List for Monday, Oct 1, 2007

XOMA looks good.

From today's list: SCON, CSIQ and RECN (Short)

Cheers!

Lazy

List for Friday, Sep 28, 2007

A few good candidates outside the list: EEE, IAG, NEXC

More bearish candidates! Does that indicate, we might need to be a bit cautious with the market?

From today's list: VCLK

Cheers!

Lazy

List for Thursday, Sep 27, 2007

These days technical candidates do not make much sense, get into any Chinese stock for a ride :)

Long list! My apologies, could not make enough time to clean up the list well.

NWL looks good. Keep an eye on PXLW.

From today's list: MCZ, SNIC

Cheers!

Lazy

List for Wednesday, Sep 26, 2007

Other than the list, here are some more potential candidates: IAI, KR, MLNM, RCD, UYG

Cheers!

Lazy

List for Tuesday, Sep 24, 2007

CPSL doesn't seem to quit.

RKH, LIFC charts look nice

From today's list: MPWR, MKTY


Cheers
Lazy

Followup post...

Just noticed, some chats look pretty good.

HEPH
POZN
NFLD

Cheers
Lazy.

List for Monday, Sep 24, 2007

CPSL, TGB, SVA continued their moves. TARR did another sneaky little move.

On the short side, TRBN did a decent dive.

GNTA actually looks very bullish once it can break the congestion around 1.45-1.50 area. Even GNBT pattern looks quite good. GEOY might be interesting, stock near all time high area trying to break resistance, and big volume coming in.

Today's list is huge, though I cleaned up, some of them look kind of okay, so did not want to remove them. And also depending on preferences, people can choose either higher priced ones or low ones. So, didn't want to remove any just to shorten the list.

From Today's List: UWM, SMBL, FALC


Cheers!
Lazy

The Stock Bandit

Another good place to learn more about technical trading is Jeff White's blog http://www.thestockbandit.net/ and check his links like "Chart Patterns" and "Swing Trading" on the right of his blog page.

I do not recommend his paid service, not because I have anything against him, but when you start paying, you are constantly on the edge to perform, always trying to be able to get your money's worth out of the service, not always a pleasant experience.

Cheers!
Lazy

Request

There is one request to describe on how to trade the picks I post, I will definitely try to find some time to write in detail on how to pick trades based on chart patterns and what all factors to consider.

I am hoping some more folks are interested, if so, please let me know. I will be delighted to help in any way I can.

In the meantime please feel free to visit Alpha Trends (link on the right). You will learn a lot from his videos and commentary.

Cheers!
Lazy

Technical Analysis Analogy to Cricket

Sachin Tendulkar, that star Indian batsman lately has been getting out in the 90s very often, in both tests and one dayers, and hasn't got a hundred in a long while!

From technical analysis point of view that means there is lot of resistance in the 98-99 range, he has been hitting at it quite persistently, so eventually the buyers will take control over from the sellers and the resistance will be broken and Sachin will get a century!

Now, once resistance is broken, it becomes support. Does that mean, from then on we will see only 100+ scores from Sachin! Dream on :)

Cheers!
Lazy

Welcome to my new home!

Welcome everyone and thanks a lot for visiting. My apologies for all these changes. Please give me your feedback so I can keep on making improvements - leave comments or write to me at lazyinvestor07@gmail.com

This will be my permanent home so please bookmark this site!

Cheers!
Lazy

Only thing constant in life is change...

My friends have convinced me that naming my blog borednlazyinvestor.blogspot.com was a very immature and hasty decision! I agree! It was one of those Saturdays when my wife had to be at work and I was down with fever. I was utterly bored when I came up with the brilliant idea to start my own blog! The result was disastrous! Hence some changes are on the cards....my apologies and hopefully you will bear with me!

Cheers!
Lazy

List for Friday, Sep 21, 2007

CPSL, TGB, SVA made good moves.

USEY and MECA were volume explosion candidates but now they have formed great flags.

From Today's list: RYN, SGMO, (GLNG and NTWK will need a few days but look good)

List for Thursday, Sep 20, 2007

DRL made a big move today. From yesterday's list OMTR did quite good.

I have included some shorts today, but not very advisable in a strong market.

