Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
looks like I'm going to have to buy back NGD - sheesh!
stopped out of NGD.to
well so much for that. Stopped out of HGU.to & PAA.to & also goodbye to DGC.
GOLD taking it on the chin today. I should've known, the best performing stocks for the year before are usually the worst performing stocks in the new year.
As always, I will monitor the situation & go from there.
Bought P.to; TIM.to & GCR.v FWIW
The penny stocks are usually profitable at the beginning of a new year.
Off to a great start for 2009. Hope it continues for a few months. It would be nice for a change to hold onto stocks for more then a couple of days.
Oh well! Guess I'll find out in due course.
added WTN.to and GCE.to
Looking back at 2008, the ETF that I had the most success playing with was HGU on the TSE. (2X bull)
HXD.to (2X bear) came in a solid second.
I also had success with USD
and UYG
Everytime I played with UNG or HNU.to (2X bull)
I lost money. I just couldn't get the timing right & I had all kinds of risk management problems with that particular commodity.
I would of had far greater success if I had played the Bear ETF's more frequently & aggressively.
As it is I did okay in the worst bear market since 1932. Having survived & making money on the way, while so many others perished puts me in a very good position to pick up some really good deals in 2009.
To put into perspective, here is chart showing the market action that slid into the abyss shortly after I made that Sept 10th call <<looks like Mr. Market is setting up for a crash>> Note that the Dow was above 11,000 & today it is now @ 8,700.
<<looks like Mr. Market is setting up for a crash in October or sooner>>
Best call I ever made... saved me a ton of money on the long side. The only thing I wish I did was to be more aggressive on the short side.
Happy New Year
Picked up some Boxing day specials: Note they are all moving past their 50 day sma. FWIW...
DMM.to
GXS.to
NGD.to
PTS.to
KCL.to
UEX.to
a long ways to go yet...
bought more PAAS & another tranche of HGU.to
bought back HGU.to (duh!) and bought PAAS & more DGC.to
FWIW you will see that generally all the charts look similar. In a work they are bullish if you look closely at'em
Sheesh! It doesn't get much lower than this...
watching DGC.to if it can break & hold above $6.00, then a double bottom play. Also will crack the 50 day sma
stopped out of UYG for not a bad gain. Bought a little bit SLW.to & bunch of RMX.to with the proceeds (first time I've bought an explorer in a long, long time - sheesh gotta go back quite some time, since the ARU dayz)
Added some more USD - will see what happens.
LOL USD new target $21.00
UYG new target $11.25
Sitting pretty so far <gulp>!
HGU.to had a double bottom break down today - new target $3.00
Unfortunately quite a few of the GOLD stocks broke down today & yesterday.
It is possible that they might recover. They (Gold senior) stocks are more or less sitting on support. There are only so many times that they can bounce off before they plunge through.
In SNDK on the Naz. Something up or it just wants to fill that gap from a few weeks ago
watching SLW, jumped back in USD & UYG FWIW
Yikes! What a day. Got stopped out of everything this morning.
I'm gonna change this board, move it from trading stocks to trading ETF's or I might start a new board. Maybe on SI
LOL - my prediction came true from Nov 13th <<herefore I am expecting a very significant rally in the very near future. Probably in less then two weeks.>> Rally started Friday, Nov 21st
nice couple of days for GOLD! Not every day that I get an ETF move 50% in one day (HGU.to)
some interesting charts for next week:
U.to
QEC.to
PBG.to
bought UYG on the NYSE
This chart is unsustainable (and scary), therefore I am expecting a very significant rally in the very near future. Probably in less then two weeks.
The end of this week could possibly reshape the hedge fund industry. Friday would be a 45 days before the end of the year and a lot of hedge funds would sell equities to raise cash for redemptions. Interesting to see will it sink the market further or not. For sure there would be some additional down pressure.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=925248208&play=1
stopped out of both
Trend line handy diviner of stock's future
have over the past several years conducted dozens of technical analysis seminars for private investors and various financial institutions. The objective is to promote the value of technical analysis without being too academic. I try to keep attendees involved by engaging them in a town hall atmosphere.
Sometimes I get a tough crowd (usually young advisers and bankers) and have to "sell" the idea of looking at a chart, by identifying objections and overcoming them.
