For those traders or investors who are looking for stocks or ETFs to buy, the wealth of free information on the Internet is quite astounding. It can also be quite intimidating, so I thought I might review four of my favorite sites and how you might use them in your research.
Though my focus is on the technical, I don't discount the fundamentals, and therefore, one predominantly fundamental site is included in my list. The initial slides were generated on Tuesday afternoon after the announcement was made that US Airways Group, Inc., (LCC) and American Airlines (AAMRQ) reached a settlement allowing their $17 billion dollar merger to go through.
My research path often starts out at www.finviz.com, and the graphic below is a partial screen shot of the home page. This can give you a quick view of the day's market action. On the top, there is a ten minute intraday chart of the Dow Industrials, Nasdaq Composite, and S&P 500 (not included). (Editor's Note; Sections of the entire Web page had to be used so that they would fit appropriately within the article.)
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Below the Dow chart (#1) is the combined advance/decline data from the NYSE, AMEX, and Nasdaq. It shows that 34.9% of the issues were advancing, while 58.9% were declining. Next to it (#2) is the combined new high and new low data for the same exchanges.
The front page also includes another valuable way to measure the market's health, that is, the number of stocks above their 50-day MAs. This is a data set for the S&P 500 that I often feature in the Week Ahead columns.
I pointed out in October (see chart), as well as late June, the number had turned up from levels often associated with market bottoms. In both instances, these changes coincided with positive signals from other technical studies, indicating that the stock market was bottoming.
The site also does a good job of screening stocks and separating them into lists, and examples are listed below the chart. They have the Top Gainers, (point a), as VNDA leads the pack for the day, up 95.29%. The links are dynamic and will take you to the entire list, which gives you a candle chart and fundamental data on each stock.
Next are the stocks that are making New Highs (point b) and also those that are considered Overbought (point c). These stocks are ones that have had "extreme price moves in the past two weeks," based on their 14-period RSI.
I generally start my analysis with the next list of filtered stocks, those with Unusual Volume (point d). This link will take you to several pages of stocks, starting with the one which has the most volume. On Tuesday, this was US Airways Group, Inc., (LCC), as 37 million shares were traded.
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I further filter the "Unusual Volume" stocks by the average volume, (circled in blue), and use the descending order, as shown in this link. I do this since I am really only interested in stocks that trade at least 300K shares per day. Unusual Volume is just one of the choices available from the Signal pull down menu.
The candle chart of US Airways Group, Inc., (LCC) is shown on the left side of the page, with a news ticker underneath. Their software draws trend lines, and based on these different chart formations, they are also filtered into groups on the home page.
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On the right side of the page is a three column list of fundamental data, (only two are shown). They provide information like the capitalization, dividend, insider ownership, % of the float that is short, as well as the average volume. The 52-Week range is also provided. Of course, you can also run scans, or filters, based on the fundamental as well as technical data to develop your own lists.
On Tuesday, the third stock on the list was JetBlue Airways Corp (JBLU), which is listed in Finviz as a Regional Airlines. Even though the merger news made Tuesday a bit different, my next step is to look at a chart of the industry group.
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On each page you will see a header called Groups (outlined in red). This will look at the performance over different periods of the sectors, industry groups, all US listed stocks or stocks grouped by capitalization. For this example, I want to look at the industry group (point 1), and then bar chart (point 2).
This will give you an alphabetical list of all the industry groups. I have cut out the Major Airlines chart from this list. The group broke out of its trading range, lines a and b, in October, and is acting very strong.
Since this is clearly a market leading sector, I can click on the chart of the Major Airlines group and get a list of all the stocks in this Industry group (point 1). I generally then filter these by those which have an average volume of 300K or greater (point 2).
This gives me a list of stocks by performance, but if I choose charts (point 3), I get the candle charts of the five stocks (see below) that meet the criteria, all on one page. This allows me to quickly examine them to see if any look interesting. Generally, I look for those that are basing, or those that have had what appear to be normal corrections after a sizable rally.
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In this case, I then look at the Regional Airlines group and notice that JetBlue Airways Corp (JBLU) had just overcome major resistance from the April and October highs. It was one of the more interesting charts, along with Allegiant Travel Company, LLC (ALGT).
Once I have found a stock to look at, I want to see how it is performing versus the overall market. One of the easiest ways to approximate my relative performance analysis is with stockcharts.com, which is a site that I have written about in the past.
Selecting Free Charts on the home page takes you to various lists of subgroups of stocks and ETFs. One that I use frequently is the CandleGlance: S&P Sector ETFs, as it has the nine Sector Select ETFs that I comment on regularly, as well as, the S&P 500. They give you the option of looking at two months, which is the default setting. You may also choose six months, one year, or a P&F chart.
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