From today's list: AXYS, INSP


Cheers!
Lazy

List for Wednesday, Sep 19, 2007

Guess what, a OTCBB stock from the 10th Sep list, CYBL - made a +200% move today! But I do not keep records of bulletin board stocks, but just wanted to mention how crazy they can be and the chart really looks sexy :)

One more thing, I mentioned yesterday that SMBL made a good move, strike that out, SMBL was a volume explosion candidate, I cannot take credit for that, anyone can give you a list of unusual volume candidates for the day, I just mention them so that if something interesting happens, you have a chance to act.

EPCT gapped up today, so no entry.

NABI still looks good.

From today's list: NFLD, OMTR



I removed the bearish candidates from the list today, in a strong market, short candidates usually keep going up instead. Also do you notice the list is so short. When I was first told that on a very strong day in the market there will be very few technical candidates, I was like - what! But makes sense, today most of the stocks made big moves, so they will need a few days to rest before some of them start forming flags, pennants, wedges and all those cute little patterns :)

Cheers!
Lazy

Thanks!

Someone left a comment saying they found the list useful. I am so glad, and really appreciate the vote of confidence, thanks a lot!

They also mentioned they load the list in their trading platform and consider one or the other based on the strength the stock shows. That's the whole idea, the list is just a bunch of potential candidates, you never know which one will get Mr. Market's attention. You have to use your judgement based on price/volume action, trend line/resistance breaking, risk-reward ratio etc.

But if you can catch a few moves and make money, that's my whole satisfaction.

Please please please use stops/trailing stops, or get out quikly if the trade does not show much promise, I would not want anyone to lose money in the process.

Once more a reminder, these posts are only for educational purposes, trade at your own risk.

Cheers!
Lazy.

List for Tuesday, Sep 18, 2007

GNTA and SIGM still look strong as they move up. SMBL also made a good move.

From today's list: EPCT, NABI

ISIS

ISIS (ISIS Pharmaceuticals Inc.) seems to be everyone's favoutite now:

Few days back Alpha Trends talked about it. And now I see that Peter Navarro has mentioned it as his "Trade of the week".

The chart no doubt looks hot!

The correct buy point would have been after retest of resistance when the chart curls up to make the actual move upwards. Looks like around 14 was the 52 week high, so that resistance was also broken. I missed this but still contemplating if I should get in if it pulls back to around 13. Anyway, every missed trade is still a learning experience!

Cheers!

Lazy

Conclusions and Confusions

I got a couple of questions from my friends who follow my blog and also from a comment, so I will try to answer them one by one:

Q. Currently, if I do not trade the candidates that I post daily then, do I not believe in them?
A. The picks I generate are for short term day/swing trades. I believe short term day/swing traders need to watch the markets and their trades quite closely, atleast once an hour. I had that luxury last year for about 4 months and I traded my picks and did quite well. But currenly I do not have that luxury, during market hours I am too busy with my day job and only get about once or twice during the day to check my portfolio and the markets.

Q. If I do not trade them, why do I post them?
A. I figured, even though I cannot trade from these lists, as I have the infrastucture already in place, I might as well post them every night so someone else might benefit from it.

Q. Are these picks based on fundamental or technical analysis?
A. Purely technical. The system looking for candidates is purely technical, and similarly I do not look at fundamentals while cleaning up and posting the list on the blog. But the decision to pick the trades from the list might be fundamental, for example post earnings bullish flag is usually very "bullish".

Q. What technical analysis methods do I follow for selecting these candidates?
A. I try to keep things very simple. I do not go into complex technical methods. I just look for well formed Chart patterns - specifically triangles, flags and penants that have the highest potential of giving +5-20% gain in 1-20 days. (I will go into more details in a separate post)

Q. What are the risks involved?
A. Very risky. Discipline, hard stops and picking trades based on favourable risk rewards ratio is a must.

Q. How are performances effected by market conditions?
A. No doubt market conditions effect the performance, in an uptrending market bullish picks will do better and bearish picks will not perform well and vice-versa. During bearish condtions, the short candidates might do well. But even in a bearish environment, stocks with good patterns do go up, and the small cap speculative ones do quite well. But key is to recognize and accept market conditions and if needed trade smaller sizes and use tighter stops.

