Month: January 2011

The rare earths stocks stalled on Thursday.   Judy had told me that the lock-up period for MCP, when insiders   from an IPO cannot sell their shares, expires this month.   After the stock recovers from the anticipated selling, MCP may be a good buy again.   Meanwhile, Judy told me about LYSCF, a small company developing a new mine for rare earths. I bought a few shares just to keep it in mine (pun intended)….

With the new year, IBD has apparently shrunk the IBD 100 list down to 50 stocks.   The new IBD 50 list contains a more selective set of stocks to watch.   I will run some performance tests in the future to see if this list does in fact perform better.   Most of my buys have come from stocks on their IBD 100 and New America lists….

I really need to set up a “Judy’s Picks” column.   So many of the stocks that she told me about over a year ago have taken off.   Check out ARMH, CAVM, APKT, PANL and FFIV.   Judy tells me that years ago   she bought ISRG   for well under $10. And I watched several years ago as a number of her picks were bought out by other companies. She was the first person to alert me to the concepts of cloud computing and LED’s, long before I heard about them from the media.   A few months ago, Judy told me she wanted to get some shares of a new company coming to market.   She was unable to, but bought some right after the stock started trading.   She was very interested in the concept of rare earths.   So, this past August, Judy told me she bought MCP at around $13.   (See weekly chart of MCP below). If you haven’t already noticed, MCP closed yesterday at $60.70!   I did not buy the stock because it had no long chart history of prices to analyze.   Judy has the unique ability to read a lot of technical material and research and to boil the information down to the key winning concept and stocks for investment.   Judy and I have found that technical analysis, coupled with her extraordinary concept analysis,   often produces   winning results. Judy makes a presentation to the students in my class each semester. We will post a “Judy’s Picks” column soon…….

I wrote yesterday about the profit possibilities from investing in leveraged ETF’s.   Well, last night one of these ETF’s, USD, popped up in my scan of possible buys.   USD aims to move 2X as much as the Dow Jones U.S. Semiconductor index.   USD may be bouncing off of support, as long as it holds above $38.   If I bought it I would exit below $38. The weekly GMMA chart below shows that its underlying index has an RWB pattern, typical of rising stocks. I became interested in the semiconductor sector because eight of these stocks hit new 52 week highs on Tuesday (CAVM,STM,OMNN,ATHR,NVEC,XLNX,EZCH,ASMI). As I indicated to you in yesterday’s post, it may be easier to invest in the leveraged ETF for a sector, rather than trying to pick the right stock.   Let’s watch USD and see how it does.