Trade Ideas for January 27, 2010

If you like politicians and federal bureaucrats, then today is your day – We have a hearing on the government’s actions taken in the bailouts, we then have the Fed releasing their FOMC Statement at 2:15pm ET, and to cap it off we have the President delivering his State of the Union address. What could possibly go wrong today!?! And on top of that you have your typical run-of-the-mill economic reports like MBA Purchase Applications (already released) and New Home Sales at 10am and I haven’t even gotten to earnings where Yahoo (YHOO) reported some good numbers last night, along with WLP who also reported their earnings this morning.

Currently the Futures are somewhat flat heading into the open, with the Dow only up 5 points, followed by the Nasdaq at 2 points up, and the S&P up almost 2 points. It is going to be a crazy day out there, and the same can probably be said about tomorrow as well. So hang in there!

Here are Today’s Trading Ideas…

Potential Swing Trade (Long): Qualcomm (QCOM) – This stock appeared in my Defensive Plays screen last night, so for this type of market environment, with uncertainty abounding, QCOM has managed to pullback nicely to its November/December Support levels, and then held the price with consecutive doji candles signifying that the bears may be running out of steam in the short term. If you want to play the market pullback as a buying opportunity, this is a good one to start with. I’d place my stop at 45.97.

Potential Swing Trade (Short): Vector Group Ltd (VGR) – This stock has been on my short watch-list for some time now, and rallied to over head resistance levels quite nicely. VGR has been a major “gomer” since reaching its highs in September, a divergence from the market strength during that same time.  Overhead resistance seems to be right at the highs of December highs, so a break there would represent a significant change in attitude. Stop-loss on this play would be 14.61.