Under Armour Walking the Plank

Amid speculation that UAA CEO Kevin Plank may be preparing to exit the firm he founded and built from scratch into a prominent athletics brand, the stock seems to be at the quintessential do-or-die crossroads. 

Under Armour has easily been one of the more disastrous big name stocks this year. Granted, retail took its sweet old time to wake up in 2017, waiting until the very last moment to show impressive buying interest. UAA did indeed participate in the retail rally since November, albeit at a pedestrian pace and far from a dazzling mover. 

Headed into 2018, though, with or without Plank at the helm, one cannot help but now view UAA as a possible comeback story. 

On the UAA zoomed-out daily chart, below, we have a stock which has not so much as seen a 200-day moving average (yellow line) test by price in roughly fifteen months. That 200-day, of course, remains steeply declining and speaks to the very bearish nature of UAA amid an overall bull market in equities. And with the retail rally the last two months, one would think UAA would have aggressively stormed back with massive percentage moves. 

But, again, that has not been the case.

Still, if UAA can push above $16 it ought to give bulls some short-term breathing room for at least a modest snapback rally into 2018. And if the market has been aggressively pricing in UAA's failures this year as well as a possible Plank departure, perhaps we are close to a moment where virtually all bad news has been discounted in an overall improving retail environment. 

Incidentally, this may be the opposite of the AAPL action this morning, with plenty of good news already priced into tech which is now being unwound.