In reading this post from @The_Real_Fly he provided a table of today’s leading industries. None other at the top was Solar. I honestly can’t remember the last time I traded a solar stock and I really have no interest in this industry yet. First Solar (FSLR) was always a fun one to trade but for me that was back when it was above 100.
With Solar being the lead percentage gaining industry today it got my interest as it has been a poor performer this year and previous years. Using TAN (Guggenheim Solar ETF) as a proxy for the solar industry (holdings), it is down over -37% YTD. In 2010 it dropped over -28% and it 2011 it dropped over -66%. Despite these horrible year statistics, something that stood out was its beginning performance on the year usually between 6-7 weeks. Below is a weekly logarithmic chart (preferred in long time frames) of TAN and you can see this beginning performance highlighted in blue boxes. Also plotted are the 10 and 40 week simple moving averages:
I found this interesting as I pretty much gave up on this industry but it is hard to ignore this statistic and it may be worth it to scour the solars and look for setups. Below is a table courtesy of The PPT (my preferred market engine) that highlights the solar industry and those stocks within. The stocks are sorted by Hybrid Score which is a measure of fundamental and technical strength.
Below is a FinViz link to the those stocks and they are sorted by 3-month average volume:
Solar stocks sorted by 3-month average volume
With this information I am going to go through some of these solars and look for stocks that are setting up on the chart with the same beginning of the year performance patterns. Then I will use The PPT with those stocks and look for those that have favorable seasonality data.
