Though the week before earnings (Alcoa kicks off the new season next Monday) is usually slow, there are a few names of note that dot the earnings schedule.  One is homebuilder KB Homes (KBH), one of the stalwarts of the industry along with Lennar, PulteGroup, and DR Horton. KBH reports on Friday before the open, [...]

The market got off to a technical bang for 2011, booking one of the best first days of the year since the 1980s.  This, of course, will have no implications for the market outside of the next few weeks or so.  But for the time being, our models continue to suggest that the first few [...]

The latest short interest report was released this morning and as we anticipated, there are some great trading opportunities to be found by digging through the data. First, the broad strokes.  According to our data, short interest on S&P 500 companies dropped an average of two percent in the recent report, which isn’t a surprise [...]

Tiffany (TIF) – Few items under the tree get more attention that the little blue box.  The upscale retail trade is back and you need look no further than TIF to see the evidence.  The stock is on a monster run, gaining more than 60% in less than four months to sit at an all-time [...]

As we’re nearing the end of the month (and year for that matter), we always get questions from people that would like to know where the relative strength leadership has been for the month.  In today’s case, we’ll look at the leaders for the S&P 500 companies. For the month, leadership in the market has [...]

Let’s take a quick look at the other side of the coin from Yesterday’s post “Finding the Strength in the ETF Market” by looking at the ETFs that are currently lagging the market over the last month. An interesting trend in the ETF performance meshes with the latest report from Goldman Sachs that 2011 will [...]

One of the most effective ways to help narrow down which stocks should be candidates for your portfolio is to compare performance at the sector level.  This top-down approach focuses on finding the “leading” sectors in the market and then focusing on the stocks within that group to uncover the stronger performing stocks.  In doing [...]

The market continues to provide an overall bullish tone for stocks as we head into the homestretch for 2010.  While there are a growing number of companies that are stretching the limitation of their short-term bullish trends, there are others that are beginning to gain bullish momentum. The Street talks about the “Golden” and “Death” [...]

There are many ways to measure whether a stock is overbought or oversold.  Typically, chart technicians will use an RSI calculation or similar method to gauge whether a stock has stretched itself too far and is due for a short-term pullback.  While we like the RSI method, we also like to put together a measurement [...]

I did a quick interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC yesterday.  The discussion focused on technically sound stocks that have seen a rise in short interest.  For those of you that don’t follow our work closely, stocks that fit into this criteria often experience sharp positive performance as the shorts fuel a short covering rally [...]