A Good Test...

When a market participant looks for a catalyst that can potentially change the general direction of the market, he/she usually looks at the homefront, where it matters. Sure, last few days the oh so powerful Shanghai market seemed to have derailed badly but there isn't any talk of catastrophic consequence in their economy as a result. Hence, the action did not spill over to America and whatever happens there, stays there. Today we had a little something different and the worry stemmed from within America and the never ending talk of "interest/inflation worry" came up again and many talking heads feel this is the cause for today's slide. For us, we literally had to check our quotes more than a few times just to realize that we are indeed in a "selloff". Oh yeah, GOOG just made a new high and closed well over $500. Maybe, people are just spooked by the fact we haven't had a good ole "whack the bid" kind of day in a long time. So there, we got the selloff today and it's time to move on.
Aside from the Index action(which is total BS in our opinion), we are seeing some very good and healthy action among few individual stocks and certain sectors. Ok folks, whenever you see more than 90% of holdings on your watchlist are having a bad day, then you may get a bit worrisome and think about some quick exit strategy. Good breadth gives us the courage to stay and chase while bad breadth simply chases us away. In our opinion, breadth is the key telling of whether we should be hanging in this market or not.
TNH, +5%, this one did not disappoint a bit and came out smoking off yesterdays buy in and finished just as strong. This is in fact a new closing high and it'd be interesting to see if it can challenge the triple digit area. The whole group seems to be up today and we wouldn't be surprised if this one goes even higher given the sustained movement in the entire sector.
CROX, whenever the other two DJIM big guns are taking a rest, this one takes over the baton and charges higher. This is almost 20 pts higher since our initial buy about a month ago. This goes to show that whenever we see a highly liquid stock with a very favorable probability of pulling multi point runup, we just have to go in big and patient. By the way, during the runup thus far, this one has never closed below 9 ema. It kissed 9 ema a couple of times but that's about it. This is a sign of a very strong stock, historically speaking. As a matter of fact, exact same deal with both FWLT and MA, neither of those closed below 9 ema ever since their EPS breakout.
GHM, this is an old name that came out with an excellent Q. We admired the effort premkt as some(one) was working hard to prop up the price. buying lots of 50 shares, including one order at 23+ plus. Unfortunately, they don't seem to know these odd lots don't appear on many trading platforms. Oh well. The action picked up a bit premkt and it traded to $22 in the first 10minutes and $23 in 10 more after the bell. ,With the market sliding, a CCall coming and we just preferred to play some later on a probable dip later.
A few a stocks off yesterdays buy list hung in tough considering the early market action, but especially since they were up big yesterday. This includes KMGB LPHI AHD and ATLS which was given a tgt bump up to $67 by FBR
CUB, up over 25% since we alerted May 3rd closed with another NCH, this is probably finally being recognized as a defense name!. Another DJIM defense stock hovering near highs, SPAR also had a nice day up 7%
MFLO LXU, we are keeping a close eye on these two as both are in our opinion setting up for a potential b/o into new highs.