

The US dollar continues to rise as expected and biotech is still incredibly hot. No it is blazing hot. ZIOP from my biotech stocks list in late January is almost a double already. IBB just broke out again and it looks like more highs in a lot of these stocks is in store. I just added some to my trading watchlist for Friday the 6th. On another note my long-term positions haven't changed much. From top to bottom in percentage I'm long FSEAX Asian Emerging Markets Fund as my largest holding, second largest is PFN Pimco Income Strategy Bonds, third is UUP US Dollar Long ETF, Fourth is USL Oil ETF 12mo, fifth is PKD Parker Drilling, and last is KEG Key Energy Services. EDIT Also long LOJN LoJack and silver. Recently I added some more to the UUP long dollar position. I'm very underweight in the two oil stocks. I like all these holdings for the long-term. I may not hold them all for years though. I'm not totally happy. I really need some more diversified US exposure. I might go with a Nasdaq index ETF and Russell 2000 index ETF here soon.

The trading watchlist for Friday the 6th is LAS AXN CYTX ABTL TTI CYTK ATXH. The only short bias is ABTL. My favorite on this list is LAS. If it starts moving it very well could hit 1.50 in a couple weeks based on how it has moved in the past. With the size of the volume here on LAS I see it moving. Back in 2009 or 2010 I remember it had day after day runs of 10-30%. AXN is only good if it breaks over 1.14. If it doesn't it looks dead. All of these are speculative day trade watches.

Loss on EXEL Trade

Friday I had EXEL along with a bunch of other stocks on my watchlist. EXEL was a bull flag continuation breakout setup. 2.99 was the high of the previous run day and was the resistance level I was looking for a break of to get long. It came and printed 3.00 on decent volume. So I got long and filled at 3.00. EXEL immediately failed to hold that 3.00 and fell off the highs and slowly declined. I'm thinking it is just consolidating and the uptrend over 3.00 will start any time soon. The market makers were pretty crafty on EXEL Friday and the 3.00 was the failed breakout. I finally realized I am probably wrong on the breakout today and cut my loss at 2.88. I actually put the order in trying to get 2.91 but with the market order I got a lesser fill. When a stock is moving fast I will always use a market order especially on the entry. I would rather catch a big run with a less than favorable fill than miss the whole damn thing with a limit order. It was not a superior setup to take from the beginning because based on its past runs 3.15 - 3.20 would be the most it would go anytime soon. The risk reward wasn't really there. I also waited a bit to long to cut the loss after the 3.00 didn't hold. I think based on the setups risk reward the position was a bit oversized for me. This one is looking like a good short candidate since the 3.00 breakout failed. I put up a new post on the 27th about the direction of the USD.

Direction of the Dollar

The US Dollar has been on a serious bull run lately. No doubt macro forces via the FED's guidance on rate raising are behind it. Since late January the USD has been consolidating. I've been waiting to see what becomes of it. Well folks it has formed a beautiful symmetrical triangle consolidation. A very clear one. I can't remember the last time I've seen such a clean symmetrical triangle on an index or commodity. Maybe gold in 2009. I mean it's that clean and pretty! Below is a chart of gold I drew up in 2009.

Image above from this old article on gold.
The USD has now spiked up off the tip. The chart says Bullish with a capital B. I expect a breakout over the highs and more gains. Here is the chart of the dollar. I've been long the dollar with the ETF UUP.

Crude Oil Trade

Crude oil has been forming a trading range lately with support being particularly defined. With a steady decline right onto support I saw an opportunity to get long. Getting long right on support gave me a clear area for a mental stop loss. Not only that but the upside potential conservatively was the top of the trading range at resistance. I drew up the trading range below.

The stock I used was UCO the double long crude oil ETF. The chart of USO and CL are very similar. I bought UCO at 8.07 on the 24th of February and tweeted it on Twitter. The doji candlestick it printed on the 23rd pretty much confirmed my area of support. It just hung out and declined a little around support after I bought it. I was fine with that as all that mattered was the action off support.

The next day oil ramped up big and UCO hit an intraday high of 8.57. Along the way I sold about 3/4ths of the position at $8.28 locking in the gain. Expecting more run days I held the rest overnight. I set a sell stop loss at 8.15 and the next day stopped out of the rest of the shares at $8.15 for a slight gain. Scaling out the way I did in tranches selling 3/4ths of the position with the gain really made this trade work for me. I missed the top but caught a good gain which I'm happy with. This especially since my thesis of a run to resistance is proving wrong so far.

We'll have to see what happens with oil over the next 24-48 hours to get an idea of direction. It very well may continue higher or we could crash below support. If there is a gap down below support oil will definitely be testing the lows of the winter.

CRIS Short Daytrade

I was following CRIS with a short bias for the past couple days. It went from $1.20 to $3.00 in about a month. It had about eight straight days of positive gains with no red days heading into today. Yesterday it looked like the buying volume had finally exhausted itself. Without any consolidation these runaway stocks like CRIS usually end up crashing pretty hard and fast.

The breakdown finally came this morning. I posted this trade on my Twitter. Looking at the intraday chart below you can see that $3.50 became resistance three times. Dollar marks and $.50 marks are often important technical levels on stocks under $10 a share. The $3.50 was tested and never broken this morning. As soon as I saw the stock go red on the day (negative) and the support of $3.30 from yesterday taken out I wanted to get short quick. The big sell volume was great too. Ideally I was looking for a pullback to the $3.40s to short. That was incase the trade went against me and the $3.50s were taken out. So I had a mental stop loss of $3.51. It actually came back up for a bit but I filled at $3.31 short.

I was confident and happy with this as more downside was evident from the stuff I just mentioned. CRIS continued to plunge as you see on the chart. I covered at $3.19 taking $.12 a share in gains. I took the quick gain because these biotech stocks can be quirky when it comes to holding losses. Just when you think the run is over and the stock is doomed they run again and again. It went on to a low around $3.00 and made a wild recovery into the close. I still say short bias on this one but like I was saying bio's are tricky sometimes. I won't be scalping this particular stock again soon.

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.
  

Small-Cap Value Oil and Energy Stocks

I like researching and writing these articles. I always try to post here atleast once a month. I could probably post almost every day because I love analyzing and blogging but I doubt my girlfriend would like that. She would probably punch me.

The drop in oil prices has brought a lot of energy companies share prices down significantly. Key Energy Services (KEG) is a $313 million dollar well servicing company out of Houston, Texas. This small-cap has $443.8 million in net tangible asset value(tangible assets - total liabilities). So with a market cap of $313 million and tangible assets of $443 million it is selling for less than all the working capital and equipment it owns. This is even with the stock price up a whopping 17% today. In 2013 it had $64 million in free cash flow. As a small company the stock presents the possibility of significant growth in stock price as it recovers. The downside is earnings haven't been consistent over the years.

Energy XXI (EXXI) owns oil and natural gas wells and has a cool $1.42 billion in net tangible assets and a market cap of just $336 million. This is 76% below net tangible assets and 82% below book value. The company was profitable since 2012 but earnings are trending down.

The final oil stock is Parker Drilling (PKD) a $384 million dollar company with $492 million in net tangible assets. So we are still at a discount to net tangible assets. This one is not as cheap as the ones above, however, it boasts a lot more profitability. Earnings are more consistent. Infact it was profitable in the second and third quarter.

If oil prices are actually bottoming here as they appear to be doing small companies will have some nice appreciation. They come with more long-term risks of course versus their large cap counterparts. The ones above are basically penny stocks which is fine with me as they are traded on good exchanges and present some value and technical opportunity. I hope you enjoyed these oil and energy ideas on this value investing small cap stocks blog.

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