Does anybody know a good online broker to use for trading penny-stocks?

I used Zecco for a long time, due to their low commissions w/ no extra fees for trading microcaps. But now that they merged with Tradeking it's virtually impossible to trade stocks that are under $1.00 per share - at least, not without huge penalty fees.

I agree. Thanks for pointing that out, itsonlymuni.

Here's the chart that I made on excel from the historical data (dating back to 1960 in this case) with the trendlines drawn in on Microsoft paint. Realize that this is far more zoomed out than I originally was looking at it (by probably 3x or so).



It appears to be a "bump and run" pattern, with a much lower sloping trendline forming at the 1974 date that you spoke of, that really took off in '82. Looking at this again, I'm thinking that you're probably right that the low of 62.34 should be used for those calculations. I missed this uptrend earlier, picking the accelerated uptrend point instead as the starting point of what I referred to as the "major" uptrend.

It's funny you bring that up, because I almost did start there. However, I noticed in the historical data that the prices moved up from that point and hovered between 80ish and 160 for some time before it formed a low that would stick at 107. That's where the trendline started, IMO.

But perhaps my zoomed out view of the data tracing back to 1950 made the minute differences in prices (relative to the current 1500 level) of the 50's, 60's, 70's obscured my ability to make out a trendline. I don't have the chart in front of me right now that I made on excel from the historical data, but IIRC, all the prices from the 60's 70's, and early 80's seemed to oscillate between basically the same high and low point without forming a clear trend...but I could be wrong.

Here's a look at the S&P 500 weekly that shows Fibs retracement levels from the start of a new major (long-term) uptrend in 1982 - that trendline is represented by the long and thick black dashes that crosses slightly under the 850 mark on the right side of the chart - and highlights the "critical period" between June and December of this year, where the market may be forced to decide whether to break to new highs or form a new bear market.



I find it interesting how the 2009 low bounced almost exactly off of that 61.8% Fibs retracement level.

I like everything about it except for the volume pattern - the down days are averaging more volume than the positive days.

LOL...I like it.

Here's a look at the S&P 500 weekly chart:



Looks like a MACD divergence on a rising wedge.

$6.66 eh? Gotta like that for an omen. You can count me in!

MNR ascending triangle breakout:

I'm seeing a MACD bullish divergence forming as well.

Thank you, lowtrade. That helped a lot.

Right, that's what I'm seeing between May, 2012 and today on the IRE daily chart. A support line that is in uptrend and a resistance line that remains at roughly the same level, with three touches on both sides.

Am I seeing something that isn't there, or is the time-frame too long,..., width too wide, or what? I really want to get this pattern recognition down, so I really appreciate you taking your time to help me with this.

If you look at a longer-term chart (e.g. 2-year) you'll see that this pattern is occurring after a long downtrend. And I read somewhere that the ascending triangle often acts as a reversal pattern to downtrends. That along with the fact that the volume within the pattern seemed to suggest that the upside movements had far more support than the downside movements is what attracted me to this chart.

I realize that it has already made a relatively large percentage gain, but I figured that a breakout from such a strong resistance, that just happens to be the top to an ascending triangle pattern, on increasing volume would be a good indicator that this had a chance to move much further north - and perhaps even reach the price pattern target of about 1.5 points from the breakout.

Doesn't any stock that breaks through an ascending triangle pattern have to run before that breakout can occur, though?

Or does this not fit the criteria for an ascending triangle breakout?

Hey lowtrade, I'm curious what your thoughts are on IRE.

I'm seeing a breakout from an ascending triangle on the daily, w/ a healthy increase in volume.

Forming a 5 day long ascending triangle on the 10 min chart - bullish.

This breaks through the 590.3 resistance by 3pm ET at the latest, IMO. It is developing some strong trend support and it is quickly approaching that resistance.

Thoughts on Sprint (S)?

Looks to me like a "cup w/ handle" is forming on the weekly and a bullish pennant, or perhaps symmetrical triangle, on the daily.

Set up for a nice potential gain here, IMO. Just interested in your chart eval.

Intraday forming a nice uptrend since the initial dip.

Daily's uptrend line is strengthening with another bounce off of it today.