I do this by inviting questions on the fly from non-believers.
Their No. 1 challenge is: "How can you predict the future by looking at historical prices?"
My answer is: "Are not earnings releases and balance sheets historical information?"
Usually after the first hour I have won over most of the crowd by neutralizing the stronger objections. Then I get the next challenge: "What is your favourite technical indicator?"
This is, of course, a trap because no indicator works all the time. If one did we'd all be using it.
I prefer to monitor technical and fundamental studies that are widely used because that enables me to see the other guy's cards. Remember, the other guy is your opponent and will often disagree with your own analysis. Willing buyers must find willing sellers, and their lines in the sand are found at the current bid and asking price.
One of the most popular fundamental tools is a company's price/earnings or PE ratio. Here is the problem. If all market participants believe a growth company, XYZ, should trade at 10 times earnings – we know it never will. The shares of XYX will always be too expensive to buy because the price rises in anticipation of further growth. The opposite is true with a shrinking company.
One of the most overused and quoted technical tools is the 50-day and 200-day moving average crossover, sometimes referred to as the "golden cross" for the buy or "death cross" for the sell signal. Here is the problem. If all market participants follow a 50- and 200-day crossover "buy" signal, we know at least one half of them will be wrong because extensive back-testing has proved the signals are correct one-half of the time.
The conclusion to be drawn here is that we need to support our investment decisions with another relatively obscure study, one that would support or reject the more popular studies.
The fundamentals-based investor could use return on equity (ROE) to support the PE analysis and the technical investor could employ modern computer-generated studies such as the MACD, Stochastic Oscillators, the Relative Strength Index and the Average Directional Index. There is only one technical study that does not require a computer: the trend line.
Today it's underused and under-loved because of its simplicity. Take a chart, a straight edge and a pencil and you're up and running.
Our chart this week has the monthly closes of Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Inc. spanning 10 years. I have used a series of trend lines to identify several bull and bear markets.
In order to place our trend lines we only need to follow a few rules:
Use weekly or monthly charts of at least 150 closing periods.
If the price over the period doubles, use a semi-log or per cent scale.
In an up-trend, join at least three lows; in a downtrend, join at least three highs and always extend from the left to the right.
Note how I have identified Potash's long base-building from 1998 to 2003, followed by the decisive breakout of 2004. The 2004-05 advance led to the mini-bear of 2005-06, as identified by our 2005 trend-line break. I have placed another short down sloping line across the tops of the mini-bear.
Note the 2006 breakout and the great 2006-08 advance identified by our final trend line. The mid-'08 breakdown should serve as a caution to long term investors.
Sell into rallies.
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/533143
Bill Carrigan is an independent stock-market analyst.
bought HJU.to; HQU.to
Looking for positive divergences like we saw in October 2002 suggest that we may have to wait a while before we get to the ultimate bottom. What will we see there? Lower volume, lower numbers of new lows and a higher lower on the BP Indices. A couple of charts worth watching:
new BULLISH targets for AEM - $62.00; GG - $42.00; ABX - $42.00; EGO - $11.75;
dipped my toe in the water for HNU.to & HGU.to
Markets falling apart and so are the charts:
sell off intensifies. Almost every stock on my screen had a very large gap-down this morning - except CLS which is having a remarkable run considering the carnage out there.
well so much for that - stopped out
bought QLD etf @ $36.11
looks like a bottom was put in on the daily & tested twice.
new PnF target for GOLD reversed today. Natural Gas starting to stir watching 2x bull - still a bit of a way for an entry though. Other then inverse ETF's natural gas is the only green I see on the screen today
...You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.. Marlon Brando 'On the Waterfront'.
new PnF target for GOLD $1122.00 occurred yesterday
Greenback key to economic recovery
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Investors should take enormous comfort from the fact that the U.S. banking crisis has not morphed into a currency crisis, at least not yet.
The willingness of investors to buy U.S. dollars and invest in U.S. Treasuries will be an essential ingredient for an economic recovery.
The real danger signal would be marked by a lack of confidence in the U.S. dollar and a dramatic rise in the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries from their current rate of 3.48 per cent.
