Month: April 2013

Love love love pulling a few of this morning’s most interesting studies from The StockTwits Charts Streams for your viewing pleasure….

1. All Time Highs Tend To Beget All Time Highs: Call it momentum, inertia, positive feedback loops or whatever, markets (and stocks) that make new highs have a tendency to continue higher. This is the stuff that trend trading is made of. Here, @RyanDetrick provides clear cut backtesting stats to clarify the phenomenon on the S&P 500. He writes, “When $SPY closes at an all-time high, it actually outperforms average returns on all time frames.” See his work below:

2. Continued Defensive Leadership: Recently, traders and the media have been focusing more and more on the leadership of traditionally defensive sectors, in particular Health Care ($XLV) & Consumer Staples ($XLP). Since the beginning of the year, these sectors have extended their leadership no doubt.  Key here though, and what few are mentioning, these sectors have been leading since the big 2009 bottom.  @Ivanhoff makes it abundantly clear here:

3. For Example, HCA Holdings Beast: @JBoorman zeroes in on one healthcare stock in particular, $HCA, and notes the incredible recent strength in the name, “10 straight up days, 7 straight all time highs…”

4. Index Halitosis: To curb our enthusiasm a bit, here’s @MarzBonfire displaying a pesky set of divergences that he doesn’t like seeing while stocks make all time highs. Decliners are advancing and advancers are declining:

On the last day of the 1st Quarter, the S&P 500 finally made its much anticipated All Time Closing High joining the Russell 2000 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average which made all time closing highs earlier this year.

Meanwhile though, individual investors continue to raise cash.

In the March data, published by The American Association of Individual Investors, cash grew by 4.58% while money allocated to stocks and stock funds declined by 3.03%.

You have a combination of stocks making all time highs and individuals increasing their cash positions and decreasing their equity risk exposure. Bearish persistence still at work and not the thing that tops are made of.

Read: March AAII Asset Allocations Survey (AAII Blog)

Way back in the day, way before the internet, Sport Illustrated published a story by George Plimpton about a baseball player named Sidd Finch, a Buddhist, signed by the Mets, with a 168mph fastball.

The year was 1985, I was 17, and I recall coming home from school and my older brother and his friends were reading SI and going nuts over the prospects of this being true.

The Mets were in on the gag too and here is a pic of the fictitious Finch with pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre:

Here’s the lead in to the article:

The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement. It may have started unraveling in St. Petersburg, Fla. two weeks ago, on March 14, to be exact, when Mel Stottlemyre, the Met pitching coach, walked over to the 40-odd Met players doing their morning calisthenics at the Payson Field Complex not far from the Gulf of Mexico, a solitary figure among the pulsation of jumping jacks, and motioned three Mets to step out of the exercise. The three, all good prospects, were John Christensen, a 24-year-old outfielder; Dave Cochrane, a spare but muscular switch-hitting third baseman; and Lenny Dykstra, a swift centerfielder who may be the Mets’ lead-off man of the future.

and the link to the genius original: The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

HT: Adam Warner who reminded me of this classic.