Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Market Outlook: Dow Theory Still Flashing a Warning Signal

All major U.S. stock indices closed lower for the week of March 10, basically giving back all of the previous week's gains. The market was led lower last week by the blue-chip Dow industrials, which lost 2.4%, leaving the Nasdaq and Russell 2000 as the only two major indices that are still in positive territory for 2014, up 1.7% and 1.5%, respectively, year to date.

U.S. stocks were particularly weak on Thursday, with the S&P 500 suffering its worst day since early February on rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia and concerns about a slowdown in China. Regarding the latter, I am expecting at least an additional 2.2% decline in China's Hang Seng Index to 21,000.  (more)

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Pacira Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ: PCRX)

Pacira Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company, develops, commercializes, and manufactures pharmaceutical products for use in hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers worldwide. It develops pharmaceutical products based on its proprietary DepoFoam drug delivery technology. The company markets EXPAREL, a liposome injection of bupivacaine, an amide-type local anesthetic, indicated for administration into the surgical site to produce postsurgical analgesia; and DepoCyt(e), a liposomal formulation of the chemotherapeutic agent cytarabine indicated for the intrathecal treatment of lymphomatous meningitis, a cancer of the immune system.
Please take a look at the 1-year chart of PCRX (Pacira Pharmaceuticals, Inc.) below with my added notations:
1-year chart of PCRX (Pacira Pharmaceuticals, Inc.)
PCRX has reached a very important price of $70 based on two different levels of potential support. First, the $70 level itself (purple) has simply been key to the stock on multiple occasions already. In addition, PCRX is approaching a potential up-trending level of support (blue) and that trendline is also getting close to the $70 level.

The Tale of the Tape: PCRX has a key area of support at $70. A long trade could be made at $70 with a stop placed below that level of entry. However, if the stock were to break below $70 traders might want to look to get short on the stock.
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Chart of the Day - IGI Laboratories (IGI)

The Chart of the Day is IGI Laboratories (IG). I found the stock by sorting the All Time High list for frequency in the last month, skipped the stocks that didn't have a positive gain for the last week and month. Last I used the Flipchart feature to review the charts. I skipped a lot of charts till I found one I liked. Since the Trend Spotter signaled a buy on 2/20 the stock gained 47.78%.
IG is the premier global provider of a novel topical patented delivery technology. In addition to having the innovative Novasome delivery technology, their capabilities include: product development, analytical services, commercial manufacturing and the packaging of their topical liquid and semi-solid products. Their expert services will ensure that their product achieves its maximum potential. IGI currently holds 56 U.S. patents, and has more than 100+ products commercialized. In the marketplace, their products continue to demonstrate their value by offering superior results and product differentiation to their customers.

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Emerging markets are dirt cheap. Are you ready to back up the truck and load up?

Not unless you're fronting the capital for me!

It's true that emerging market stocks are almost universally shunned, which smacks of a classic contrarian set up.


The valuations can't be beat, either. Take Russian stocks, for instance. They're trading for less than five times forward earnings. (That's more than a 70% discount to U.S. stocks.)

However, cheaper prices can always get cheaper still. And we certainly don't want to fight the downward price momentum.

The good news? We should be getting extremely close to the bottom. At least, based on history.

I say that because during previous crises, whenever price-to-book ratios dipped below 1.5, emerging market stock prices rallied shortly thereafter. And sure enough, we just breached that critical level.Please share this article

One-third of Americans only have $1,000 saved for retirement

More Americans are confident about their retirement prospects for the first time in seven years, but even so, more than one-third of workers (36%) have a measly $1,000 saved for their later years, according to a new study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. (Compare that to the 28% of workers who said they had $1,000 saved in last year's survey, and the picture gets a little more grim.)

As a whole, however, Americans are feeling more confident about retirement, with 18% saying they're "very confident," up from 13% in 2013. But this year’s confidence numbers are still lower than they were before the Great Recession, when one-quarter of Americans were feeling very confident about their golden years.  (more)

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3 Ways to Profit From the Drilling Bonanza: (NYSE: SLB), (NYSE: HAL), (NYSE: BHI)

Producing the energy necessary to meet global demand is getting more complicated… and costly.
At the turn of the century, there were only seven energy companies with projects costing $5 billion or more. Now there are more than 35 such projects.
That means energy companies all over the world are competing with each other for the equipment and engineering talents provided by the oil services companies. And that’s exactly where the opportunity lies…(more)

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