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Underexposed - Canadian Stock Journal


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Underexposed - Canadian Stock Journal

  #591 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014

I have ignored this journal for a while and spent most of my time over in the American version of my journal.

Here is the status in this mid week



As you can see we have a big chunk of money to invest as a result of the stop-loss trips last week. I may have set those stops to fine so I will review those tickers before looking elsewhere.

Small loss so far but hardly serious.

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  #592 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014

well this has not been a good week on Canadian markets. We lost about 207 points on the week the majority of which happened today.

But the limited stop - losses did their job and we lost our holdings in Lakeshore Gold and Chorus Aviation as can be seen in the following charts









As you can see from my company transaction records you can see that as far as LSG is concerned this swing trade basically recovered the losses of the first time we purchased shares in this company.

As far as Chorus Aviation is concerned... this is also the second time we have played this stock... successful not only in capital gain each time but also we have gained about another $300 in dividends ... we get one more payment of $114 in a couple of weeks





So now you will see we have a substantial cash balance in this account We are over 50% in cash at the moment. This actually reflects my real portfolios as well. I have learned to do this by posting in this journal. In the past I have rode out losses after early month gains. I will be reviewing all stocks now as well as the TSX to judge when to spend this cash...I am not in a hurry to do so at present.



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  #593 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014


I have been thinking about this current market. As a long term trader, you like the market in general to be bullish. It has been such until the latter half of 2014 when the price of oil started its fall.

This has not had the effect on the American markets as much as it has on the Canadian stocks. Canada is basically commodity driven and right now commodities are not doing so hot. The metals/mining sector suck (I cannot understand why gold price is doing what it does.) , the price of oil is half of what it was 6 months ago, another crisis in the beef industry with 2 cattle found to have mad cow disease (though it was found before the cattle made it into the food chain, the forestry sector is in a downturn.... the list goes on.... with the service sector to these commodities suffering as well.

This of course will not last forever and buying opportunities for long term trading will abound in the future.... but not right now. In the past I tended to hunker down with my stocks ... not selling and deciding that it may turn around... losing gains I had made earlier.... and then some.... I am getting tired of this




you can see the instability in the TSX with the rapid advance / declines in the last 3-4 months. Right now we seem to be between two large resistance/support bands and I have an over active imagination to visualize them in this chart.... they are more bands than lines. The dotted green line is a potential support but I doubt it will hold for long.





This chart shows the beginnings of a bearish dive.... the 200day SMA seems to be a support but I doubt that will hold long. The value of the TSX is below the lower bollie so there may be a pullback but don't be fooled this index is in for a fall for the near future..... See the Slow Sto/MACD they are falling but the BBwidth is rising... the fall has just started





this chart is pretty neutral in a bearish way for both Force(100) and RSI(30)... the DI+/- shows the beginnings of a bearish cross





the Ichimoku chart looks potentially bad.... the thin red line has crossed the thin blue one... not serious yet but just starting.... the share price will probably challenge the green cloud below soon and that edge is a support that corresponds to that in the P&F chart..... the Onbal vol is neutral bear... the CCI is full on bear.


Conclusion

The TSX is in for a fall this week and perhaps longer. I am in no rush to buy new shares and have the stocks that are left protected with limit stop-loss orders.

My future plays in this portfolio will be swing trades and BY THAT I define these trades as lasting 1-4 weeks at most.

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  #594 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014

ok...so I have decided to make 1-4 week swing plays.... NOTE: this would be a swing trade as defined for a long term trader. The term swing trade is tossed about on this site often but is usually not defined by the writer.

A swing trade to a day trader could be a trade that lasts 2-4 hours ... a long term investment could be one that lasted the whole day to the same trader. Then you have those that consider a swing trade one that lasts a day or two.

It can mean anything to anyone but when they talk about it they should define its time frame IMHO. To any trader a swing trade is just a shorter time frame than their normal long term hold. In my case my long term holds are of the order of 2 months to a year or more...you can see that in the history of this journals.

I don't mean trades that you bail out of because they did not proceed as planned and you get out of them to preserve your capital before the losses are too great... those are just corrections of a bad trade. A swing trade is is a shorter trade that results in a smaller than normal profit... somewhere between 3-10% would be about right for me.

I am not good at such trades at present... I prefer developing longer term trades but I do know what I would be looking for. You don't just enter a trade at random and hope it works out to make a swing trade. That is a recipe for losses IMHO.

To me there are 2 situations that I want to find:

1. the share price is approaching a bollie squeeze.

This is the same as I use to find a long term trade as described in previous posts in this journal.

The difference is that I do not give a toss as to whether or not the target stock is financially stable or not. You will note that most if not all of my previous picks are biased to stocks with increasing revenues and zero/reducing debt. I don't care about such a criteria in a swing trade. Any stock can rise or fall on some kind of news and are independent of its financial stability.

