John, What we had today was a plateau. First the gap up, then the table top, then the dropping edge. I look at a lot of charts after close today. They all have a very similar pattern. They all close at or near their upper BB's. As I said this morning for FGII, there were lots of drillers violating the intraday outside of the band rule. What that means is the odd favors their coming back to the upper band by close and not remain out. I think all offshore drillers exhibit this pattern. The leading subgroup of this rally is the fabs with FGII leading the pack. They close slightly above the upper bands. Debra, did you buy VRC or FLC, or neither?
The interesting question is what about tomorrow? It was very easy to make a call yesterday but today is a little tougher. The reason is we are at a critical point once again. The stock has to choose a direction to go very soon. The continuing uptrend (riding the upper BB wave) scenario is very possible. In fact most fabs already have confirmation of this. The question is would the offshore drillers follow this pattern or get bounced off the upper BB? This is a tough call. Right now I say 50:50. When in doubt, look for other factors such as the overall market, politics, crude, cheerleading seminars, etc. Tomorrow is Friday. Unless there is a renewed momentum tomorrow morning, I don't see why TRADERS want hold the drillers through the weekend. Other people with different TA indicators may want to contribute here.
Paul Levy - You are really psyched up today. I thought you had already done this sometimes in December. It appears you like academic discussion as much as making money. Unfortunately, I just like to make money although I have the qualification to get into a discussion. You made several good points and people on this thread should be thankful for a different opinion. I would encourage both you and Ron to not reveal too much of the gains you each racked up to the unknown shadowy eyes out there in the net. My gain from Jan 97 to Oct 97 by trading the drillers using mostly TA guidance was in the three figures. I did lose more than half of that in 1997, not because of the drillers but of my unwise venture into diskdrive. My 1997 lesson was to not invest in an area I know LESS about.
Now, if I can just open up your mind a little, let's look at the following IQC chart on FLC - a very typical driller for the past three months.
wysiwyg://14/http://207.95.154.130/chart/default.exe?PERIOD=60&time=day&chart=candle&chart1=bb&volume=y&stochastics=y&symbol=flc
I'm going to let the picture says all the words. A lot of people here, and I hope that includes you, can see some value in the two TA indicators shown here - stochastic and BB. It is not foolproof each time, but don't you agree the odd favors success of predicting the next direction in each stochastic cycle? (buy when %K dropped below 20 and sell when crossover occurs)
If you are still not convinced, you ought to acknowledge that a lot of participants in this market use TA for guidance. We are not talking about daytraders here. There are plenty of poeple who practice long term TA. Well, as Diana says it today, they do influence the stock price because they make up part of the market. How would that make a difference? For example, if after examining all the fundamentals and financial analysis numbers and one decided to buy a driller stock back in early November, one would have been very miseable by now. If one is aware of the extreme overbought condition due to TA revelation, one can at least say "let's wait because I think this stock is highly overbought and has a very high risk of coming down short term."
Papaya King - how do you change name? Do you have to e-mail the webmistress or did you pay $200 for a new ID? |
