Monday's Breakouts

Monday, April 15:

Of 1,934 stocks and exchange-traded funds in this week's analytical universe, 126 that are traded on the major American stock exchanges broke beyond their 20-day price channels, two to the upside and 124 to the downside.

Yes, it was that kind of day.

The symbols that I analyzed had a better than even chance of producing a profitable trade in at least one direction during the past year using the Turtle Trading method for entry signals.

Note the difference in how I built my universe. Up to now I've used breakouts since January 2009. In today's universe, and going forard through the week, I'm using breakouts in the past year for my initial screen.

This was because of a problem discussed in my posting today about gold.

Bear plays are only possible with high volume stocks. All of the seven high-volume bear signals have earnings announcements within the next 30 days and so are excluded under my rules.

The two bull signals are lower-volume symbols, IIM and PSK. Both have sufficient success rates since January 2009 -- 52.6% for IIM and 55.6% for PSK -- but with low yields of around 3%, which puts their scores below 2%. I prefer a score of at 5%.

Looking at the last 12 months, IIM has a bullish success rate of only 20%, and none of PSK's bull signals has produced a profit.

Bottom line: All of Monday's breakouts fail my tests, and I'll be opening no new positions on Tuesday.