Cross Check

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 27, 7:42PM EDT · Published Feb 21, 12:36PM EST

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From Ticker Sense

On January 29, we highlighted lists of stocks exhibiting golden and iron crosses. According to technical analysts, stock which have a golden cross will continue to rise, while stocks with iron crosses should be sold. As the results in the table below show, an investor would have done quite well buying the stocks with golden crosses, achieving a gain of 5.88% and outperforming the 2.59% rise in the market (based on the return of SPY). While the golden crosses handily outperformed the market and therefore supported the rule, iron crosses were not as cooperative as they also outperformed. Although in this case it was to a much smaller degree (2.85% vs 2.59%).

Given that it has only been one test, it’s still too early to come up with any conclusions based on the mixed results we calculated, as a host of outside factors such as the market’s direction over the time period analyzed are also likely to have an impact on returns of each list. With that caveat in mind, we ran the same screen on S&P 1500 names (see lists below), and will once again check on the returns at a later date.

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http://www.tickersense.typepad.com/

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.