September Trading Down

Markets were closed in the United States for Labor Day on Monday. On Tuesday Amazon opened to another new high with news on entering the India market to compete with Flipkart. Amazon became the 2nd company to one trillion dollars in market capitalization. Boeing bottomed early today at 339.50 and went up 7 from there. AMD was up over 10% today as excitement is moving towards AMD and away from Intel. I find this funny when Apple computers ,Chromebooks and Windows tablets use Intel processors.

Retail stocks moved up as predicted today with Best Buy moving back above 80 and Home Depot moved sharply up within 2 points of it's all time high established back in January. Apple moved up a little which was nice to see as Samsung announced that they will be releasing a foldable phone this year. In the past Apple would drop on any competition news. Apple has shown a negative impact from iPhone announcements and that day is coming soon.

Alphabet (GOOGL) continued to sell off on Tuesday as it opened lower than Friday's close. In the first few minutes it went up from 1222 to 1228 and went down from there. Alphabet appeared to find a bottom at 1211 as it bounced off and moved up to 1221 before back peddling the rest of the day and found a new bottom at 1209.

Hindsight is 20/20 and I actually missed my exit point as it was found on the 1 minute chart which I had on my screen next to the 5 minute chart. As I indicated in my 1 minute chart and in past blogs that you should look for movements of approximately 10 points when trading Alphabet. Tomorrow is a new day with Facebook and Twitter testifying for Congress with Google being left out because Congress wanted a higher up instead of their qualified representative. I would expect to see some sort of positive news before the market opens for Alphabet where it will open 10 points higher and fall from there as the testifying begins.

Golden Apple

• Stocks didn't move much Monday. McDonald's (MCD) reported a great first quarter. Tuesday was started by Merk and Pfizer reporting earnings. Pfizer was disappointing and the market went lower on Tuesday. 
• Turn around Tuesday was lead by tech. Google hit it's low for the day around 10am and everything else was around 11am. The charge was lead by Apple in anticipation of their earnings report after the market close. Fifty percent of Apple's revenue came from services which is giving them a pass on their unit sales. Apple is spending $100 billion to buy back stock and increasing it's dividend by 16%. The shares popped in the after hours trading. These were expected. I would expect today's gains are given back tomorrow plus some. Apple past $175 after hours which could be a signal for them to go higher in the short term as we have found Apple has shown resistance at $174/share.
• Snap had a disappointing earnings report and was down after hours and would expect it to go down further tomorrow and the next coming days.
• Sell in May and go away was the old story because most stocks are up in the first few months of the year. This year the market hit a high on January 26 and has not revisited it so there is more room to the upside.
• Wednesday the Federal Reserve Board will meet and possibly raise the Fed Funds Rate. It is expected to happen, but not tomorrow. If that rate goes up, the market may hurt from it. It doesn't make sense to raise interest rates as higher rates means less loans that people want to apply for mortgages, auto loans, new construction,... 
• The tax reform appears to have freed up cash for most companies, but have not increased wages. Instead companies are using it to buy more stock back to raise the stock price for the investors rather than the middle class. The combination of higher rates and tax reform are what is keeping the market in a trading range that it might not break out until the end of the year or sooner with updated legislation.
• Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook made a great speech at a developers conference today where he discussed how you can clean your browsing history in Facebook along with further focus on increasing the personal connection with friends and family.