ASX 52-Week Highs Show Small Companies on the Move

Which ASX stocks made 52-week highs yesterday? It is not such a strange question for an investor to ask during a bull-market. For a stock to make new-all time highs, well, it has to make new highs. That's why in most major financial markets, you won't have much of a problem finding out which stocks made new highs yesterday, or which stocks made new 52-week lows. It's useful information for investors, and generally widely available, usually for free.

Not in Australia. When we first got here, we thought we'd find this kind of data with no problems. In the UK and the US it is easy to find data like advancing and declining stocks, the advance/decline ratio and other measure of market breadth and depth. Retail investor have demanded it as a source for new investment ideas. Used properly, the additional level of information helps independent investors make better-informed decisions.

Well we've looked and looked for that kind of data here and we just can't find it. Is it so valuable brokers have chosen to keep it to themselves? Is it so expensive to organize and publish that you must be a paying customer to view it? Or do most Australian investors not care about it because they haven't had to care about it? After all, if you just bought a passive, index-tracking fund over the last few years, you'd be sitting on double-digit returns from one of the best-performing share markets in the world.

Whatever the reason for the missing data, we've done the American thing and decided to find it ourselves and publish it. In fact, we aim to publish a whole raft of useful data and stories in one of our new e-letters "Money Morning," set to launch next week. It won't be anything like the Daily Reckoning, we promise. It will be "market neutral."

That is, Money Morning will be your daily guide to the market news that matters. And we can virtually guarantee that it won't be as long as the DR. You can think of it as a daily digest of the most important global and local stories, the stories that matter to your shares and portfolio. As much as we love ideas and deeper discussions into what's moving the markets, we have always realized the utility of timely data to alert us to a specific opportunity or risk.

Take stocks making new 52-week highs, for example. Gloucester Coal (GCL) made a new high yesterday at $4.85. That is ten cents higher than what Swiss mining giant Xstrata offered for a share of GCL back on April 8th. At that time, Xstrata's $391 million bid valued GCL shares at a twenty five per cent premium to their closing price.

It didn't take the market long-only one day, in fact-to add $1 on to the share price. Since then, the stock has moved a tiny bit higher. Granted, the horse is probably out of the barn on this story. Knowing that GCL made a 52- week high yesterday isn't the same as owning the stock say, on April first before the big recent move. But there are other stock making new 52-week highs every day. It's useful to keep your eyes on them, to see if a small company stock is starting to move. Today there are twelve on the list. We'll begin publishing the top five next week in Money Morning.

Dan Denning
The Daily Reckoning Australia

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