No biggie, yo. That's what stoplosses are for. I'd almost prefer for AAPL to go down to $350 and give me a momentary loss - that gives a lot of breathing room for a nice long bull run.

How's that for the optimistic approach?

TAs gotta love those fat finger trades, making the day's trading range look far more bearish than it actually was and messing with all the indicators in the process.

Thank God, and about time.

My only problem regarding AAPL is that today's gain is on relatively small volume. But that's a rather minor problem.

I think we see a consolidation day tomorrow - a bit of a pullback - followed by a push through the resistances at 560 and 570, now that it has the market behind it.

How do you see the overall market playing out in the short-intermediate term (next month to year) future, if you don't mind me asking?

I see a bearish "rising wedge" on the S&P 500 monthly chart w/ the upper channel line around 1500 right now and the lower around 1300, but the two lines don't appear to converge until about one year out.

I see what he's saying, but I respectfully disagree. The point I'm trying to make is we must change our thinking first.

Yes, from our current mindset it would be arrogant to "meddle" with nature and try to control what happens or doesn't happen in the ecosystem, BECAUSE we are working from a self-serving mindset. It doesn't have to be that way, neither at the individual level nor the level of the whole.

We can have real respect for other people and nature without it having anything to do with our pre-concieved notions about how it'll benefit us presently or in the future. IMO, the real problem currently lies in our false belief that we can't be anything other than selfish, that it is a fact of life. As a result, it IS a fact of humanity as it is today - how can it be anything other when that's what everyone chooses to believe?

This is a VERY complex issue that people are facing as a whole, and the fact that most likely escapes the average person, who's struggling to find a deeper purpose to their life, is that every single person who can see past the falseness of such limiting beliefs leads all of humanity that much closer to finally escaping the many pitfalls that society has built - fears that are based on illusions about who we are and how we relate to one another.

We have whole fields of human endeavor that are devoted to helping discover these answers - things like spirituality and the scientific field of psychology - but, ultimately, each person must make the effort to know for themselves before any real progress can be made.

If the world were full of clones of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and Albert Einstein, and all the world's greatest minds and humanitarians, the world would be a much better place to live. Their inspired beliefs are reflected in their actions and, therefore, in their ways of life and the impacts that they have on the world. We can each share in their beliefs, if only we can get past the (false) doubts that we have no choice but to think the way that we currently do.

Like I said before, we must have a collective shift of consciousness - and that must start at the individual level - a revolution like no other in the history of the planet, which might just get us past greed's strong grip on society for the first time in our history. Because history repeats itself...until it doesn't. Then new possibilities become open that were previously un-accessible.

This is true both at the individual level (eg I discover something new about myself, which empowers me with the knowledge and/or means to change it) and at the collective level (eg enough people discover something new about the conditions of society and the planet, enabling them to change it).

The day's range is resting perfectly between the resistance at 560 and the long-term upper channel line that formed between early 2010 and late 2011 at around 540, currently. That channel line should act as support now for this move.

The next resistance is found around 568~570 and then blue skies to 650.

It didn't work in the past, that doesn't mean that it can't work in the present, or the future.

IMO, we just need the right catalyst for it to happen. Enough people must come to realize the real problems that we are facing as a whole, and that our ways of living MUST come to an end if we are to avoid the blatantly obvious direction that our current actions are leading us towards - the total destruction of our planet and an unsustainable economic system of society.

A revolution must happen or we will be much like previous highly advanced civilizations that ultimately fell due to their stubbornness, ignorance, and/or pride - ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, Germany (WWII), etc.

History continues to repeat itself, albeit in slightly different variations, and the underlying cause is always a mixture of ignorance, arrogance and greed. We want more than we deserve and we think that we're more powerful than we really are. That's where the ecosystem steps in and says "not anymore...I can't sustain your ways of life...have fun starting over from ground zero." We're about there right now, IMO. It's all coming to a head with our current emphasis on competition for resources - and it cannot be sustained.

We're only hurting each other and the planet through our capitalistic ways, and the planet will always win in the end.

IMO, it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad day, if, and only if, it's accompanied by a huge shift in consciousness towards sharing the wealth instead of making every effort to protect it and keep it to one's self. I believe that we are very near a point in our technological advancements in which production will become so cheap and efficient that everyone can be provided for w/out the requirement to pay vast amounts of money.

