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January 30, 2025

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In Stocks

Snowflake and Twilio Stocks are Surging: Here’s What to Do Now!

4 Mins Read

While StockCharts offers numerous tools you can use to find top stocks or top-gaining stocks, I decided to focus on an Outperforming SPY: 3-Month Relative Highs scan to see if I can find a few resilient stocks in early-stage trends, especially after Monday’s huge market rout.

FIGURE 1. THE OUTPERFORMING SPY SECTION OF THE PREDEFINED SCAN GROUP.  I went with the first scan to find stocks that outperformed SPY over three months.Image source: StockCharts.com. For educational purposes.

What I found were two cloud-based tech stocks at different trend stages: Snowflake (SNOW) and Twilio, Inc. (TWLO). It turns out that both were garnering attention on Wall Street due to their recent earnings performances:

  • SNOW surged late last year on strong financial performance and strategic AI advancements.
  • TWLO’s jump to an all-time high can be attributed to several analysts recent “buy” ratings and upward price target revisions, following the company’s strong earnings results and guidance.

Also, note that both stocks have a StockChartsTechnicalRank (SCTR) above the 90 line, indicating extreme bullishness across multiple technical indicators and timeframes.

FIGURE 2. RESULTS OF THE SCAN. When you run a scan, consider categorizing stocks by volume to list the most liquidly traded stocks from the top down.Image source: StockCharts.com. For educational purposes.

While outperforming SPY, an S&P 500 proxy, points to recent developments in the stock, it’s always good to get a bigger-picture view of relative performance. In light of this notion, take a look at a one-year chart illustrating relative performance between $SPX, SNOW, and TWLO.

FIGURE 3. PERFCHARTS RELATIVE PERFORMANCE OF SPY, SNOW, AND TWLO. This gives you a one-year perspective on the relative outperformance and underperformance of the two stocks.Chart source: StockCharts.com. For educational purposes.

This adds more depth to the comparison. It also makes you wonder if TWLO and SNOW are overvalued and undervalued, respectively, relative to the S&P 500 on a purely technical basis.

With that in mind, let’s start with a daily chart of SNOW.

FIGURE 4. DAILY CHART OF SNOW. Note the conflicting volume-based indicators. You’ll need to analyze this divergence to get a clearer set of possible interpretations.Chart source: StockCharts.com. For educational purposes.

SNOW is breaking above resistance (and its most recent swing high) at roughly $187. The nearest level of support can be found at its most recent swing low at the $153 range. Note the significant earnings-driven gap late November; a range it might retest should SNOW’s breakout fail. SNOW’s price momentum has pushed it toward the early stages of an overbought condition, as indicated by the Relative Strength Index (RSI).

If that’s relatively straightforward, the picture presented by the volume indicators is much more confusing. The On Balance Volume (OBV) indicates strong buying pressure, but the Accumulation/Distribution Line (ADL) behind the price suggests a drastic weakening in money flows. What might this mean? Here are a few possibilities:

  • Institutional distribution and false strength, or institutional sellers absorbing retail demand.
  • Rally or trend exhaustion.
  • If price holds above support, it can also indicate hidden accumulation.

Your actionable step: Add SNOW to your ChartLists and track its price movement relative to support and resistance levels. This will help you better understand its potential direction, assuming that it’s supported by momentum and volume.

Now let’s shift over to a daily chart of TWLO.

FIGURE 5. DAILY CHART OF TWLO. Strong breakaway gap, but possibly well-overbought.Chart source: StockCharts.com. For educational purposes.

TWLO experienced a parabolic jump following a breakaway gap just last week. While the OBV underscores the bullish optimism, showing strong buying pressure, the Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) signals that selling pressure is now greater than buying pressure.

Is this another case, similar to SNOW, of retail strength buying into institutional selling? Or will accumulation continue once TWLO has pulled back? After all, the RSI is signaling overbought conditions, and TWLO is well above the upper Bollinger Band.

For now, add TWLO to your ChartLists and wait for it to pull back to the middle Bollinger Band. If you’re bullish on TWLO, such a pullback would present a strong buying opportunity as long as price doesn’t fall below $105, the bottom level of the month-long congestion range.

At the Close

SNOW and TWLO have shown strong relative performance and bullish momentum, but conflicting volume indicators suggest caution. Monitoring key support and resistance levels, along with volume and momentum, will provide better clarity on their next moves. Keep them on your ChartLists and monitor them for confirmation before taking action.