Q. If I do not trade these picks, do I trade at all?
A. I do, but I follow a completely different method, I maintain a list of good stocks based on strong eps momentum, profit margins and returns. Decision to buy or sell them is decided by fundamental or techincal changes. We know earnings momentum give good returns but I keep the strategy so basic that I do not have to follow the markets hourly, in the process my returns might suffer, but thats the trade-off I chose. (More about my current trading method in my new blog)

Cheers!
Lazy.

Rules of the game

If people are interested, I will write a few posts to explain how to effectively trade these short term swing candidates that I post daily. These lists are generated purely based on technical analysis, the ones that show the best patterns.

Like I have mentioned, I am not able to trade these picks myself nowadays, as I am very busy with my day job during market hours. But when I used to trade from these lists, I was doing quite well. Proof being: MOVI (+100%), TARR, CRDC (+25%), GNTA, RMBS (around 20%) in 1-10 days. So, I felt I should atleast post these lists everyday, so someone else might make use of it.

I post stocks from AMEX, NYSE, NASDAQ and OTCBB. I post stocks of all kinds, high priced, low priced, penny stocks, volatile, illiquid etc. Depending on preferences, selection needs to be made. Be sure to check the chart out.

Though I post the OTCBB stocks also in the daily lists, I do not count their results as they are more risky. I remove the Pink Sheet stocks that appear on the scans, when I am cleaning the lists every night, as I think small investors should avoid them.


Cheers!
Lazy

List for Monday, Sep 17, 2007

BCON, ACF look quite decent.

Recent Performance!

On the long side we got some great moves: TARR :) (Mentioned it yesterday that it was looking excellent)

Others include CRDC, RMBS, CREE, GNTA, SMTC

But for these short term trades: you have to be very alert and take profits quickly or maintain tight stops...look at CRDC chart and that should give you idea of what I am talking about.

CORT and MDII are still looking good.

On the short side NITE made a great move.

Actually nothing for me to brag on a daily basis, I wrote the scripts, but now I just mechanically run the programs and whatever lists are produced, I post it here.

Going forward, from each day's list I plan to mention which charts look the best, (but remember, pattern looking the best may not give best performance, but still puts the odds in our favor)

List for Friday, Sep 14, 2007

TARR and MDII still look excellent.

SMTC gave a good +10% upside.

GIII looks good too, got deleted from list by mistake.

List for Thursday, Sep 13, 2007

CRDC made a great move today.

TARR looks REALLY good. MDII might be interesting.

List for Wednesday, Sep 12, 2007

MOVI keeps doing well.

List for Tuesday Sept 11, 2007

MOVI made another good move today. CRDC did not appear here but might be interesting.

List for Monday, Sep 10, 2007

XOMA SCRX GNTA TRDQ CPST look quite good.

Great Minds think Alike?

Coolcat Report is Kevin Kennedy's investment newsletter. Now the newsletter has various subscriptions, but originally there was only one newsletter which followed an momentum strategy, which does very well during bull markets. Here is the strategy in Kevin Kennedy's own words:

The bottom line when you buy a stock is you want the price to go up. So that's what we look for first: stocks with the very best relative price strength. We want to focus our energies on identifying strong performing stocks that share the characteristics of past winners. Most of our stock selections share the following criteria:
* The stock price is higher than it was 1, 3, 6 and 12 months ago.
* The stock has made a new 52-week high in the past two months.
* The company has positive 12-month trailing earnings.
* The ratio between 52-week high and 52-week low meets a minimum standard.
* The stock price is within 20% of the stock's 52-week high and is trading above its 50-day moving average.

Sounds familiar? By now if you have guessed it, good job! Yeah, that's right, so similar to the Double Trouble momentum strategy by Pradeep Bonde of Stockbee

A section of the double trouble post:

- Calculate the lowest close for a stock in last 260 days. If a stock has less than 260 days data calculate lowest close for those many days.

- Calculate percent change from lowest close and select stocks which had 100% plus growth

- Find the highest price in the 100% move and only take stocks which are within 25% of that highest price.

But there are subtle differences, which proves one did not copy from the other, they came up on their own. Which proves that this strategy is really good!

But that brings us to another point. Herein lies the greatness and humility of Stockbee, he is sharing this strategy (and many more excellent ones) in great detail, free of charge while Coolcat report is making money trading the strategy as well as sharing it. Go Stockbee!