WHAT ARE THE EXPECTATIONS?
This is where Goldilocks and the three bears story comes in for the economy. Investors want to see government bond yields rise (the porridge is “too cool” now) as they pull out of bonds and move into other assets. But a dramatic surge in yield as investors lose confidence in the U.S. (the “too hot” scenario) would be devastating. Something right in the middle – “the just right temperature” – is what investors should be looking for.
“Unfortunately, we have all the ingredients in the U.S. and Europe for the greatest financial catastrophe in 250 years,” warns Peter Gibson, vice-chairman of Desjardins Securities and his portfolio strategy and quantitative team.
Those dangers are the ballooning U.S. debt, a liquidity crisis, the hedge fund crisis and risk of a collapse in consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 per cent of the economy.
“However, we still expect that the Fed will stabilize the financial system, and that with globally co-ordinated rate cuts and direct intervention in the distressed U.S. mortgage market, the S[amp]amp;P/TSX will rebound in 2009.”
The immediate dangers that could precipitate a historical crisis include a collapse in consumer spending and a run on a major bank or a sudden withdrawal of liquidity if investors and nations decide to no longer backstop the market for U.S. Treasuries, Desjardins Securities said.
Over the longer term, investors should monitor the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries, it said. A red light signalling a crisis would be if over the next 18 months, 10-year U.S. Treasuries rose in yield to 5.2 per cent at the same time the U.S. dollar was collapsing, Mr. Gibson said.
“Otherwise, we remain unconcerned about a falling U.S. dollar, if bond yields are stable.”
It would be healthy sign if the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries rose to a range of 3.8 to 4.2 per cent following cuts in regulated rates, he said.
Investing myths laid bare by this bear market
Foremost is belief that balance sheets reflect true value of assets
Oct 03, 2008 04:30 AM
Be the first to comment on this article...
Bill Carrigan
Special to the Star
The 2007-08 bear market in global stock markets has exposed several investing myths. Let's start with the idea that corporate balance sheets are a fair reflection of the value of a company's assets and liabilities.
Balance-sheet myth
Last Monday's panic liquidation began with shares of Wachovia Corp. plunging to penny-stock status in reaction to the massive devaluation of Washington Mutual's loans.
The problem was WaMu's numbers were much lower than those at which Wachovia was valuing its own portfolio.
Citigroup quickly agreed to buy Wachovia's banking operations for $2.1 billion (U.S.) in a deal arranged by federal regulators.
Mad Money's host Jim Cramer was enraged, claiming Citigroup bought Wachovia "for a pittance."
It was only two weeks ago that Wachovia chief executive Bob Steel told CNBC's Mad Money viewers that out of $500 billion in loans on the bank's books, only $10 billion were bad.
Cramer did not call Steel a liar, but rather believes that Steel believed what he said. Cramer was mad at himself for letting his viewers down. He trusted Steel, who has been known as a solid financier for 25 years, and he urged viewers to do the same.
Cramer went on to say Wachovia's financials "just didn't reflect reality," and "the SEC and multiple bank examiners all signed off on Wachovia's books. Even Steel, a former number two at Treasury, couldn't see how bad his own balance sheet was.
"He just didn't know what was there."
Cramer would end up the session by adding the CEO to the Mad Money Wall of Shame.
The demise of Wall St. shows that balance sheets could not be trusted because large amounts of their assets were based on murky financial engineering.
Complex financial derivatives such as credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations were not valued properly because they were not subject to the same visibility as publicly traded securities.
Commodity myth
Remember all that talk about the commodity supercycle and how China's growth would keep commodities prices in the stratosphere forever? Doesn't seem to be working out that way.
The investors who bought into the long-term commodity story have over the past several weeks learned a brutal lesson. Commodities are cyclical. They don't pay dividends and they are not growth companies.
Prices gyrate as leveraged hedge funds push prices every which way with billions of dollars of hot money stampeding in and out of the latest hot commodity.
Global diversification myth
We also learned that global diversification in recent years has been little help to investors. There was a time when markets around the world went in different directions, while economies in different countries did their own thing. But for years now it's been a global economy and markets increasingly move up and down in unison. When it comes to the world bourses, it is monkey see, monkey do. What you do get by investing abroad, however, is foreign-currency exposure, and that does add diversification.
