After pretty much going straight up from early June through mid-September, the decline we've seen over the last few weeks may seem pretty significant. In reality, the major indices are all down just a few percentage points from their bull market highs. To get a quick sense of how the big blue chips look at the moment, we ran the 30 Dow stocks through our trading range screen (which can be customized for your portfolio if you're a Premium Plus member). For each stock, the dot represents where it is currently trading relative to its "trading range," while the tail represents where it was trading one week ago. The red shading represents overbought territory, while the green shading represents oversold territory. (You can read more about the specifics of the "trading range" in the description below the screen.)
Last week at this time, 15 of the 30 Dow stocks were overbought while just 4 were oversold. As of the close today, 8 stocks were overbought while 7 were oversold. The bulk of the oversold stocks are in the Technology and Industrial sectors -- CAT, HPQ, INTC, MSFT and UTX. The bulk of the stocks that remain overbought are either in the Financial or Health Care sectors -- BAC, JPM, UNH, MRK, PFE and TRV.
We also include the year-to-date performance numbers for the 30 Dow stocks in the screen below. Two stocks stand out in this regard, one for how much it's up and the other for how much it's down. Bank of America (BAC) continues to be the best performing Dow stock in 2012 with a big gain of 65.65%. On the downside, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) takes the cake with a huge decline of 44.95% so far this year. Talk about a "dog of the Dow."
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