Such stocks may be entering a merger, have a product potentially being approved (drugs are great for this), have a product viewed as innovative or be the right product for the right time. This attractions may wear off with time.... or not (many short term swing prospects can develop into long term holds... you just don't know at the time.

here is an example of what I would be looking for





here you look for the "trigger" the same as I have touted here for a year now... rising MACD and Slow Sto and then the "trigger" of the sudden positive slope to the BBwidth.... that is the easy part for me.

The more difficult is the sale (emotional issues).... but the way to do it is when the MACD, Slow STO AND BBWidth plateau... in the above example the dotted red line is probably were I would think about exiting and the solid red line is where I would do it. and you make about 18% on a 12 day swing.... pretty good for the girls I go out with

Here is another example.... same entry but different exit criteria. This happens when you find the price above the upper Bollie





I have talked before about how it is unusual for a share price to be above the upper Bollie for more than 5 days. So in the example above you watch for the normal exit as described in the previous chart....but when the price hangs above the upper bollie for 5 days it is time to get out of the pool.... if you wait for the normal exit (dotted red line) you gain very little and could lose profit.... this would be a very nice 5 day trade at 15.5%


1. the share price has fallen hard and you get a MACD/BBwidth squeeze

Here we are predicting a bottom...or at least a solid rest.... here is an example





it is my experience that when you find this MACD/BBwidth squeeze that the share price moves toward the 20daySMA afterward.... often as in the larger featured one in the chart... the share price also falls below the lower Bollies....

This MACD/BBwidth squeeze happens more often than you think but I have been reluctant to act on it as I don't do such short swings normally.

here is another example with TD Bank... a long term play from the past in this portfolio.






See the completed example in the pink circle.... almost exactly the same as the first example.... NOW look at what is going on right now!!! The set up is there for another MACD/BBwidth swing.

It is not perfect...yet...... I would want to see the Slo Sto rise a bit....

let's watch this another day and I may try this out in this portfolio... it is an expensive stock but I have the coin to try it out... and I would use a limit stop-loss after purchase to protect myself if it was just a rest.


EDIT: that last chart is NOT recent .... it was from Dec /14

Here is how it worked out later in the month





It did work as I described and happened again a few weeks later.

{sigh} I was goinf to play the swing until I suddenly realized the chart was not current and is the reason for the deleted post below....I will look for a current possible now.....sorry about that...

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  #595 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014

hmmmmm, At this rate I will be 100% cash in this portfolio by Wednesday. Monday was another bad day on the TSX losing just short of 100 points today.

In the process, it took out 2 of the last 3 stocks in this portfolio... Black Diamond Group [BDI:TSX] and NorthWest Healthcare REIT [NWH.UN:TSX]

we took a profit on both trades which are swing trades lasting less than 2 month. Here is the history for the trades for these companies





we still have dividends to collect later this month to add to their totals as they were purchased before the ex-dividend date for Feb.

Here are the intra-day charts that tripped the stop loss orders for both these companies








As I described earlier the TSX has not finished its downward slide.... If you look at my American journal you will find that it is so far up over 1% this week (status will be reported Wednesday)....go figure!!!

This is not a fun time to trade for me...I do not trade in shorts...perhaps I should look at bear ETFs and trade shorts that way... not something I like to do.

I think it will be better to look for swing plays but not easy given the decline in prices to find these plays.

BUT I have preserved capital...which is something I have struggled with for years. Using these limit stop-loss orders take a lot of the emotion out of the sales for me...I have tons of money now for future investments where in past years I would have frittered it away on downturns and frankly it has come about through maintaining this journal and has carried over to my real portfolios as well where I am 80% in cash now.

Anyway, I will look for swing plays and devote more attention to my American journal where I think I finally have a grasp on American stocks now

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  #596 (permalink)
 
jackbravo's Avatar
 jackbravo 
SF, CA/USA
 
Experience: Beginner
Platform: SC
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Trading: NQ...uh..ES actually
Posts: 1,337 since Jun 2014
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nice work improving your method. always satisfying. I was thinking about a trailing stop loss for you. Do you think something like a 30 ma to use as a stop loss would work? Since most pullbacks occur to the 20 MA, maybe trailing a stop just outside of that can become a perfunctory way of maintaining your trailing stops.

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  #597 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014


jackbravo View Post
nice work improving your method. always satisfying. I was thinking about a trailing stop loss for you. Do you think something like a 30 ma to use as a stop loss would work? Since most pullbacks occur to the 20 MA, maybe trailing a stop just outside of that can become a perfunctory way of maintaining your trailing stops.

