Utilities and Stocks Breaking to New 52 Week Highs

Sometimes the simplest things are effective for finding candidates to trade on a short-term or intraday basis.

For example, if you want to identify strong stocks that are likely uptrending – and may continue to do so – scan for stocks bursting to new 52-week highs in an uptrending market (particularly in strong sectors).

Let’s take a look at the current list of candidates of the 41 stocks that registered new 52-week highs in today’s bullish session.

The 41 stocks above (of the 500 stocks in the S&P 500 list) carved out new 52-week highs today.

You can put them in a scan list and quickly study their charts for steady uptrends and potential trading (retracement) candidates.

Do additional analysis on the stocks that show the most potential according to your trading style.

I separated the Utilities ($XLU) stocks with yellow highlights to note that 16 of the 41 stocks are “Risk-off” or “Defensive” stocks in the Utilities sector.

Here’s a chart of the broader XLU Utilities ETF (note the uptrend and dominant price action into the highs):

That’s generally not something you want to see if you expect the broader market to continue power-trending higher.

Nevertheless, use this quick, simple scan to find potential pro-trend relative strength candidates.

Follow along with members of the Daily Commentary and Idealized Trades summaries for real-time updates and additional trade planning.

Corey Rosenbloom, CMT
Afraid to Trade.com

Follow Corey on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/afraidtotrade

Corey’s book The Complete Trading Course (Wiley Finance) is now available along with the newly released Profiting from the Life Cycle of a Stock Trend presentation (also from Wiley).