The market’s evidence continues to take steps in the right direction and, by our measures, the intermediate-term trend is now on the fence—a couple of decent days from here could produce a green light. Of course, even if we do turn up, it doesn’t mean it’ll suddenly be 1999 again, but we’re not taking anything away from the action: The market has put together a few positive steps in a row, now let’s see if it can continue in the days ahead.



This week’s list again picks up on a few names that are already testing key resistance even as the indexes are just a couple of weeks off their lows. Our Top Pick is a nuts and bolts type of firm that’s seeing a huge upmove in earnings and sports a dirt cheap valuation.

Earnings season is finally behind us. But there are always a few interesting opportunities to be found in between earnings cycles. Plus, the downtime between cycles gives us some time to reflect on the prior earnings season and, more importantly, prepare for what is ahead.

There are a few interesting opportunities that garner a look in the week ahead, which we will discuss below. But there is no doubt that opportunities are slim as we sit in the doldrums between earnings cycles. When earnings season is in full swing we will often see 20 to 30 trade ideas per week.

As I stated in my last update, I will be adding several more trades to our short list of open positions next week. My goal is to have a rotation of five to ten positions in both the Income Trades Portfolio and Income Wheel Portfolio.

On Wednesday we placed our first trade, a bear call spread in SPY at the 440/445 call strikes. My goal is to place at least two more trades, if not more, next week as we begin to build out the portfolio to hopefully five to eight positions. Of course, we’re not going to force trades. As always, we will patiently wait until a trade makes sense. That being said, with implied volatility remaining high across the board, we shouldn’t have any issues finding some underlying stocks and ETFs to wrap a few high-probability strategies around.

The market continues to be messy, but we’re going to take a partial swing at a profitable software company playing in a big, growth market – cloud services.

This company is like a smaller version of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. But without all the other parts of those much, much larger companies.



We may be a bit early. But we’ll manage that risk by taking a half position in a company that’s likely to grow above 30% for years and is very profitable.


Enjoy!

The market’s evidence has clearly improved during the past couple of weeks, so much so that our Cabot (and Growth) Tides are now on the fence, while our old Two-Second Indicator is starting to pick up on a bullish change in character for the broad market. That said, it’s close, but we haven’t seen anything definitive yet--tonight, we have no changes, but if we see some green lights, we’ll be on the horn with two or three new additions most likely.



In the meantime, we continue to hone our watch list and put together our game plan should the evidence continue to improve; we’re not going to go whole hog right away, but after six months of punishing action, we’re remaining flexible and write about a few potential fresh leaders in tonight’s issue.

As investors are broadly satisfied with the current outlook, it seems that we have arrived at the end of the beginning of the post-pandemic era. However, there remains immense uncertainly about how the middle-game will play out.



This week, we took advantage of the strong performance of some of our stocks to reduce our ratings. And, as not every stock works right out of the gates, we are moving Big Lots (BIG) from Buy to Hold as we want to rethink our outlook and valuation given its dismal recent earnings report.

This week we are adding a covered call in yet another earnings season winner that has emerged amidst the rubble of the retail sector.

During the past couple of weeks, the market has put together a handful of solid baby steps; in fact, the rally has been enough to put the intermediate trend on watch—a bit more strength from here could produce a green light. That’s all to the good, but (a) we still have to see the signal actually occur, and (b) even if it comes, there’s still plenty of overhead to chew through given the damage seen over the past few months. That’s not to throw cold water on the rally attempt—we’re nudging up our Market Monitor to a level 3 tonight, but right now, it’s best to remain defensive and to go slow on the buy side.



This week’s list is again heavy on commodity-related stocks and special situations, along with some recent earnings winners sprinkled in. Our Top Pick is a medical firm that lifted above long-time resistance following a clean FDA approval.

