2012 Top Performers Acting Badly Today

You may have heard the Wall Street maxim, "A rising tide lift all boats", with that in mind and with the first week's performance in mind (virtually flat for the majority of the indices), I looked at NFLX which was covered here yesterday.

" I would expect a pullback as they don't want a overbought condition to sink prices either, then the next leg up I would expect more distribution."


Then I ran a custom scan for other top performers in the New Year, the results are a bit surprising considering the market environment today.


These are just a few examples and they are not cherry picked, I went to my 5-day performance scan and almost every stock here was in the top 20 of the Russell 2000 (almost all with gains of 20% for the previous 5 days which is as close a scan as I have for the New Year). If I were long any of these stocks and woke up to see the futures, I would be very excited, that is until the market opened.

 ATML

 CBLI

 CIEN

 DCTH

 DNDN

 GNOM

 IPGP

 ITMN

 JAZZ

 MRVL

 MU

 NFLX

 OCZ

 RTK

 ZGNX

ZUMZ


Most of these stocks are the top performers for 2012 in the top 1% of the Russell 2000, it sure is a strange day for them to be pulling back or otherwise showing very weak relative performance.


Lets not forget about AAPL, also recently covered here: "AAPL on Thin Ice"

There certainly may be some pullback opportunities in some of these names and I'll be keeping them on my radar, however their price action today is most unexpected considering the market's early tone; they performed better in a flat market or on red days.