The Nasdaq led a bounce back today clearing yesterdays high on decent volume. As most of you know I key in on the Nasdaq, and particularly the QQQQ etf. When they are leading the move, good things happen. It is still too early to say whether the indices will break out here for another wave higher, so it is probably best to take it light right now. I think I'm gonna do things a little differently this year as far as how I post my charts. I usually post a mess of charts with just a few comments, but I think I will narrow down how many I post and offer more thorough comments. We'll see how it works out. Here are a couple charts of one of the stocks I was looking at for my contest. I looked at weekly charts for the contest, but I will drill down to daily charts in case any of these setup for a nice trade.

Qiao Xing Universal Telephone Inc. (Public, NASDAQ:XING)

What struck me about XING's weekly chart was the huge saucer base with clearly defined resistance. It broke through resistance a month ago, and came back into the base. I like the volume on the right side of this chart and it looks like it is only a matter of time before this breaks resistance. I didn't take it for the contest because it wasn't over resistance, although I bought some "real" shares of this before any of my contest picks.
Here is a daily chart showing the past few months. It looks like it is trying to breakout out of this consolidation channel while holding near a previous pivot high. It is still a little dicey here as it is being pushed back by the 50sma, but the recent action looks bullish to me.




This year has started off quite interestingly testing traders right off the bat. Keep calm and stick to your rules.

Good Luck,

DT

I had a full post typed up and Firefox crashed either due to blogger or stockcharts. I lost everything and I need to step out. I will try and repost tonight or tomorrow morning.

Congratulations to Dave at stocktickr for the prominent mention of his site on a Wall Street Journal article profiling "Social Networking" sites. I was quoted right in the beginning under my given name; Joey Fundora. It was pretty neat to see my name on the Journal and it is funny how I interviewed with the reported for over an hour and the end result was one blurb. I was more then happy to offer my opinion on stocktickr as I truly find it critical to my success. Congrats again Dave.


DT (Joey)

EDITED ** Below added at 12:45am 1/4/2007

Sorry for cutting the post short as I was running to the movies and my browser crashed before I could publish the post I was working on.

It looks like we can count on some volatility this year as the trading year started off with a roller coaster of a day. The indices gapped strongly this morning and plowed ahead through mid-day. They started rolling over before the fed minutes were released and accelerated their descent at 2:00. They then made a strong push to finish near unchanged. All of the indices had wide ranging days eclipsing both the prior high and low. This type of action occurs at market turning points, so if the indices can't clear today's highs soon, a major high may be in place. I don't want to put too much emphasis on one days action, especially a when no side was able to follow through, but it was an auspicious start to the year.

I mentioned the stock contest I have with my friends and below are the final choices. I'm not too happy that one of my picks (OMNI) was derailed along with the oil patch, but it is a long year.

DT Btuff Smorg Paige Lionshare Doc Y Fcagger
OMNI BOOM MFN MFN DELL AUY MFN FE
CXW ASEI ERS LMRA INAP SLW ICE CRY
Publish
I had narrowed my choices down to six stocks and in the end was stuck on five of them. Here they are in the final order of preference.

1. CXW
2. OMNI
3a. EZPW
3b. COCO
3c. XING
6 HAR

I looked at weekly charts of each and found something compelling on all of them. I currently don't hold a position in any of them, but will be looking for entries if the markets cooperate. I will resume posting charts tomorrow.

Good Luck,

DT

Happy New Years everyone! It was strange to have the markets closed for four straight days, but I found that it was nice to not have the markets on the back of my mind for a few days. I find that even when I'm on vacation, as a swing trader, it's difficult to have a clean slate and not pay attention. This is a huge advantage for daytraders in the stress management department, as they can just shut it down when they are not feeling up to it. Volume will come back tomorrow and I think there will be some large gaps in the morning with all the time off.
It's hard to expect anything at this point, but I would guess the indices gap higher. I don't think I will be chasing much of anything though, probably just managing my open positions.


