How I buy rocket stocks bouncing up off of support (BOS): Examples: $HII and $AWK

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After tradings stocks for over 50 years my trading strategy continues to evolve. I used to ignore indicators like stochastics and Bollinger Bands because I mistakenly believed that such concepts as overbought or oversold were useless. I fortunately  began to re-analyze some of my trades using these indicators and found these indicators to be extremely valuable.

The biggest problem faced by me and my students is buying great stocks that then turn out to be “extended.” These stocks promptly turn around and decline right after what we thought was a perfectly timed purchase. Sound familiar? After listening to some of the expert traders who come to lecture to my students I decided that rather than buying stocks that break to new highs, I should buy strong stocks that have rested and become oversold and then start up again. I do like buying green line break-outs (GLB) but maybe should wait to buy them after the break-out when they subsequently become oversold. The GLB is just evidence of a strong stock that has broken out to an all-time high after a rest of 3 months or more. At the moment of break-out they are rarely over-sold!

I prefer to buy  strong oversold stocks that are bouncing off of support (BOS) and to place a sell stop just below where they have bounced. This means that if the bounce fails I am sold out quickly with a small loss. Since a lot of my purchases will likely fail, it is critical to have very small losses when my trades go awry. When the bounce holds, I can then ride the stock and even add more to my position  so that my relatively few large profits make up for my many small losses. There is nothing more freeing emotionally than to buy a stock and place an immediate GTC stop loss order to sell with a very small loss. My mantra is that each small loss brings me closer to the next big gain–no ego allowed.

I have written a number of scans in TC2000 that can detect strong rising stocks that have become oversold and that are bouncing off of support  (BOS). My primary measure of oversold is a bounce up from the lower  15.2 daily Bollinger Band. Once I find a list of bouncing stocks I  investigate such things as their trading volume, fundamentals, market trend and anything else that can help me decide which stock to buy. But these additional  analyses really do not matter much because in the end it  is impossible to reliably predict which stock’s bounce will hold. By the way, I have used this strategy successfully with all types of stocks and ETFs.

Below is a chart of a BOS stock that bounced on Friday, HII. Each previous bounce from its lower BB is shown with a “B.” The 2 magenta lines show when the major market indexes’ recent mini-corrections ended. Note that even though the decline to Bottom 2, the Grexit decline, was lower and steeper than the decline to Bottom 1, HII managed to show incredible relative strength and resist the declines. HII was actually trading higher at Bottom 2 than Bottom 1! Will HII’s Friday bounce hold? I do not know. But if I wanted to trade it I would buy it on strength (if it trades above Friday’s high) on Monday and place my sell stop below the bounce, perhaps around 167.19. I am presenting this only as an educational example of my technique. I do not own HII.

HIIbouncesWhile I am not showing its chart, my favorite water stock, AWK, showed a similar BOS on Friday.

During the trading day, when TC2000 alerts me to a BOS, I often tweet the symbol to the world. You can receive my tweets intraday at @WishingWealth. Just keep in mind that I tweet only to teach people and to enable them to evaluate any of these stocks using their own criteria. I do not trade all of the stocks I tweet about. I am looking forward to fall semester when I will teach a class of 180 freshmen what I wish someone had taught me at their age.

The GMI remains at 6 (of 6).

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Introducing BOS alerts for my tweets; GMI at 6 (of 6); a Dr. Wish Favorite Post; BOS: $RTN

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The primary trading approach from my course on technical analysis that I teach undergraduates is contained in the following quote from yours truly:

ClasssloganI have for years been stressing the  break-out strategy at the end of this quote. (Who quotes himself?) Buying stocks breaking out of a base and through resistance is highlighted in the works of successful traders I have emulated, like Nicolas Darvas, Jesse Livermore and William O’Neil. (Their exceptional books are listed on this blog.) Each trader defines a base somewhat differently, however. For me, it is defined by a green line breakout (GLB).  I draw a green line on a monthly chart at a stock’s all-time high that has not been penetrated for 3 or more months. This defines an advancing stock that has rested or consolidated. I then become interested in the stock the moment it exceeds its green line top, preferably on unusually high trading volume. I set alerts on TC2000 to signal me when a GLB occurs. I have recently taken to tweeting GLB alerts intraday.  The major problem with GLBs is they often fail and equally important, it is not really easy to define in advance a price at which I think will indicate the break-out has failed and I should exit. I usually try to exit if the stock that has a GLB closes back below its green line. So many of the GLBs occur when the stock is overextended and it soon retraces and I get (rightly or wrongly) scared out.

Over the past couple of years I have developed an alternative set-up for buys that seems to work very well for me in an advancing market (GMI on a Buy signal or QQQ short term trend is up).  I actually like this strategy better than trading GLBs. As the first part of the quote above states, in an advancing market, I find a strong rocket stock that has become oversold and/or is on support. I programmed TC2000 to alert me when a stock meets my criteria (rocket stock and not extended)  if the stock trades up. (This set-up I label Bounce on Support, BOS.)  If I like the stock, I buy it and place an immediate sell stop order in below the bounce or the support level. I really like this approach because my stop or exit level is typically quite close to where I entered, so I likely risk little. I know that a good percentage of these entries will fail, but the name of the game is to lose very little when it fails, to exit quickly,  and to retain stocks that behave. I do not know in advance which BOS position will succeed. No one really knows that. So I take an unemotional and detached attitude, making my purchase, setting an immediate sell stop, and then letting the market decide whether I will profit or lose. This really is a succinct summary of where I come out after a 50 year journey of trading stocks.