IF you had such a stop-loss based on a 30daysma might work. I did at one time use a 9daySMA as a stop-loss for when I wanted to sell. The Stop-loss trip point was based on the previous day's value.

if the previous day has a 9 daySMA of "X" this will be the stop-loss for the present day

if the previous day has a 30 daySMA of "Y" this will be the stop-loss for the present day

here is a chart trying out this idea. Let us say we are going to try a swing trade in Toronto Dominion bank [TSX:TD]





So initially we set a manual stop-loss at $53.90.... Now I have it static but in reality I would manually adjust it as the share price ros and would be really concerned when the share price plateaued and the BBwidth looked weaker... so I would reset the manual Stop-loss to $55.00.... by doing so I guarantee myself a profit for the swing yet still give it a chance to continue to rise.

the 9daySMA stop which is trailing would have tripped the same day but at a lower price of about $54.75... you are still giving it a chance to increase in value but the price plunged on that day for some reason

I don't really like your 30daySMA stop loss... it is not tight enough and by the time it trips you have lost basically all that you gained... Now TRUE you gave it every chance to climb higher but it did not do it for long and in consolidation it has fallen back losing your gains.... though it has protected you from an even bigger loss.

Conclusion

Trailing stops based on sma's are fine if you are doing it automatically through software... I don't has a platform that automatically links to my discount broker as I imagine some of these platforms on this site can do.

Therefore it would be a pain in the ASSets to have to update my trailing stops manually, based on a SMA of the previous day, on a daily basis. (can you imagine doing this if you had 25-50 stocks???) . If you look at my status updates I only make the stop-loss updates intermittently... usually making them really tight when I want to capture the most profit I can while still giving it a chance to move higher.

From this albeit one test...I think a 30daySMA is too lax... a 9daySMA may be too tight... though it worked here... Perhaps a 11 daySMA might be better. However, since I cannot do this automatically, I think I will stick to doing it manually...judging when by looking at the indicators for guidance.

Nice question though....

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  #598 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014

Ok...I think I found an interesting swing play.

It is Algonquin Power [TSX:AQN]

Sound familiar??? Yep we made a little money on this puppy 6 months or so ago in a swing play as shown from my record archive





Here is the chart dating back to that time




ok... this was a not designed as a swing play but after that nice jump the stock did nothing as it marched down that BB tunnel for a couple of weeks. I did not like the way the Slow Sto and MACD were declining and though there was no bad indication from the BBWidth (did not rise as others fell) I pulled the plug and took a decent profit for the 6 weeks we had the stock.

A few weeks later the stock plunged and I forgot about the stock with a satisfied feeling of grabbing a nice profit.

But the stock recovered nicely which would have been hard to see at the time...and rose to $10.30 4 days ago.

the stock was becoming interesting then as a financial report were due soon... but on the day they were to be announced the company announced that there were some accounting problem and there was a huge bailout as people took massive profits.

And that is where we are today.... Are there problems with this stock? Is this an over reaction??

you can see it tried to recover to the lower BB but failed....

We have the makings of a MACD/BBWidth pinch..... why not buy in now? I am not convinced the bottom has been found yet....Slow Sto is falling still and there is no hint of a reversal in the MACD and BBwidth.

It is a stock to watch... I wonder what the accounting problem is.....??????????

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  #599 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014

I said earlier that when making a swing play I would not care about financials too much... but that is when you see the opportunity happening... not beforehand.

In the case of Algonquin Power, as you can see in the previous chart... it has had a nice steady rise over at least the last 8 months... the company should be doing well financially.... right??? well let us look at the summary of the last 5 quarterly reports




Hmmm not really, since March of last year the operating revenue, net revenue and hence the EPA has severely declined.

One has to wonder what has given investors optimism for this stock. One has to wonder what this accounting problem can be.

1. Is the year end quarter a disaster??? If it is the profit taking is certainly justified if this proves the case when the financials are announced on March 26

2. Did the accountants do something wrong for an entire year and the situation is better than analysts think??

either way I don't think the bottom has been found yet .... it is still a watch but I am not hopeful at this point without more clues as to what is going on.

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  #600 (permalink)
 Underexposed 
Calgary Alberta/Canada
 
Posts: 934 since Feb 2014



Underexposed View Post
hmmmmm, At this rate I will be 100% cash in this portfolio by Wednesday. Monday was another bad day on the TSX losing just short of 100 points today.

well that was prophetic... I just had the last stock in this portfolio trip its stop-loss setpoint today...Wednesday

Noranda Income Fund [TSX:NIF.UN]

here is today's intraday chart so far





massive sell off in early morning with a rebound later on.

Here is the company record





Did we make only $80 and change on this swing trade?? No... if you dig back into this journal you will find that we were after the monthly dividend of $0.042/share or annual yield of 17%. We collected one dividend last month and have another pending in a couple of weeks.





So we will have made a total of about $500 for the two months ($80 + $210 + $210)... not a fortune but no loss either.


Sooooo.... I am 100% cash now.... no further losses at least.... what do I do now???

I wait...I will monitor the market for the turnaround that has not shown its face yet (one up-tick does not change a trend)

I will dig through previously owned stocks in this portfolio as they are by-and-large decent stocks to begin with and look for swing opportunities and who knows what I might find could turn into something long term.

This is a weird market for a long term trader.... the rise and fall of the TSX is not conducive to long term holds... only swings as I see it right now.

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Last Updated on March 21, 2015


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