TradingMarkets Stock Indicators: Always Buy Bargains
In the film version of David Mamet’s classic tragedy,
Glengarry Glen Ross, actor Alec Baldwin almost steals the show with his
performance as “Blake.” It is Blake, “here from downtown…here on a mission of
mercy” who delivers the immortal commandment to a group of cynical, disgruntled
— and underperforming — real estate salesmen: ABC, as in Always Be Closing.
The TradingMarkets approach offers traders and investors a
no less critical maxim by way of a slightly different acronym: ABB, which stands
for Always Buy Bargains.
Many times we refer to stocks as “Top Stocks.” When people
typically refer to top stocks, what they really mean are stocks that are
spiking, rising strongly right now or, worse, were rising strongly a minute, an
hour, a day, or a week ago. The traditional financial media is often the worst
about this kind of thing, telling would-be investors everything they want to
know about the stocks they should have bought at the beginning of the
trading day or week.
To my mind, this has always seemed a little like hearing
the name of the winning horse after the ticket window has closed: interesting
information, but not exactly all that useful by the time you hear it.
Part of the problem is that many in the financial media —
including many of the very talented analysts and commentators invited to opine
on the world of stocks — do not have a systematic way of figuring out which
horses are going to be the winning horses. This often leaves them either
calling the race after it is over, or simply iterating the names of the horses
in their stable, which may or may not end up winning, placing or showing when
the finish line is crossed.
One of the things that make the TradingMarkets approach to
trading different is that we do have a systematic way of figuring out which
horses, historically speaking, have tended to be winning horses. And not only
that, but our approach also helps traders know when to wager on those horses,
when to wait for better opportunities and even when to bet against a particular
pony.
If you take a good look at our
TradingMarkets Stock
Indicators section, one thing you’ll notice is that many of the factors that
traders have traditionally viewed as bullish for stocks are, in the
TradingMarkets approach, actually bearish. And many of the set-ups that traders
think will lead to great bets against stocks — lower lows, gaps down, oversold
Relative Strength Indexes — turn out to be just the sort of conditions that we
have found to be conducive to stocks moving higher, especially in the short
term.
In other words, the best stocks for investors to be paying
attention to are not the stocks that HAVE gone up. They are the stocks that are
GOING to go up. TradingMarkets is actually in the process of developing tools
that will make this crystal clear for traders and investors to see. We believe
that these tools alone will stun and surprise quite a few, as people will be
able to visually understand not just how the TradingMarkets approach leads to
picking the right stocks at the right time, but why.
Trading successfully often means little more than having
the discipline to buy when others fear the worst, and the good sense to sell
when others feel nothing can go wrong. Our TradingMarkets Stock Indicators
provide clear methods for traders do this in both rising and falling markets.
So the next time you hear the lamentations of investors as the markets move
down, remember that these are the times when the best stocks, the “Top Stocks”
if you will, aren’t so much falling apart as they are falling right into your
lap.
David Penn is Senior Editor at TradingMarkets.com