Seasonal MACD Buy Update & October Stock Basket
By: Christopher Mistal
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October 12, 2017
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Seasonal MACD Buy Update
 
As of today’s close, our Seasonal MACD Buy Signal is still on Hold. Our 8-17-9 MACD “Buy” indicator applied to S&P 500 and NASDAQ turned positive on September 29. DJIA’s MACD “Buy” indicator turned positive on October 2. All three indicators remain positive, but are trending toward turning negative. 
 
The criteria to issue our Seasonal MACD Buy Signal is a new buy signal using our 8-17-9 MACD indicator on or after the first trading day of October and DJIA, S&P 500 and NASDAQ must be in agreement.
 
This criterion has not been met yet.
 
[S&P 500 MACD Chart]
[NASDAQ MACD Chart]
[DJIA MACD Chart]
 
Stocks for upcoming “Best Months”
 
These 22 stocks all have reasonably solid valuations, healthy revenue and earnings growth, while exhibiting positive price and volume action as well as other constructive technical and chart pattern indications. The group of 22 covers a broad array of sectors and industries. It also runs the gamut of market capitalization with a mix of large caps with more than $5 billion in market value, midcaps in the $1-5 billion range, and small caps under $1 billion.
 
We first sifted through the universe of nearly 8,000 U.S. traded stocks for those with a market cap of at least $50 million and average daily volume of 50,000 shares or more on average over the past twenty trading sessions. Then we winnowed the list down to only those stocks with relatively low price-to-sales and price-to-earnings ratios. From there we searched for stocks that were exhibiting revenue and earnings growth.
 
We then dug into numerous individual company charts before settling on these final 22 stocks. Our underlying theme was to find reasonably priced stocks quietly growing sales and earnings that are flying somewhat under the radar with few on The Street paying close attention to them. As market cap goes higher, this becomes increasingly challenging and a history of earnings surprises becomes even more important. 
 
At the end of the screening process we found that construction, technology and financial industries were well represented in the basket. We did not search specifically for top-performing stocks within these sectors, this just happens to be where reasonable value and growth currently exist.
 
This basket is being presented in order to take advantage of the “Best Six Months” (November to April) for stocks. We will look to add these 22 stocks, in the table below, on dips. We will allocate a hypothetical $2000 from the cash position in the portfolio to each position. For each stock we have provided the ticker, name, sector, general business description, plus annual sales growth, PE, price-to-sales ratio, market value, a dividend yield and a suggested buy limit and stop loss. 
 
[Almanac Investor Stock Basket October 11, 2017 Closes]