Disclaimer: This blog is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice. The ideas and strategies should never be used without first assessing your own personal and financial situation, or without consulting a financial professional.

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In World news

Former al Qaeda member named as Syria’s president for transitional period

3 Mins Read

Former al Qaeda member Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has been named as Syria’s president for a transitional period.

“We announce the appointment of Commander Ahmad al-Sharaa as head of state during the transitional period. He will assume the duties of the president of the Syrian Arab Republic and represent the country in international forums,” commander Hassan Abdel Ghani, spokesman for the Syria Military Operations Command, said in a statement Wednesday.

“The president is authorized to form a temporary legislative council for the transitional phase, which will carry out its duties until a permanent constitution is enacted and put into effect,” Ghani added.

The command also announced several resolutions, including the suspension of the country’s constitution, the dissolution of the country’s parliament, and the dissolution of the former regime’s army and its Baath party.

Al-Sharaa was the leader of the main militant group that spearheaded the lightning offensive that led to the overthrow last year of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime had been in power for several decades.

His task now will be rebuilding a country torn apart by more than a decade of civil war that has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced millions more, according to the UN. The conflict broke out during the 2011 Arab Spring when the Assad regime suppressed a pro-democracy uprising and soon plunged into a full-scale war that pulled in other regional powers from Saudi Arabia and Iran to the United States and Russia and enabled ISIS to gain a foothold – for a while – in the country.

Shortly before he was named president, Al-Sharaa said the Assad regime had “left behind deep societal, economic, political and other wounds, and fixing them requires great wisdom, hard work and doubled effort.”

A sense of duty was what Syria “needs today more than ever,” he said.

“Just as we were determined in the past to liberate it, our duty now is to be determined to build and develop it,” Al-Sharaa added.

Who is Ahmad al-Sharaa?

Al-Sharaa became a Syrian “foreign fighter” in his early 20s, crossing into Iraq to fight the Americans when they invaded the country in the spring of 2003. That eventually landed him in the notorious US-run Iraqi prison, Camp Bucca, which became a key recruiting ground for terrorist groups, including what would become ISIS.

Freed from Camp Bucca, he crossed back into Syria and started fighting against the Baathist Assad regime, doing so with the backing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would later become the founder of ISIS.

In Syria, he founded a militant group known as Jabhat al-Nusra (“the Victory Front” in English), which pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, but in 2016, he broke away from the terror group, according to the US Center for Naval Analyses.

Since then – unlike al Qaeda, which promoted a quixotic global holy war – Al-Sharaa’s group, now known by the initials HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), has undertaken the more prosaic job of trying to govern millions of people in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, providing basic services, according to the terrorism scholar Aaron Zelin who has written a book about HTS.

This post appeared first on cnn.com

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In Business

Over 3 million on Social Security may wait more than a year for higher payments

2 Mins Read

More than 3.2 million people will see increased Social Security benefits, under a new law.

However, individuals who are affected may have to wait more than a year before they see the extra money that’s due to them from the Social Security Fairness Act, the Social Security Administration said in an update on its website.

“Though SSA is helping some affected beneficiaries now, under SSA’s current budget, SSA expects that it could take more than one year to adjust benefits and pay all retroactive benefits,” the agency states.

The Social Security Fairness Act eliminates two provisions — known as the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset — that previously reduced Social Security benefits for certain beneficiaries who also had pension income provided from employment where they did not contribute Social Security payroll taxes.

Those provisions reduced benefits for certain workers including state teachers, firefighters and police officers; federal employees who are covered by the Civil Service Retirement System; and individuals who worked under a foreign social security system.

The law affects benefits paid after December 2023. Consequently, affected beneficiaries will receive increases to their monthly benefit checks, as well as retroactive lump sum payments for benefits payable for January 2024 and after.

The benefit increases “may vary greatly,” depending on an individual’s type of Social Security benefits and the amount of pension income they receive, according to the Social Security Administration.

“Some people’s benefits will increase very little while others may be eligible for over $1,000 more each month,” the agency states.

The Social Security Administration said it cannot yet provide an estimated timeline for when the benefit adjustments will happen.

In the meantime, the agency is advising beneficiaries to update their mailing address and bank direct deposit information, if necessary. In addition, non-covered pension recipients may now want to apply for benefits, if they are newly eligible following the enacted changes.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

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