AOD Watch

The high-yield Alpine Total Dynamic Fund (AOD) is showing bull phase on Person's Proprietary Signal, as the major technical tools continue to point toward further recovery to the upside.

	trend	adx	psar	pps	macd	macd trend	sto	sto trend
AOD $6.97

At 9:50 a.m. Eastern

The bull signal, however, is unstable -- it is ghosting, disappearing and reappearing, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice, so it's impossible at this point to give it much credence.

AOD has shown higher daily highs for five straight trading days, a bounce for the $6.04 low, on May 25, of a 35.5% decline from a $9.36 high, on April 21.

The Alpine fund has always been volatile. This is not your old granny's coupon-clipping investment. Alpine pays an annual dividend of more than 20%, and the payout is monthly, so it is hair-trigger in its reaction to moves in interest rates and currency exchange.

More than half of its holdings were in non-U.S. equities at the last annual, and that includes considerable eurozone exposure. So the recent euro-Greek debt-Spain-Portugal-whatever crisis hit AOD hard. (It's hard to pin down exactly what AOD's holdings are, because the fund actively trades in and out of equities in order to capture their dividends, multiplying the work a dollar does.)

Reversal Levels

• $8.63, +23.8%
• $7.90, +13.3%
• $7.30, +4.7%
• $6.97 <== You are here.
• $6.94, -13.3%

If the Person's signal holds at the end of the day, then it will be "official". The parabolic sar is in its second bull-phase day, the macd is rising toward the zero line, and the fast stochastic is ascending through the neutral zone bound for oversold territory. Those trends, combined with the all-important price increases, suggests the worst may be behind AOD, for the moment at least.

Here's my earlier analysis of AOD.

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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
• 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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Tim Bovee, Private Trader tracks the trades of a private trader for his own accounts. Nothing in this blog constitutes a recommendation to buy or sell stocks, options or any other financial instrument. The only purpose of this blog is to provide education and entertainment. No trader is ever 100 percent successful in his or her trades. Trading in the stock and option markets is risky and uncertain. Each trader must make trading decision decisions for his or her own account, and take responsibility for the consequences.