News Details – Smallcapnetwork
Staffing 360 Solutions (STAF) Sets Earnings Release Date... And It's Soon
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February 2, 2024

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PDT

How about that 180-degree turnaround for stocks today? Clearly traders were counting on Janet Yellen to remain more dovish than hawkish in her speech following the Fed's Jackson Hole meeting. Once the market realized she's very likely to go through with a rate hike sooner than later though, those ames traders changed their mind. The respectable intraday gain turned into an alarming loss for the session. Some key lines in the sand were crossed for the first time in a long time. We'll look at it in a little detail below. The first thing we want to cross off of our checklist today is letting you know we've got an earnings announcement in the lineup for one of our Featured Stocks. We won't get a chance to tell you again before it happens, so be sure to make a note of it now -- Staffing 360 Solutions (STAF) will be releasing its previous quarter's results (ending in May) on Monday of this coming week... September 29th. We don't have a time yet, but they've always come pretty early in the morning. The company has already given us most of the numbers we would want to know about, pre-announcing its fiscal Q4 and full-year results in late June. Now they're going to post the official numbers, and fill in a few of the blanks. Bryan Murphy gave us a look at the numbers we have so far, plus some historical context. The growth is undeniable. Interestingly, the Staffing 360 Solutions conference call isn't going to take place on Monday. That won't happen until September 9th, just to make sure everybody can participate in the call and still keep any Labor Day plans they have. For the details on that call and how you can participate, check out Bryan Murphy's full post today. Moving on to the bigger issue today, it finally looks like investors remembered the market isn't an infallible machine that only goes up. With lots of profits to be taken and Janet Yellen giving them plenty of reason to take them now, the weight of the recent gains is taking a toll. Just to give credit where it's due, it was James Brumley over at the Under the Radar Movers newsletter that provided a lot of the context for the discussion we're about to have. While we won't be able to give you all the insight URM subscribers have been getting for a while -- including today -- we'll be able to give you some of it, starting with the simple point that the S&P 500 has now fallen under the 20-day moving average line, and made three consecutively lower closes beneath it. This in itself is a big clue. The lower Bollinger band seems to have played a support role on Friday, but don't get too excited about that just yet. The proverbial big Kahuna of red flags was the VIX. As the Under the Radar Movers newsletter pointed out in today's edition, the VIX was putting pressure on its 50-day moving average line for the first time in weeks. By the time the closing bell rang, the VIX had broken above its big ceiling around 14.0, and closed just beneath it. This is an important (even if nuanced) signal. A rising VIX indicates that traders are actually hedging against a pullback, or even betting on one. This is something we hadn't seen yet, even though stocks have been ripe for a pullback since mid-July. If traders are thinking bearishly enough to actually buy insurance against a pullback - or worse, bet on one taking shape - it's probably only a matter of time before they actually start to make such a self-fulfilling prophecy happen. I'll also let you know the Under the Radar Movers service has actually tested a buy/sell trading system using the VIX's ebbs and flows as the basis for those signals. James was showing me how (and why) it worked a couple of days ago, and I'm sure he's got his eye on it right now. It's a cool system, as he's found the optimal way to use the VIX for trading. This includes knowing when not to flinch if the VIX isn't actually signaling what we think it's telling us. Although I can't tell you any more than that about the URM's assessment of the current market, I will give you an updated version of the NYSE's advancer/decliner and up-volume and down-volume chart. I have to say, none of you have any reason to be very surprised about today's stumble if you've been keeping tabs on this chart. The rally started running out of steam (volume and participants) as all those bulls have been increasingly defecting to the bearish side of the table as far back as late July. The market managed to coast for a while, but a vehicle can only coast so far on fumes before gravity takes over. Funny thing is, none of this is terribly unusual. We're headed into September, which is arguably the worst month of the year for stocks in terms of the number of times it dishes out a loss as well as its average performance. The average September performance is a loss of 0.68%, and it books a loss 56% of the time. In any case, while I like to think that we're giving you lots of value and perspective here in this end-of-day newsletter you're reading right now, as a subscriber to the Under the Radar Movers service, I can't deny that the URM crowd is getting so much more. And I don't just mean great, complete near-term and long-term looks at the market either. The URM team is serving up stocks trades all the time too.... several per week. Some are long term, and some are short-term, but they're all great setups. I'll even let you know James has lined up a leveraged bearish ETF trade to use as a hedge against a market pullback if that's what's in the cards. It looks darn near perfect too, poised to move up no matter what the market does next. It's that kind of smart, savvy trading that makes the Under the Radar newsletter a great all-around tool no matter what kind of investor you are. If you're not a member, you're missing out.