Look at it this way, if it takes little to no effort on the part of the manufacturer to make its products - just the push of a few buttons - and their raw materials are cheap, because their suppliers are also benefiting from the same technologies, what is there to pay for? If production levels begin to increase exponentially, 1 car produced per hour becomes 10, 20, 40...and there are no employees to pay, minus the mechanical engineers who oversee the machinery processes, and the raw materials are cheaper (think nanotech and the new materials that are being (re)engineered, from the molecular level up) - what are the costs to that manufacturer that the consumer should be expected to pay for?

Of course, the technology will be very expensive at first and I'm sure a lot of kinks will have to be worked out in the tech's infancy stages. But once those kinks are ironed out and that tech can be made more efficiently (cheaply), then we're talking tech that once cost hundreds of millions of dollars now costing merely hundreds of thousands, much like the "supercomputers" of the 1960's once cost several times the average person's accumulated life income at that time and you can now purchase a simple scientific calculator for a few bucks that is far more powerful than that supercomputer was.

So, there will come a point in time when these super-advanced 3D printers that efficiently print out any material objects or structures that one can conceive and those highly efficient robotic driven manufacturers reach the stage that computers already have. When that day comes, the average person will have the means to have that same tech in their own homes, meaning those manufacturers won't have any leverage on the consumer anymore. They'd be forced to chop down on their pricing.

We only must first push aside our collective greed as a society in order to reach that pinnacle. Otherwise, there will be an inevitable period of time that will further stress the lower and middle class, if not kill consumerism altogether. And if that happens, every man, woman and child will be forced to fend for themselves during one of the only periods in our history where we've become almost totally reliant on technology and the current structure(s) of society for our means of living.

I believe that we've reached a point in the evolution of our tech advancements that the collective greed of humanity has the very real potential to entirely destroy the infrastructure of our society and even all of civilization. In other words, this generation of technology might just be the catalyst (being the most powerful vehicle to our greed that we've ever known) that ends civilization, possibly erasing thousands of years of knowledge and its achievements. A potential "re-set" point for humanity, if you will.

It all comes down to our greed in the end. Both beautiful and ugly, depending from what perspective you look at it - the human or the ecological. I tend more towards the former (beautiful) than the latter, myself.

If we can't respect each other and we can't even respect our planet, what right do we have to our ways of life? Now we're looking from "God's" perspective. Now our freewill is finally being put to the ultimate test. We have a choice to make right now: push greed aside and share this newly discovered means of abundance and prosperity (or) let greed get the better of us and destroy everything we've ever accumulated from, or cherished about, our past.

This company could be really big someday with this 3D printing tech. A lot of money to be made with advancements on this tech in the future - especially if it ever becomes more mainstream w/ lowered costs and a push to advertise the products.

I recently read an article at Forbes.com that predicted 3D printers in the near future (looking roughly a decade out) that would be capable of "printing" whole buildings from the foundation up! How crazy would that be?

Pick the right company early that has their foot in this door and you might just be looking at multiple thousands of percent gains, IMO.

Between this and the recent advancements in robotics, I don't know if there's any room for the manual laborer in the future!

LOL.

Interesting look at AAPL trading cycles - 20 year monthly chart:



Interesting notes:

The "major cycle" appears to be about 4 years (actually a little less). The "minor cycle" is about 2 years.

The end of every major cycle resulted in, at the very least, a "short-term" (3-6 month) reversal (correction)

Every single major and minor cycle caught either a major high or low of the period or an intermediate top/bottom (support/resistance) - the only exception being the most recent minor cycle right before 2011.

This chart demonstrates a 16 year long "bump and run" pattern at the logarithmic scale!

The overall 16 year uptrend (starting in 1998) formed the classical Elliot Wave - 5-leg (wave) run up; with "impulse waves" 1,3, and 5 moving in the direction of the (up)trend and "corrective waves" 2 and 4 retracing to the trendline. The implication here is that the long (very long) term outlook calls for a 3 wave correction (wave a and c moving down, with leg b moving up). Which means that this analysis is calling for a 6 to 8 year bear market.

