INTC Watch

The semiconductor behemoth Intel Corp. (INTC) shows a bull phase this morning on Person's Proprietary Signal, a day after the parabolic sar turned bullish.

	trend	adx	psar	pps	macd	macd trend	sto	sto trend
INTC $22.80

At 10:51 a.m. Eastern

The signals can be interpreted as marking the resumption of a sometimes choppy rise that began in February 2009 and that doubled the price of the stock, and of the more immediate rise that began in February of this year.

However, there are ambiguities, and it's the sort of signal that cries out for confirmation before entry, at least for the prudent trader.

(I'm not making a case for a prudent approach, by the way. I often come down on the side of recklessness, because that can be where the profits are.)

Ignoring the mini-panic low, which I discount as being due to rogue assumptions programmed into computers, the current swing low was set May 7 at $20.46. This is within the range of extended sideways trading last Febraury, before the present swing up began.

In that sense, the decline doesn't count as a lower low, and the price at that level would need to decline down to below $18.31 or so, the low set in November 2009, in order to qualify. However, the stock has not yet set a higher high, and would need to move above the swing high of $24.37 in order to meet that test.

So we're in trend limbo. It could play out as a lower high -- below $24.37 -- before reversing, in which case it's a burgeoning downtrend. Or it could break above $24.37, in which case it's an uptrend.

Reversal Levels

• $24.37, +6.9% (Swing high)
• $23.16, +1.6% (20-day moving average)
• $22.80 <==You are here.


• $22.16, -2.8%


• $20.46, -10.3%

Nearly 7% potential to the upside before serious near-term resistance is an attractive directional play for the short-term trader. So what if it reverses at resistance -- there's still a tidy profit, especially with the leverage that options provide. Even a 1.6% rise, to the moving average, is not unattractive.

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Martin Pring's detailed deconstruction of the economic cycle: What sorts stocks to look for at each stage of the recovery. A masterful analysis.

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Skynet Panic of May 6 Panic Looks Like This Skynet Panic Poisons Technical Tools Abbreviations: psar - Parabolic Stop and Reverse adx - Average Directional Index pps - Person's Proprietary Signal ma20 - 20-day moving average macd - Moving Average Convergence-Divergence mfi - Money Flow Index sto - Fast Stochastic About the glance: The colors indicate the state of each signal.

• trend: Determined by the 5-day moving average, green for up, red for down, yellow for sideways
• adx: orange for above 30-up, blue for 20-down, purple for in the middle. Red is most prone to whipsaws
• psar, pps, macd: green for bull mode, red for bear
• sto: green for overbought, red for oversold, yellow for the neutral zone.

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