I am up to the portfolio update 100 and it is good to see your comments indicating that you appreciated what I am doing. I am hopeful the markets do their bit to celebrate this post and continue their way up. After having a really good week the week before last, the Australian share market continued to advance, although by a much smaller level. This led to many more buying opportunities for next week and could mean some healthy profits in the near future. If the indicators are wrong however it will mean that the portfolio goes into negative territory for the first time.
Before I went away I mentioned that I would like to change the way I present the portfolio. Rather than always buying 10k worth of shares, I will use a percentage of the capital I have available for any purchases. This will give a better picture about performance as any profits are re-invested. Unfortunately having just returned from holidays I have been a bit busy this week and will set this up in the next two weeks. So for now any news buys will still be added to the existing portfolio. I will however transfer them to the new one once everything is set up.
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Categories: Portfolio, Trading Updates Tags: anz, apa, axa, boq, hvn, ORI, sto, wbc, wes, wpl
We are back from our extended holiday to Europe and had a fantastic time. The way it looks I didn’t miss much in the market and we picked the perfect time coming back. Looking ahead I can see many buying opportunities. Let’s just hope the market has found its bottom. Whilst overseas I occasional looked at the different indexes, one day 2-3% up and a few days later 2-4% down. Crazy market conditions. The German and the Australian index haven’t made a new low for some weeks now making me hopeful that we have seen the bottom.
Looking through the charts this weekend I could see many bullish bars indicating the same. And for the first time in months there are a number of stocks ticking all the boxes (according to the HSC) for a buy. If the upcoming week remains positive there will be plenty more joining in. Whilst the market is volatile though, it might be worth to look at a slightly different strategy to determine the stop loss. David teaches to never risk more than 15% on any given (HSC) trade and if the turning point is closer, use the turning point +1% as the stop loss. There is nothing wrong with this approach, especially if you are just starting out.
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Last week it was sell, sell, sell, this weekend it is rain, rain, rain. We are away for the long weekend and it hasn’t stopped raining – the kids are sleeping so perfect time to go through the shares for the week. The world markets and the Australian market showed mixed results last week, with the overall trend being bearish. The Australian market finished the week marginally lower as it managed to recover some of the losses on Friday.
We are now approaching the March low again. If the low is taken out it means we are yet to see the end of the last 53 week cycle and we should see more bearish behaviour over the next couple of weeks.
As mentioned last week we sold NAB, TSE and WBC. TSE was almost at break even and the other two incurred just over 7% loss for both. Looking ahead for the next couple of years, I expect the Australian market to finally show some direction again and rise steadily.
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Sell, sell, sell, this is the motto for the week ahead. I have identified 3 stocks that are currently in the portfolio that have two closed below the uptrend band this week, making it a sell. They are NAB (National Australia Bank), TSE (Transfield Services Ltd) and WBC (WestPac Banking). And the way it looks none of them will return us a profit. On a quick scan I have also identified a further two stocks with two closes below that are not part of the blog portfolio. They are CGF (Challenger Limited) and COH (Cochlear Ltd).
This combined the a Bearish Outside Vertical in the overseas markets, point to a further downward move in the week(s) ahead (if this week’s low will be taken out). I just hope this sideways movement in the Australian movement will come to an end soon and we will see the HSC perform better in a trending market.
I still have a couple of stocks that meet all the buy criteria according to the Home Study Course. They are: DOW, TEL, TLS and WOW. Fingers cross the keep their strength for the next weeks.
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Happy Easter everyone! With the price for Gold at record highs, I hope you found plenty of golden Easter eggs. Contrary to my expectations of seeing the market drop further in the week leading up to Easter, we have seen some healthy gains in the Australian share market. Although we briefly took out the previous weeks low, the market turned up again. Obviously this got reflected in our blog portfolio’s profit rising from 11.05% to 14.43%. Another contributing factor was that we got stopped out of a losing trade.
ALL (Aristocrat Leisure), dropped further and got to a 15% loss, which is the maximum loss I am willing to take. I have also identified CTX (Caltex Australia) as another sell as it had two closes below the uptrend band. TSE (Transfield Services) is a new buy and I will add this to the portfolio next week. As mentioned last week you could have already bought it during the week as it was trading above 3.47. There are also still a number of buys carrying over from last week. They are NAB and WBC. QBE finished on an Outside Vertical Bar and will be a buy again if it rises above 19.19.
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I don’t like what I saw this week. Flipping through my charts for this week, I have noticed many bearish looking bars, especially in the mining sector. Also looking at the weekly Aussie 200 chart I noticed a bearish outside vertical bar (BEOVB). A BEOVB is a bar where the price rises above the high of the previous week, then drops taking out the low of the previous bar and closes in the bottom third of the bar. This bar (in the Aussie index) occurred in what I think is a significant place. It just took out the February 2011 high, it is still slightly lower than the April 2010 high and in an area of some good resistance. However last week’s bar was a relatively low range bar, making it easy for an outside bar to form.
If the bar is taken out to the downside I would expect further bearish behaviour over the coming weeks. However if it is taken out to the upside (in the next two weeks) it might have fooled us and we will see a strong bull market return. Again all this is based on probabilities and there is no certainty either of these scenarios will happen. This is what we do as technical traders (and the HSC is technical analysis). We look at the information presented to us on a chart and based on previous chart patterns make a decision if the market is likely to go up or down. And if we do our job well we are right more often than not.
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