The market remains quite weak, and thus ripe for a major rally at any time. But until we see real strength, continued caution is advised.
And today’s recommendation fits the bill, as it has a solid dividend and the prospect of real growth as the global energy industry adjusts to a world without Russian oil.


As for the portfolio, we’re selling one laggard, which is suffering as consumers cut back on discretionary spending.

Inflation may be easing somewhat but interest rates will continue to move upward, presenting a headwind for markets. Investors are acting on bargains but in restrained ways until an uptrend develops. The Explorer’s Fanuc (FANUY) is up 10% in the last two weeks and Chilean real asset play SQM is up about 25% in the last five weeks. Today, we add another new overseas play, this time from London.

It’s too soon to buy new stocks aggressively. But there is a safer place in the meantime to generate a high yield without much downside in the near term.
In this issue, I highlight a stock from the energy sector, the only market sector having a good year. Yet, the stock is not overvalued or overpriced. It provides a high yield without much downside if the market decline continues. And the price is likely to trend higher over the rest of the year.

With all of our stocks now having price targets assigned to them, we thought we’d share with you some of our process behind how we set those price targets.

Every so often, I get a question from a subscriber about a price move in one of my micro-cap recommendations. The first thing that I do is check the trading volume.

It’s been another week of mixed stock performance and assorted headlines that collectively give me the sense that, while a lot of investors may be shifting money around, there’s no real consensus yet on what will work and what won’t in the near-term.

That tech stocks would cool a bit has been one of my key themes over the past few issues; and September has seen it come to pass.

After pulling back over 8% from the high, the market is having trouble finding any traction. And the selling may not be over.

Through most of the summer, investors had become increasingly confident about the strength and direction of the economic recovery, the likelihood of the arrival of several promising Covid vaccines, another round of federal economic stimulus and other favorable indicators.

As we move closer to October, the S&P 500 is down about 8% from its peak and this is no longer the longest start to a bull market.

The market and big-winning growth stocks from this year remain iffy—today’s drop put our Cabot Tides on the fence and many growth stocks are still in a rough patch.

The flavor of the market hasn’t changed in the last week, in my view. There is still a sense that many high growth stocks have run too far. I think the lesser-informed general public hears about the recent slide in the mega-caps (AAPL, AMZN, MSFT, FB, etc.) and thinks they are “the market,” and that since they’re going down the market is in trouble.

It may seem unnecessary to write covered calls in a raging bull market. but that’s seldom the case. Over time you are likely to get a better return with this income strategy than just holding a market index. And you get a paycheck.

The raging bull market took a breather. The S&P 500 actually pulled back 7% from the high at the peak of the recent Labor Day selloff. But that seems to be over. The market has since regained some traction and appears to be resuming an uptrend.

Yesterday, voters in all five states where it was on the ballot—Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota—said they were in favor of legalization, and in every case, the majority vote was clearly positive, not even close.

Our second recommendation is a short that is failing technical tests.

Our first idea today is picking up steam due to its coronavirus testing; the company just walloped analysts’ projections for its third quarter.

Four of our portfolio stocks report earnings.

As I noted in this morning’s Covered Call email, this portfolio position broke my mental stop last week.

Our second recommendation is a sale of a previous idea.

Our first idea is an infrastructure play that just walloped earnings estimates.

This tool and storage company just announced its third-quarter results, beating analysts’ EPS estimates by $0.16.

Tyler recommends selling one stock and gives earnings updates on five more.

The market has started to look iffy lately and today we’re seeing another wave of selling. The pressure is on the bulls to step up and turn things around. Or, at least stop the bleeding. At the moment there are very few bright spots, but we’re fortunate to have one of them in our portfolio.

The weakness in the market and growth stocks is continuing this morning.

We’re selling this portfolio stock with a 54% profit since its December 2019 recommendation.

Our Cabot Top Ten Trader’s market timing system consists of two parts—one based on the action of three select, growth-oriented market indexes, and the other based on the action of the fast-moving stocks Cabot Top Ten features.