I had come across coolcat report long time back and the strategy had made sense, and I invest based on something quite similar (will talk about it in more detail in a later post). So, when I came across Stockbee and was reading double trouble, I was amazed how similar it is to coolcat report strategy. Great minds think alike!! :)

List for Friday, Sep 7, 2007

My apologies, did not get time to clean up the list, so quite long :(

List for Thursday, Sep 6, 2007

Followup...

Not much worthwhile happened today from any of the existing picks. Most of the formations still look good.

Hopefully the shorts: ANEN, URRE might break down further.

My apologies that I am not able to devote time to each of the picks, but as I have mentioned earlier, I just get about an hour in the evening to keep in touch with the markets.

I should mention once more, all my technical analysis concepts are from books and the blog Alpha Trends by Brian Shannon. His methods are so simple, so lucid yet so effective and powerful and his commentary is always a pleasure.

Posts for tomorrow soon!

List for Wednesday, Sep 5, 2007

I have not included the candidates that came up in yesterday's scan as well as turned up today, Enjoy....

Followup...

Most of the patterns from yesterday are still intact. MOVI made a great high volume move, intraday it was 40+% up. CGLD (OTCBB listing) had a even greater volume today without moving anywhere, worth keeping an eye on.

In another half an hour, I will post the candidates for tomorrow.

Cheers!

List for Tuesday, Sep 4, 2007

Techniques of Technical Analysis...

As I had mentioned in my first post, every night (hopefully) I will post some interesting candidates which look technically promising but might need a few more days to really develop into a proper formation. Some might actually move right away. But my experience has been that most of them take a few more days to actually make a move or fail if that's what it is destined to be.

Along with bullish and bearish candidates, I will also post some stocks which show unusual volume activity. The volume issues need to be considered with a pinch of salt, as volume explosion can be due to various reasons - positive ones would be silent accumulation prior to big news, big investor buying, acquisition etc while negative ones might be dumping, dilution etc. But it is worthwhile to keep these candidates in a watchlist lest they provide some opportunity. This has worked well for me for low priced (read penny) stocks.

First Post

I am a part time investor, who has spent some years in the market but in total not much, reason being that I have a day job which I love so much that it takes up most of my time and energy. But markets fascinate me and I invest on the side, and tinker with various trading systems and investment philosophies whenever time permits.

Talking about investment philosophies, some blogs (or bloggers rather) that I really admire are :

• Stockcoach (Microcap Value Investing - He is the boss in his area of investment philosophy, his success is amazing, I salute him, too bad he had to stop blogging, I wish him the very best in his current endeavour. But I would suggest to people new to investing not to try to emulate his methods because it is not simple, it is simple to stockcoach because as I said, he is the boss!)
• Stockbee (Momentum Investing - Very simple and no-nonsense methods, I would suggest all people new to investing to go through his site and investment methods, you will learn a lot. The blogger, Pradeep, is from my country so you might say I am being biased towards him :) but you take a look and decide)
• Alpha Trends (Very High Quality Technical Analysis based swing trading. Again people new to investing, great place to learn if you are technically inclined, very simple yet powerful methods.)

I will talk about these blogs in more detail in later posts, and also a quick mention that there are other excellent investors/traders/bloggers out there, either I do not know them or have not followed them extensively to form any proper opinion, so please excuse my ignorance if you are not in the list above.

When I ask "people new to investing" to check these blogs, I do not mean experienced and successful traders/investors should not regularly visit these blogs, all of us can learn something from them. But when I was new to investing, I wish I had access to such great investing minds. I did the works - microcap, otcbb, value, growth, technical, fundamental and what not - without particularly knowing what I was doing and how to do it - only thing I knew is that I wanted to make some fast bucks :)

Talking of Apha Trends and technical analysis, sometime back I had more time in hand and also got a few hours during the day when I could watch the markets quite frequently. So, I tried my hand at technical analysis based trading - patterns and support-resistance and all that stuff, with decent success.

I had created a database where I would load nightly stock information (freely available data) and run some SQL queries to identify patterns like bull/bear flags, wedges, pennants and the likes. Now, I do not have time for those, but I plan to run my queries every night and post the potential candidates, so someone else might benefit from my excellent SQL query writing skills :)

So, you would ask what is my investment philosophy currently? Simple answer - EPS Growth based momentum investing. Simple, easy to identify. The difficult part is when to buy, when to sell and how to manage stops - that decides how much money you will actually make!

More later! Adios!