Making Hay (Almost) Monday - November 12th, 2024
A special edition: Chart-O-Rama!
Hello and happy Tuesday, MHM Readers:
As many of you might already have concluded, we took a publishing holiday this week in honor of Veterans Day. Thanks to you all for the patience and, of course, for your continued and much-needed support of this newsletter. Our goal is to keep things pretty steady and routine throughout the holiday season, with the exceptions of the Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks themselves. On that topic, let us know if you’d like to gather ‘round the Haymaker fire for an end-of-year chat on 2025 anticipations (and 2024 aggravations).
There’ll be plenty of time to get into Q/A practice once our new AHA! webinar series is in full swing. The first of those is kicking off this week, so be sure to join in and bring your sharpest questions for the elder Haymaker!
The Haymaker Team
“A swelling interest in investment performance has created an increasingly short-term oriented and (in my opinion) more speculative market." -Warren Buffett writing to the investors in his investment partnership in 1969; based on his current cash hoard of over $300 billion, he obviously has similar feelings today
“Clearly Mr Trump’s election could lead to a seismic shift in a number of areas. His signature policies – the ones I would rate as most likely to be implemented – include tax cuts, tariff increases, deregulation, larger deficits, and slower working-age population growth. This is a mixed bag for investors. But markets are now betting on an outcome that has the good stuff without the bad stuff.” -Gerard Minack, author of the insight-rich Downunder Daily
Chart-O-Rama
In this week’s Making Hay Almost Monday, we are doing a reprise of our stock chart-focused edition. As a result, it will not include the usual Champions, Contenders, or Down For the Count sections.
The last stock chart issue was on July 22nd. At the time, we highlighted nine stocks, (we’re embarrassed to say it was supposed to be 10 back then) making clear they were not buy recommendations. The screening test for these names, out of several hundred charts we reviewed at the time, was based on those that were making new three-year highs. In some cases, they were breakouts above even a longer trading range. Better yet, a few had made all-time highs.
Regular Haymaker readers are aware of the heavy emphasis we place on these developments. In our experience, the longer the trading range has been in place the more significant, and likely profitable, is that breakout.
What happens after these events is, unsurprisingly, varied. Often, they surge 20%, or more, quite quickly. Sometimes, they correct hard before surging again. Occasionally, there are false breakouts where a marginal new high is made and then the stock in question breaks down in a material way. Fortunately, those are rare. To avoid those fake-outs, it’s helpful to also consider fundamentals such as valuations, as well as preferring situations where earnings are often also making new highs.
Before providing a few new names you may want to put on your watch list, let’s take a quick look at how those highlights from back in July have performed. Because two of them are part of the famous Magnificent Seven, this might be of particular interest in terms of comparing them to the less illustrious stocks shown below.
(Note: To expand any charts, simply click on them directly.)