Weekly Market Trends & Xerox Case Study
Every week I update my market sector trend chart. Here it is:
The Technology sector and the Utility sector are doing quite well — more than 75% of all stock prices in these sectors are trending up.
Sectors that are doing less well are Staples (food and basic retail) and Energy (means, oil & gas companies).
The yellow areas indicate uncertainty in price move direction (i.e. no definite trend).
So what?
Imagine you would randomly choose a company to buy stocks from… I know, that sounds a bit crazy. But hear me out!
Assuming that trends tend to continue, randomly choosing a company in the technology sector would result in a winning trade for 3 out of 4 trades. Those are pretty good odds!
Will that always work?
No.
In any case, it’s a 75% chance, not 100%!
And trends do reverse at some point. It’s just extremely difficult to predict when that will or might happen. Existing trends have a strong momentum and reversals take time to materialize (with very few exceptions).
Can I improve my odds further?
Yes.
By using additional information about that company. We will look at one such case next.
A case study: Xerox Corp. (XRX)
You probably heard about Xerox. If not, check out your office copy and printing machines — chances are that some are from Xerox. It’s a technology company (remember, 75% success rate!).
It’s an “old” company — founded in 1906! And they became a large corporation primarily through their key invention: the photocopy machine. But I will not dwell in their business fundamentals here — instead, I will look at their historical pricing.
How have they been doing compared to the rest of the tech sector?
Answer: not that great.
In fact, their overall trend is still downwards. The gray, thicker line is the sector average.
But there are signs of recovery. In the last 6 months, their stock price has greatly improved and is now growing faster than the sector average. And there was a trend reversal indicator, too: a cross-over of long-term and short-term trend lines.
The long-term trend line is not going upwards, yet — so by definition, XRX is not trending up for now. And there were “fake” reversal signals before — it certainly can happen again.
For opportunistic buyers: set your stop price far enough from the buy price.
Here’s an example trade:
With an (example) portfolio value of $50,000:
- Limit the risk to 1% of portfolio value: $500 max. loss
- Buy price: $33.13 (as of 24-Sep-2017)
- Stop Price: $29.00 (that’s more than 10% below buy price)
- # of stocks: $500 / ($33.13 — $29.00) = 121
Buy (Limit) and Stop Orders:
- BUY LIM 121 @ 33.13 GTC
- SELL STOP 121 @ 29 GTC
- or trailing stop: SELL TrSTP 121 @ 4.13 GTC
Remember to adjust these numbers to your portfolio value!
Happy trading!
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