So a few friends of mine have had a little stock picking contest the past two years, where we pick two stocks each in the beginning of the year and hold for the entire year. The winner is the person with the highest combined return for their two picks. It is not a realistic contest as you can't sell or lock in profits, but it is lots of fun to see how a pick would of done had you held the entire year. The only prize is bragging rights, which is a valuable prize indeed. Here are the final results for 2006. The numbers behind the ticker are total return, buy price, sell price.

6th. Lionshare -25.57%

JDSU -13.95% 19.36 16.66
AMD -37.19% 32.40 20.35

Poor Lionshare was derailed by semiconductors. He is a techy who is all over this space from a technology perspective, but timing is everything in stocks. Both were up substantially until getting hammered when the overall markets corrected through mid year. It seems like money never rotated back in as the markets turned around and both kept floundering. I am surprised AMD was such a horrible stock for most of the year.

5th. Downtown -11.18%

REDF -3.82% 19.13 18.40
CMED -18.54% 33.23 27.07

I finished a very disappointing 5th, dragged down by an 18.54% loss in CMED. I am surprised that in the year of Chinese stocks that CMED was such a poor performer. REDF had to stage a late year rally to manage a small 3.82% loss. Not to discount my poor performance, but REDF and CMED were up quite a bit after I selected them. REDF was well into the 30's from 19, and CMED into the 40's from 33. A trailing stop would of easily locked in huge gains, but alas, this contest has a forced holding time of a year.

4th. Doc -9.07%

ELN +5.28% 14.01 14.75
VPHM -23.43% 19.12 14.64

4th place begins the group of sub par performers. Doc had a 23.43% loss in VPHM wipe out the 5.28% gain in ELN although it could of been a heck of a lot worse. VPHM was down well over 50% at one point and had a 100% move up from 7's-14's in the second half of the year. ELN got a little spunk in May but was basically flat after June.

3rd. Btuff +26.34%

NGPS +45.51% 27.42 39.90
CKCM +7.16% 21.23 22.75

Btuff had a great call on NGPS nailing a 45.51% move despite a +15% haircut from the top. CKCM was all over the place ranging from over 30 into the mid teens before being taken over for 21.23 a share.

2nd. Paige +102.83%

SVMFF +202.45% 4.85 14.67
RUTH +3.22% 17.71 18.28

Paige caught a 200% move on SVM which helped pad the 3.22% he got from RUTH. RUTH was looking like it was gonna clear the 200sma late in the year but fell apart in the end. SVM was a great call for Paige and Smorg below, and I am extremely happy they both actually held the real thing for all of it.


1st. Smorg +117.64%

SVMFF +202.45% 4.85 14.67
IVN +32.84% 7.40 9.83

Wow. Smorg went with the precious metals and cleaned up this year. SVM is a silver miner that trades on the Toronto exchange and just had a monster year. IVN had a volatile year but had huge move in the fall. It was up over 11 in October and then again in December before pulling back to finish at 9.83. Smorg has been all over a few other foreign mining companies and made a heck of a call on SVM.

Congratulations bud, great job. I'll buy the beer on my next trip up to Toronto.



There are a couple of changes for this years contest. First, I am keeping stock selections to the NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX. Not that I am opposed to other exchanges, but I find them hard to track down with my charting program and I wanted to keep the stocks familiar to my blog readers. Second, stocks must have a share price over $5. Smaller stocks have drastic moves in both directions from a percentage perspective, and most funds stay away from them anyways.

I'm still waiting on a few picks from Smorg for this years contest, but we have most of them in already. I will be posting charts for these tomorrow with further analysis.

Downtowntrader
OMNI and CXW

Paige
LMRA and MFN

Btuff
BOOM and ASEI

Doc
AUY and SLW

Lionshare
DELL and INAP


If anyone wants to throw in their two picks in the comments section, I will recap them next year when I review the contest.

Good Luck tomorrow,

DT