Honestly, I have no idea.

Obviously, a gap up and/or a green close w/ good volume on Monday would be a good sign that this might just be the turning point.

I'm awaiting some form of confirmation of a bottom before I commit on this, and that obviously takes more than just one bullish candle.

All indicators on the daily look bearish to me (e.g. trend indicators like ADX and MACD, and money flow (buy/sell pressure) indicators like CMF and OBV) with the exception of oscillators (e.g. RSI, CCI, Stochastics, etc.) which, of course, are flashing "oversold" signals. The problem with these oscillators is that they can remain in the "oversold" condition for weeks at a time during strong bull/bear moves.

That being said, bottoms can occur w/ little to no prior indications. That's why bottoms are so difficult to pinpoint.

If I HAD to guess, I'd say this stays above the 520 support for the week and tests the long-term upper channel line (that formed on the chart between Feb 2010 and October 2011), which currently sits at about 540. However, I think it is more likely that this eventually breaks through that 520 support and tests the long-term uptrend line somewhere between 450 and 480ish.

...and, finally, a clean (un-annotated) look at the monthly:



Play at your own risk

Looking from this more macroscopic level, a "mid-term" bottom at around the 450 level is not only possible but likely, IMO.

Breaking through the 1-year (12 period) SMA that held through all of the 4-year uptrend was the first major sign of bearishness. That happened with this month's candle.

Now a bearish crossing is about to occur on MACD, which is the DMI equivalent of a bearish crossing of DI+ and DI-, that is also occurring. This would indicate the first confirmation of downtrend by any indicators.

There really isn't any support shown on the monthly between its current price and the trendline, IMO. It just so happens to nearly intersect the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement level of the 4-year uptrend.

I say this hits near 450, more likely north than south of it, maybe something like 465~480 and gets a nice, momentum filled bounce that should test the previous high within the next "cycle."

The test at that point will be whether it decides to break that resistance and head for blue skies or form a double top and take another shot at it somewhere down the line.

Here's the same 10-year chart, but arithmetic - w/ fibs analysis on the 4-year accelerated uptrend (bump and run pattern):

A look at the 10-year Monthly Chart (logarithmic) - with some cycle and Fibonacci analysis:

I really appreciate you taking the time to respond, Lowtrade.

I've only just started using ADX and I wasn't aware of the relationship between ADX's position and the strength of any corresponding reversals. Your explanation helped a lot.

Thanks again.

Safe bet to short to 450, if it breaks that psychological support, IMO.

If it breaks 450, who knows what could come next...either way I'm sidelined until I get a confirmed bottom.

I'm wondering if this might retrace to the Fibonacci 61.8% retracement level for the previous 4-year uptrend. If it did, that would place its shares right around $320.

The way this continues to crash through support after support w/out the least bit of hesitation, and how selling pressure only seems to be mounting in the process, suggests to me as well that this might fall for some time to come.

I expect that this will hit the long-term trendline (near 450 right now) before this bottoms, but that's only an educated guess based on what I'm seeing on the technical side of AAPL's price.

Lowtrade, I have a few questions regarding AAPL:

Long-term look:



Shorter-term look:



First of all, can you please explain to me how to interpret the ADX's relationship with DI- here - what does it mean when it "straddles" the ADX line?

Secondly, the trend indicators on the daily seem to still show bearishness, as do the support indicators. My feeling is this can fall quite a bit more based on the picture that CMF is painting of the sell pressure. Can you please comment on this?

Lastly, do you think there is any chance that this retraces all the way to the 61.8% Fibs retracement of the 4-year uptrend? I know that it's hypothetically possible, but I have a hard time believing that there can be that much momentum in this "correction" so as to erase 100's of billions of dollars of profits. But, then again, it is declining very steeply w/ a lot of pressure (volume) behind it. Seems like a lot of emotion is at play here. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this.

Thank you.

Funny, that reminds me of one of the sayings of Buddhism - you can't live yesterday or tomorrow, only right now...it's the only moment that ever exists (paraphrased).

It's the "next week" attitude that keeps people from ever accomplishing their goals and, in this case, feeding their rationalizations for why the money ain't here yet.