I have newly embraced tweeting some of my stock alerts intraday. (If I begin tweeting, this mode of communication must have peaked!) You can sign up to receive my intraday tweets here: @WishingWealth.  My goal, as always, is to teach people how I systematically trade stocks and manage risk and not to make trading recommendations or to sell anything. I often have already researched a GLB or BOS stock long before I receive an alert. So I am ready to act. Many of my stocks come from the IBD 50 list. Everyone must design their own set-ups that are consistent with their tolerance for risk and financial situation. My tweets appear each day on my blog site, www.wishingwealthblog.com, but they come much quicker and directly to people who have signed up to follow me on twitter. So last week I tweeted that I bought RTN and placed a sell stop to exit if the stock traded back below 129. Take a look at the daily chart of RTN. RTN never looked back–yet…  Can you guess why it is a BOS?

Screen Shot 2016-06-05 at 3.14.20 PMI define support or oversold levels on the basis of a few criteria which I will not specify here. (Ask my undergraduate students!)  Just keep in mind that not every BOS will work out. When I tweet a BOS alert, I will also specify the price at which I think it would have failed and where I would place my stop loss order. When a BOS position succeeds, I must then decide where to raise my sell stop to. Sometimes I may not raise it at all, if I want to try and ride a strong stock that I have been waiting for an entry for, or to avoid being whipsawed. Other times I might raise my sell stop to a level that will likely prevent a gain from turning into a loss. This is where science ends and the art of the trade begins….

Friday was the 7th day of the new $QQQ short term up-trend and the General Market Index (GMI) remains at 6 (of 6). As long as my market indicators stay positive I will tweet some of my alerts for GLBs and BOS. By the way, you can check out the performance of selected recent GLB alert stocks on the right of my blog page. Many are doing well, as the market is in an up-trend.

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All World Stock Markets entering BWR Down-trends! I am in cash and monitoring T2108

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I assume that most  U.S. part-time traders, like me, tend to monitor  closely the U.S. stock indexes. I have been writing that the major indexes I follow (DIA, QQQ, SPY and NYSE) appear to be entering major down-trends, showing the RWB pattern I invented by modifying GMMA weekly charts. My charts have 12 exponential weekly moving averages, a band of 6 shorter averages plotted in red, and a band of six longer term averages in blue. A strong up-trend is evident when all of the red lines are well above the rising blue lines such that there is a white band separating them. I call this an RWB pattern, Red/White/Blue. A significant down-trend is evident when the reverse is true, giving a BWR pattern. I also include in my charts a gray dotted line that shows the weekly close of the index being plotted. This more recent price line (gray dotted line) tends to lead the averages.

The past few weeks I have been showing you that the U.S. indexes I follow have been transitioning from a multi-year strong RWB up-trend into a BWR down-trend. This is clearly evident in this weekly chart of the SPY. The NYSE index, composed of large multi-national stocks, is in a fully formed BWR down-trend.

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All of the other U.S. indexes I follow have  patterns  similar to the SPY, although the QQQ, shown below, composed of nonfinancial tech stocks,  is  less far along than the others in forming a BWR pattern. It is clear from these charts that these markets have come out of a  multi-year RWB up-trend. In an RWB the gray dotted line is largely above the red averages, showing that the direction is headed up. In a BWR down-trend the reverse is true. Note that the gray dotted lines in the above two charts are now below all 12 averages, signalling a deepening down-trend. One  sign of a new up-trend would be if the gray dotted line were to close back above all 12 averages, although I prefer to see the full RWB pattern develop before I trade big with a changed trend. My primary conclusion is that the RWB pattern (bull advance) of the lest few years in the U.S. markets  is clearly over and no one  knows when it will come back. Is it too late to sell?  Sorry, no one knows.

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The above discussion would have been my routine analysis of the markets. But given the current market turmoil and the primary cause being ascribed to the market in China, I thought I would look at the chart patterns of markets world-wide. I examined 37 ETFs representing markets across the world. With the exceptions of the markets in Belgium and Ireland, all markets I examined were in well developed BWR down-trends!  Can we legitimately blame all of this on China? I will post just a few representative examples below.

Thailand:

ThailandAustralia:

Australia

Russia:

RussiaSouth Africa:

SouthAfricaUnited Kingdom:

UnitedKingdomGermany:

GermanyHongKong:

HongKongFrance:

FranceChile:

ChileIndia:

IndiaEgypt:

SwedenSweden:

SwedenChina 25:

ChinaI am not an expert on world markets. Maybe one of you can comment on these relationships. Is it really possible that all world markets are going down because of the China market? I suspect not. There is probably another factor driving all of these markets? Deflating commodities?

Did similar relationships occur in 2008? Not all of these ETFs existed in 2008. When I looked back at the patterns across a few countries in 2008 I again saw tremendous similarity across the markets. That does not necessarily mean that we are entering  another crisis like the one  in 2008? Nevertheless, the possible implications of these charts concern me more than a little……..

My GMI remains on a Sell signal with all indicators negative. Where is the bottom? A major past signal of  panic-induced market bottoms that I have noticed is when the Worden T2108 indicator, now 15,  falls into single digits. The monthly chart below shows that T2108 reached 1 at the 2008 bottom,  7 in 2011 and around 6 last August. I post T2108 each day, to the right of this page.

If T2108 goes below 10, I hope to hold my nose and move some cash into an index ETF (SPY or QQQ) or an index mutual fund. I will then only average up if the market continues to recover. I make this promise each time we have a large decline but seldom keep it! At the bottom the market always looks too scary to buy…..

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