Bank and Tech Week

The early earnings kickoff this week include some of the biggest names in tech and banking. As I have mentioned before it is really nice to go to briefing.com (under useful links at the right) and print out the earnings and the events calendars. Personally, I print out the earnings three weeks in advance and spend a few minutes to color code the market-moving companies and companies I am interested in with various colors of highlighters. I also code the important weekly events. This method may help you as well as it does two things:

1. It keeps you on top of the game. No one wants to be caught off guard when the whole market shifts because of an earnings or market event that was overseen. It's quick and high bang for the buck preparation...

2. It allows you to scan ahead of time for earnings releases that may affect an individual stock or sector well you are in or are interested in before the actual release. Often stocks move up or down before earnings based on anticipation of results. If you know this you may be able to get a high probability trade (like ISRG) before earnings... regardless of how the company actually performs (low risk, high probability of adding to account). Additionally, if you own a solar stock like say CSIQ (my favorite as I have mentioned) it may move one way or another based on the timing and results of other solar companies. A quick scan shows that SPWR reports BO (before open) on Thurs (R) and ESLR reports AC on R. This is good to know!

So let's look at some of the big names...
Today INTC kicked things off with a very nice report. In a market that is being as shorted as heavily as this one is and is oversold such news can have a big impact. The report not only beat the street by 12% but also indicated that INTC sees sales remaining solid for this quarter. Seventy five percent of sales are overseas. Tech tends to do well going into the second half anyway. Watch for potential short-squeezes and moves up if the other techs follow suit later in the week. I have my eye on RIMM and MRVL, among others, as the selling may have been overdone here. QLD is also something to look at.

W: Wells Fargo, ebay. Also we have core CPI. Any positive news in the financials could send the whole market up, at least temporarily.

R: This is a huge day!
Financials
JPM
MER
BLK (this stock has been crushed but they are a very solid company... I'm watching this)
MTG

Tech
GOOG
IBM

Steel
NUE
RS

Solar
SPWR
ESLR

Ford also

Fri
C
HON
SLB
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Some other points:
By far and away two of the best stocks to hold in this market, in terms of safety and growth, are POT and MOS. They sell off sometimes but bounce back. Can you imagine that POT was at 200 recently and MOS at 120? ALWAYS look for these kind of pullbacks. The easiest gains in this market in my opinion. If you haven't seen it take a look at LT Bull Market Food under top posts. I'll may very well talk more about MOS specifically on another post...

CSX reported today in-line. This is despite the higher selling prices and the tremendous shipment of coal and agricultural products overseas. I am a bit surprised. This just demonstrates how much the domestic market is slowing. They also have some management issues so this may have affected their results a bit. I never looked at this as an investment but a short-term trade... as such I do not know everything there is to know about this company... and my price targets were not hit yesterday and I did not play this as a day trade today. If you bought in around the 56-58 region with a stop under 56 I would probably sell tomorrow... Not all trades work but the idea is to put the probability as much in your favor as possible, limit losses if they occur, and more then make up for this by letting winners run and never letting winners turn into losers.

FXI.... I am continuing to watch this. It pulled back from the upper Bollinger today and looks good around 125-126... but I will likely wait for Thursday's earnings... "Never step in front of a Bus".

On another note I was heavily considering shorting AEM this morning. Over and over again I am seeing the pattern develop where RSI goes over 70 then turns, and falls substantially. One would think that the FOMC minutes would have kept gold up but... the more I see this market the more I pick up on the number of technical people/computers here... this creates opportunity.

Best,
J

"The Yellow Rose Street Beat" is for informational purposes only. It does not give investment advice.