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My rolling five-day watchlist is my best barometer to measure the health of the market for short-term swing trades. My watchlist is everything, it tells me more than watching the indices ever will. As a matter of fact, I don't even have the indices on my screen, I have no idea during the day what the market is doing. I encourage you to take the indices off your screen and allow your watchlist to do the talking.Your watchlist is everything, it will tell you;Are you looking at the right stocks?Are you flagging them at the right time?Are they moving immediately in [...]

Contraction in stocks with high momentum typically leads to more upside, it's that simple.Here are a few recent examples.The best way to find stocks with high momentum is to sort the universe of stocks based on year to date performance (high to low), or the best-performing stocks of the last 3-6 months, look at the top 200 stocks. Once you do that you want to wait until the stock consolidates (don't chase) to within a couple percent from its 20-day moving average, then it's just a matter of waiting for the first hint of expansion to jump aboard.SIGN UP HERE FOR [...]

When it comes to trading and investing you have to do what you believe in, and what you believe doesn't even have to be true, you just have to believe.Some people believe that the only way to make money is by buying stocks that trade above $15. Others believe that stocks under $10 is where big money is made. A few believe that stocks need to have accelerating sales and earnings growth. Some believe that stocks with low PE is the answer to picking winning stocks. Whatever it made be, you have to believe in it.  Fact is that with the [...]

The popularity of shorting volatility has risen exactly when the most popular short-based ETF'S have lost momentum. A few articles in the last couple of months have highlighted how easy it has become to short volatility.  As you can see in the chart below, SVXY has traded lockstep with the SP500, hitting highs and lows almost simultaneously until recently. The SP500 is off -1% from its recent highs and the SVXY is -16% off its highs. This is a character change for SVXY and XIV."Each morning, at the market’s open, Seth M. Golden, a former logistics manager at a Target store, [...]

The market is under pressure this morning due to the missile launch by North Korea. Fact is; we've been saying in these pages for the last couple of weeks (here and here) that there's been a slight change in character in the market, the North Korean missile is just something we can blame.Unlike previous times when the market sold off we did not see a V-bottom nor did we see an uptick in stocks rebounding hard after the sell-off this time around. As you can see in the chart below, anytime we had a spike in 1-month new lows we typically [...]

I have an interest in the above stocks on the long side if and only if they can get through yesterday's high +.10-cents. Stocks move in short-term momentum bursts that last 3-5 days. The returns within those days could be anywhere 5-20% or $5-$20 dollars, low price/small float stocks have bigger percentage moves and higher price/large float stocks have bigger dollar moves. The return within the 3-5 days depends on market conditions, market cap and float of the stock.Here are two recent trades, one high priced and the other low priced; $GOOGL, $IMGN.SIGN UP HERE FOR OUR STOCK PICK OF THE [...]

We had a decent bounce yesterday in the indices with the $SPY and the $IWM both gaining 1%. However, both have already given up half of their gains in pre-market. Like we said in our last POST, the market is experiencing a little character change. Traders don't turn your trades into investments and investors don't turn your investments into trades, know your timeframe and the reason why you got into the trade/investment in the first place.A few Gold stocks (ABX, NGD, RGLD) printed inside days along with the ETF'S $GDX and $GDXJ, I always pay attention when volatile instruments print [...]