Fun Operating in the Shadows

In life, sometimes it pays to be a bit shady.

While there are tons of good, decent people out there, there are also some people who check in every so often merely to learn of your intimate personal business and then disappear until the next go-round. 

When I was a kid, a very wise man once told me that the best way to fend off intrusive, unwanted personal questions from social vultures, if you will, was simply to respond with a quizzical look and firmly ask, "What do you want to know, for?" That last word, "for," if said forcefully enough, invariably put them on the defense and squirming to justify their faux pas. That always stuck with me, and seems to have worked every single time. 

As for stocks, at times we want to favor those shady names, operating in the shadows outside the mainstream popularity of rather visible tickers in the current market.

One example would be Nutanix, second below on its daily chart. While many software stocks in the HACK and IGV ETFs are essentially taking the day off and/or dipping, NTNX is up 3% as I write this an attempting a well-defined base breakout. For a while now, NTNX has been turning its ship around to the upside and even exhibiting contra behavior insofar as rallying on those days when software or even the broad market slumped. 

As for bios, FibroGen, on the first daily chart, below, also seems to be overlooked. Note the strength today compared to many peers, as the mid-cap tries to clear a base of its own. 

Overall, if the current market rally is to continue to thrive then we must see names like FGEN and NTNX take turns rallying on days like today where software slumps and the broad market rally narrows a bit.