Zacks.com Announces that Gregory Spear Highlights the Following Stocks: Applied Materials, Intel, Valero, and Tesoro.

CHICAGO -- Gregory Spear says the market could rally into Christmas and possibly January as it did last year. Read about this expert's market view and learn about Applied Materials' (NASDAQ:AMAT), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Valero (NYSE:VLO) and Tesoro (NYSE:TSO). Click here for the full story exclusively on Zacks.com: http://at.zacks.com/?id=84

Highlights from the November 19th Featured Expert column by Gregory Spear includes:

The market is marking time before options expiration and consolidating, without giving any satisfaction to the bears. Based on Applied Materials' (NASDAQ: AMAT) impressive turnaround on Thursday, the semiconductor equipment vendors seem to be acting as though all the bad news were priced in. This bodes well for some leadership emerging from the tech bellwethers. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has now formed a symmetrical cup pattern from August and Gregory Spear would expect a pause here for some kind of 'handle' to develop.

In today's weekly edition, Spear and his team draw a fairly detailed parallel between the current market action and the end-of-the-year rally that started the Monday before Thanksgiving in 2003. If the pattern plays out in a similar fashion, we could have a steady rise into Christmas or even January without a pullback even to the 20-day ema. The 8-day ema supported the S&P 500 from November through December of 2003. That's a seriously fast and smooth uptrend and it could be happening again.

Sweet and Sour 

Spear's team profiled both Valero (NYSE: VLO) and Tesoro (NYSE: TSO) back in May. At that time, he was confidently bullish on these two companies, despite analyst skepticism. Well, in the six months since, the PE ratio of both VLO and TSO have been cut in half and the stock prices have risen 50%. While no one has a crystal ball, Spear and his team going out on a limb once more and suggest that the conventional expert wisdom is going to be wrong, again. He is relying, in part, on his CANSLIM method that recommends buying stocks making new all-time highs. That's the 'N' and the 'L' in the acronym, which stand for New and Leader, and imply not just relative strength, but absolute strength.

He is also relying on guidance from the CEOs of the companies in question and on his belief that both VLO and TSO are in the sweet spot of the refining business, which happens to be sour. In other words, the margins in the refining business don't have a linear relationship with the price of light sweet crude. You can verify this by looking at the charts of VLO and TSO, which are near all-time highs, while December Light Sweet (CL04Z) has fallen 16% in a month.

Read Gregory Spear's complete commentary by clicking: http://at.zacks.com/?id=85

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