The S&P 500 kicked off Monday close to record highs set last week.
The stocks that led the benchmark index higher in recent days were a diverse bunch – Norwegian Cruise Lines, Twitter, PayPal and Tapestry were among the biggest gainers in the past week.
Danielle Shay, director of options at Simpler Trading, splits those four into two groups. The first, Twitter and PayPal, could be seen as tech stocks that benefit when the Nasdaq is on the upswing.
“The Nasdaq has consolidated, it’s pulled back over the course of March, and right now we’re seeing a breakout in those stocks, going higher into their earnings reports. So when I’m looking at Twitter and PayPal, I notice that on average on the 21-day time frame prior to earnings they do typically trade higher,” Shay told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Friday.
PayPal is scheduled to report earnings on April 28, and Twitter the following day, on April 29. To take advantage of that trend, Shay is buying out-of-the-money calls on the expectation of more upside heading into those releases.
“As far as the other two, Norwegian and Tapestry, for me these are reopening trades,” she said. “You do have traders coming in, buying those stocks as a part of the reopening trade so I actually like all these stocks even though they rallied pretty, pretty nicely. If you get a pullback to the 21-[exponential moving average], I think all of them would be a great shot to the upside.”
Craig Johnson, chief market technician at Piper Sandler, also sees promising trends in PayPal and Twitter.
“If you look at the chart of PayPal, all it’s really seen here is sort of a correction within the constructs of a longer-term uptrend,” Johnson said during the same interview. “There’s probably another 15% to 16% upside we think in Pay Pal shares just to get you back to those old highs at $305.”
PayPal traded below $266 a share on Monday morning. A move to $305 implies 15% upside.
“The second name is Twitter. Again, the stock looks like it has just been a correction back to the longer-term uptrend after having corrected more than 20% back to that uptrend support line, and it looks like it’s a name that should be bought,” said Johnson.
Twitter has fallen more than 13% from a high set in late February. It is up 30% so far this year.
