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I'll Be Watching Tech Earnings This Week for Clues on How to Trade

Microsoft, Tesla, Intel and Apple will be among the big tech companies reporting and it will be interesting to see how the market responds to their results.
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If you're a long-only trader and you've managed to stay mostly (or entirely) in cash over the past few weeks, great job! The hardest part of trading isn't buying or selling, it's implementing proper risk management and knowing when the best trade is no trade. And with the Nasdaq, S&P 500, Russell 2000 and Dow Jones Industrial Average all trading beneath their short, intermediate and long-term moving averages, the best place to be is out of the line of fire.

Without question, many traders are looking for a bounce this week. And with losses last week ranging from 6% to 11% in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) , Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) , iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) and ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) , a reprieve from the selling seems logical. Even if stocks are headed lower over the next couple months, the decline is unlikely to occur in a straight line.

I like to track the percentage of stocks trading above their 40-day moving averages to determine whether the market is overbought or oversold.

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While there's no strict method for interpreting this indicator, I consider anything under 20 oversold and above 70 to be overbought. With the percentage of stocks beneath their 40-day moving average sitting at 22, we're clearly in oversold territory.

Suffice it to say, genuine shocks or crashes like what we saw with onset of COVID or the financial collapse of 2008-2009 can send this indicator into the low single digits. Like any indicator, this one only should be used to formulate a bias or strategy and not treated as gospel.

Beyond the oversold factor, this week's trading likely will be driven by two things -- how traders respond to earnings and whether Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell adopts a hawkish or dovish tone when delivering his comments at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) news conference on Wednesday.

Because I have no idea what Chairman Powell will say, let's jump straight to earnings.

While many high-profile S&P 500 names are reporting, I'm primarily a technology guy. Consequently, I'm interested in how the market responds to Microsoft (MSFT) and Texas Instruments (TXN) after markets close on Tuesday, Tesla (TSLA) , Intel (INTC) , Lam Research (LRCX) and ServiceNow (NOW) after markets close on Wednesday, and Apple (AAPL) , Atlassian Corp. (TEAM) and KLA Corp. (KLAC) after markets close on Thursday.

With this week's earnings offering a nice mixture of semiconductors, software as a service (SaaS) and mega-cap tech, we'll get a good indication as to what, if anything, traders want to get back into.

At the time of publication, Byrne had no positions in the stocks mentioned.