Currency hedging myth
While investing abroad adds currency diversification, in recent years many investors have curiously moved to hedge out that exposure. The recent weakening of the Canadian dollar has illustrated that currency hedging is an expensive scam. If foreign currency exposure gives you some diversification, why then would you hedge the advantage away? For example, the currency-hedged iShares CDN S&P 500 Index Fund (XSP) is down about 21 per cent year-to-date. An unhedged version would be down about 15 per cent in terms of Canadian dollars. Investment industry pushes helped make hedging popular two years ago.
If you have the time, one strategy that you can employ in sloppy markets is to engage in stock picking. During these volatile markets, the price behaviour of a stock will tell you much more than the current fundamentals because the price leads the fundamentals by weeks and months.
For example, collapsing markets create an opportunity to study the price behaviour of stocks in your portfolio and of the stocks you are thinking of acquiring. The strategy here is to seek out stocks that performed better or worse than the broader stock indices during a period of fear and panic.
That is very bullish
I ran a stock filter and uncovered 48 issuers that displayed the same bullish price action subsequent to the Monday massacre. The selections are relatively liquid and stocks trading under $2.25 (Canadian) were rejected from the scan.
You can view these names on my blog at www.gettingtechnical.com.
Hey! My calls have been pretty good this past year. Anybody who would have listened to me, would have saved themselves a ton of dough. & even would've made money the past 4 months.
ya gotta be ahead of the curve - not behind it or you would've killed
This is a thread to discuss the TA merits of Stocks that trade on a variety of senior exchanges, preferably with a minimum volume of 50,000 for the TSE & AMEX; & 200,000 shares average volume for the NYSE, NASDAQ.
I rarely play the CDNX... but I have no choice in the current market enviroment... (resource friendly), note these stocks are thinly traded & one must always use limit orders & sit on the bid or ask for days or weeks in order to get a fill.
As of this date January 14/06, resource stocks have been flying, in many cases doubling or tripling in a couple of days or less. Amazing how things change. Looks like were in a very speculative bull market in that exchange.
High risk IMO but sometimes very high reward.
Please do not post OTC American stocks. (ie: Nasdaq pink sheets)
I am a novice chart reader giving opinions that I hope will help me and others learn some more about Technical Analysis.
Sometimes I'm right, most of the time I'm wrong. Which is why I use stops. Mental, physical or otherwise...depending on the liquidity <g/ng>
**********************************************************************************************************************************
My typical charts now show the following indicators:
Candle Chart - a candle price chart used in conjunction with
Moving Averages (on the Price Chart) - I have been using a 5 X 21 day EMA moving average.
Moving Average crosses, either of the daily price over various MA's, or of each other, are often significant. Note that I like to work in three different periods, monthly, weekly, daily or weekly, daily, hourly. With confirmation ideally in all 3 time periods, but I am comfortable with two time frame confirmations (higher risk though...)
ADX - the ADX line (heavy black) is used to establish whether a strong trend (rising ADX) or a weakening, non-trending period is in effect for that particular chart.
In trending (rising) periods, trend following indicators (MACD and MA's) are perhaps more valuable.
In non-trending (under 20) or possibly flat or falling periods, oscillating indicators (Stochastics for example) may be more appropriate to use.
+DI, -DI (within the ADX section) - these lines are indications of buying &/or selling strength
It may be useful to use a cross of the +DI over the -DI as a buy signal in conjunction with other indicators, and to use the opposite cross as a sell signal or as a possible short.
MACD - See above re: use in a trending market (see ADX: above 20)
Stochastic - For an oscillating or a non-trending market (see ADX: below 20) market.
OBV- an indicator of the strength of money flow into or out of a stock over a period of time.
Occasionally I will post Pnf (point & figure) charts, along with detailed explanations, in conjunction with the other charts.
Example of a PnF chart :
Example of a typical (daily)up trending chart with my favorite indicators
and 3yr weekly
Please enjoy, learn, and contribute.
Regards,
Peter
Volume | |
Day Range: | |
Bid Price | |
Ask Price | |
Last Trade Time: |