Good morning beta group,
Yesterday: average…not bad, nor great. Modest gains.
Today I’m going to do something a touch different. At the request from a couple of you, and for today only, I’m going to print the entire “list” of stocks that I filtered through. Usually we take this larger list and go through each and every one, by hand, before we choose the two or three (or none) that we publish. We check news and overnight trading. We look at competitive pressures. We examine the overall market dynamics. We measure the recent performance of the stock six (minimally) different ways and no, I won’t tell you what they are! (Anymore than I’ll reveal the formulaic nature of our algorithm that actually does the filtering.) And by the mere fact that we publish the choices to the website and leave them there for a significant period is in fact validating our historical performance. So… Now, what else? Futures are and have been in positive territory all morning and we’re setting a course for a mid 50’s advance on the Dow opening. As usual on Thursday, we have a weekly jobless number at 8:30 AM east. I’m in Dallas, by the way…meeting with some really bright guys at JMJ. Earnings season started last night with the very nice Alcoa report…for a change. Retail numbers are floating in too and frankly they have been a bit better than the fearless (fearful?) expert analyst’s have been predicting. I promise not to slam the analysts this season. Promise. Well, maybe a little smack. Gosh, these guys make me annoyed. Here’s an example. One guy that “covers” a major retailer of clothing (targeted at teens and young adults) has actually never been to one of the stores. He’s in his 60’s…that’s not the problem by the way. He’s a great numbers guy if you need numbers counted. He has no children. He previously covered (his name and bank purposely unnamed) the airline industry. His retailer just reported. He missed by 80%. To the wrong side. The retailer reported an increase of 8% in same store sales. He had it at 4.7%. Anyway, I’m using him as an example. Most of the retailers are reporting improved numbers, even if they are still down. Retailers are trading higher this morning across the board with a few exceptions. This sector, retail, has notoriously been difficult to predict and I understand that. Ok, let’s look at the overseas markets…Asia gave us steady gains overnight with no real drama. Europe? Trading higher at mid-day. They’ll take their lead from us this next week as we sift through the earnings reports.
Here you go, symbols only:
PEP
ZUMZ
CLF
FIZZ
WMT
GE
KFT
X
ACH
EL
ASIA
TIE
It’s 7:30 AM here and here’s the jobless number…down 33,000 to 521,000 and the four week moving average is down 9,000 to about 539,750. Lowest number since early January. A good report. Clue into our choices from the above list: people have FEET, dog’s have _ _ _
We’re all set…have a great day and happy trading.
Wes for the guys