What We're Reading

As discussed yesterday in Chat, small caps appear to be forming a diamond which can represent a "top" or merely taking a rest or consolidation before resuming it's trek higher.

Theory is to trade the direction of the break higher or lower.  IWM would work for a bullish breakout and TWM for a bearish break down for those who are unable to short.

fwiw we recently traded TWM on market weakness.  Looks as though it may be setting up again.

For more information on diamonds, I would suggest you browse through Thomas Bulkowski's pages at ThePatternSite.

For a technical analysis trader or investor, you need to be able to properly identify stock patterns his book Encyclopedia of Stock Patterns is a must have.

“After 5 years of a bull market, the only place left to invest is in value names”
“The best protection in this volatile market are value stocks”

How reliable are these sorts of claims?  Those promoting the approach offer lists of stocks that are considered undervalued typically when they meet such financial criteria as low price/sales, low price/book value, or high, stable and growing dividends. However, they rarely attach timeframes or price targets.

So I decided to do some “back testing”.  By searching the term “value stock lists”, I gathered a small random sample of such lists published in 2012-13; stocks in these lists met one or more of criteria that qualifies them as “value stocks” at the time.  I then compared their stock price on the publication date with that of twelve months later; as a benchmark, those changes were compared with against the S&P 500 change over the same period.  These were selected at random and space limitations prevented including more, I suspect others wou

This has a lot of good information in it. It's in pdf format so you can download it and keep it for future reference..C.pdf