The market deteriorated very quickly last week. The 4 down days occurred on much higher volume than the single up day. In fact, the up volume of some of the bear 3X ETF’s (EDZ, FAZ, ERY) was the highest I have ever seen, especially on Friday. The 2X Ultra short QQQQ ETF (QID) also had huge up volume. This suggests that the pros are making huge bets on the short side. The Worden T2108 is now at 21%, not yet at extreme oversold levels, but it is getting there. The GMI fell
ETF
Exciting New Worden stock tool–volume buzz at FreeStockCharts.com
I recently attended a Worden seminar about their new software, StockFinder.com, which will eventually probably replace TC2007, my favorite analytic program. While there, they talked about the free software that they make available to everyone, Freestockcharts.com. Freestockcharts.com is a platform that is very similar to their new StockFinder software, but it is free and provides real time charts and statistics. While many sites provide intraday prices, I learned at the seminar that Freestockcharts.com has an indicator called “volume buzz.” Volume buzz compares each stock’s volume to its average volume at a specific time during the trading day. (I do not know over how many time periods the average is computed.) So, for example, at 10:05 AM I can rank my watchlist by how each stock’s current volume at 10:05 AM compares with its average volume at 10:05 AM.
I can therefore see anytime during the day whether a stock is trading an unusually high or low number of shares. Volume buzz therefore enables someone to spot unusual volume in their specific watchlist anytime during the trading day. One just edits the watchlist column to include volume buzz. The picture to the right, taken after Friday’s close, shows that the volume for TYH on Friday was 85.7% above its average total trading volume by the end of the day. Of course, if I had taken a screen shot during the day, the volume buzz statistic would have been computed based on the exact time during the trading day when I would have taken the screen shot. Pretty neat!
Freestockcharts.com also enables me to set alerts for each stock, that can be emailed to me immediately when a stock trades in a specific way. (A larger number of alerts and stock scans require a paid for premium service.) Check it out. Meanwhile, the GMI is at 5 and the GMI-R is at 9. The indexes are still near the top of their Bollinger bands and it may not be a great time to start taking on new longs. But as long as the longer term trends are up, chances are that the daily advance will resume suddenly. When stocks surge on good earnings, like AAPL, AMZN and NFLX did last week, we know that we are in a strong up-trend where funds and traders are buying strength. The QQQQ and SPY index ETF’s have closed above their critical 10 week averages for 15 straight weeks. It is unfortunate that so many people have missed this rise. One needs to follow the trend and not try to second guess it. As long as the trend is up, I can go long and manage risk by placing sell stops beneath key support levels.
IBD 100 list top ten stocks do outperform!
From time to time I attend stock meet-ups and listen to members opine about how useless the IBD 100 lists are. People just like to denigrate things without examining the evidence and these untruths tend to get passed on unchallenged. Each Monday, IBD publishes a list of the top 100 growth stocks that meet their technical and fundamental criteria. I feel a lot more confident buying stocks on this list because IBD’s stock selection criteria are based on analyses of their comprehensive database of the best stocks over the past 100 years. Imagine that–they actually analyzed the characteristics of past market winners to design an empirically based system for selecting winners BEFORE they take off. Because human trading psychology is pretty stable, one can discern lasting technical patterns (which are really trading decisions) that are characteristic of winning stocks.
So, one of the exclamations that I have heard from self-proclaimed experts is that by the time that a stock gets to the top of the IBD 100 list, it is too late to trade it for a profit. The table below shows this assertion to be nonsense, at least for the top ten stocks on the list published on