5 Charts Showing a Year-End Stock Bounce

A skeleton crew is keeping watch over Wall Street today, while the rest of America herds into mile-long lines at the mall.

Black Friday's half-day of trading is typically a light volume day for Mr. Market, and that's likely to be the case this year too. But it's what happens after Black Friday that's worth keeping a close eye on -- historically, the final month and change of the year often comes with a year-end bounce higher for stocks.

In 2012, we're starting to see that shape up in the S&P 500: the big index slammed hard against support at 1350 late last week, rallying back above the 200-day moving average on Monday. That support level coincides with a 61.8 retracement of the June through September rally in stocks, an important level for traders who rely on Fibonacci levels.

The fact that the S&P's pullback has been orderly for the last couple of months is significant. And now, we're seeing bottoming in a large number of individual names -- but we're not focusing solely on upside today.


Instead, we're leveraging new interest in the market by taking a technical look at five big names that are tradable this week.

If you're new to technical analysis, here's the executive summary.

Technicals are a study of the market itself. Since the market is ultimately the only mechanism that determines a stock's price, technical analysis is a valuable tool even in the roughest of trading conditions. Technical charts are used every day by proprietary trading floors, Wall Street's biggest financial firms, and individual investors to get an edge on the market. And research shows that skilled technical traders can bank gains as much as 90% of the time.

Every week, I take an in-depth look at big names that are telling important technical stories. Here's this week's look at the charts of five high-volume stocks to trade for gains.

Apple

We can't talk about big trades without bringing up Apple (AAPL), the $528 billion tech firm that's been catching so much attention from traders in the last couple of months. Apple rallied hard with the broad market from June to September, and then it followed up by dropping like a rock for the next couple of months. But a v-bottom in Apple points to the end of a nasty trend here. (more)