LH Laboratory Corp of America reports October 23.
When you are thinking about a position trade or even a strong trading stock that has bounces off its 10 and/or 20 day moving average, you need a collection of fundamentally strong companies in very hot sectors. I'm seeing junk day after day.. junk at high valuations. I'm being asked about junk as well. Its fine to trade POS stocks like BLUE, AKAM, I do it, but unless you are prepared for quick, sharp downturns in the midst of 'uptrends' and going short you will be on a constant rollercoaster and the more times you ride this rollercoaster, the dizzier you will be and more elusive will be the signals..as trends changes within minutes and you have what they call 'trends within trends' until you can lose focus completely.
Unless you plan to short some of the overblown rallying junk, you will end up buying high and selling low.. and calling that 'scalping'. Its not scalping, just mistakes of entry. We all have them, but there are growing more and more frequent in these markets where uptrends are one day if you are lucky, but mostly last about 7 minutes. Stops have to be tighter so you have even less chance of making the trade work.
Short plays you can have a little looser stops, especially if the market internals are so negative that what you see as a 'rally' is only a brief flicker of the flame before it goes out completely. You can also hold option puts/calls for up to 3 days without decay and if the market is down and you want to 'try your luck' on finding a bottom at least the call option will be very cheap. So you will have risked just 1 or 2 grand on a 30-40 dollar trade on the longside.
CSFB analyst Robert Willoughby re-instates coverage of Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (LH) with a STRONG BUY rating and a 12-month target price of $145. Earnings out on 18th.
Goldwasser highlights Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings (NYSE:LH - news). "LabCorp is focusing on expanding their esoteric testing capabilities. About 15% to 20% of their business is esoteric testing. They just completed an acquisition of a company that specializes in esoteric testing, which should help them fuel growth. I expect them to do some more acquisitions of esoteric players in the future."
Thomas MacMahon, CEO of Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings, states in Wall Street Transcript interview, "We'd like to see, over the next couple of years, 9% to 10% top line growth, which was very different for this industry three years ago when most companies were in negative growth. We'd like to increase our market share to approximately 7% over the next three to five years." |
