Toiling away in the stock mines

Yesterday I saw that TNA was going up, so bought it and waited to raise my sell-stop.  But the price didn't go up enough!  I raised the stop to break-even and then went to a dental appointment.  By the time I returned home, the stop had triggered and TNA ended the day below my purchase price. Today it went up 6.6%! Oh well; it was too much risk for my taste and so that profit wasn't really available to me. All I lost was three days of investment time for that money, plus some health points for the two hours I spent compulsively watching the stock-ticker. Intraday trading is expensive in health points!

Now that MACD has finally turned against JNK, only 22% of my account is invested; 13% is cash and the rest is flying through the ether, including 22% that will rejoin cash tomorrow.  I'd better get started on picking some new stocks!  Thankfully the news is good (Mubarak has announced his retirement as dictator of Egypt; the manufacturing index was unexpectedly much higher last month) so the risk that the Imminent Correction will strike tomorrow seems low.

I tried my usual stock screen (Schwab rating = A or B, price = “far above” 50-day average, MACD = “buy”), but there were only five hits and none were appealing.  So I tried my usual backup screen (change the price criterion to “moderately above” 50-day average; I have no idea what numbers correspond to those adverbs).  There were 22 hits, which I whittled down by eyeing their price charts.  I want to see a chart that’s pretty much a straight line from lower-left to upper-right, preferably for at least a month.  Also, I do not want to see times when the price dropped to more than 3% off its peak, because that would have triggered my emergency sell-stop.  Other undesirable traits include excessive jitter in ITA or MACD (more than two trades in last month) or failure of those indicators to capture at least 66% of available profits for the last year.  These rules eliminate all 22 candidates!  Marginal cases include IRF (with its nasty 7% drop from peak Jan. 14 to trough Jan. 20) and MKL (which I’ve passed over before because it’s only gained 22% in the last year and the indicators capture barely half of that).  So I put in my “buy” order for IRF, which has just announced a new power MOSFET transistor for industrial applications (this dovetails nicely with the bullish manufacturing index report, so hopefully the news-based traders will buy it) and several analysts have recently put out BUY recommendations (which will cause many sheeple to buy the thing, raising its price).

Tomorrow I’ll call Schwab and ask what is going on with DRETF.  It was supposed to become tradable again Jan. 31, and indeed I see some trading volume, but Schwab’s website still won’t accept my order.  Maybe I should call their Global Operations Centre and ask them to get me some real shares of D.UN from the Toronto exchange, rather than those fake DRETF "pink-sheet grey-market" shares that are supposed to be equivalent but obviously aren’t because the new-stock-issue announcement halted trading in D.UN for one day but DRETF was halted for two weeks.

I still need to find two more things to buy tomorrow.  I could try my usual scan for ETFs, or maybe try some new scans.