It’s been a good start to the new year, with breakouts in small to mid caps doing especially well.  The number of breakouts increased in the last half of January with a total of 59 stocks breaking out (from the pool of around 800 companies that I follow).  Once again oil, commodities and metal did well.  Cement and railroads have also been surging.

The screenshot below provides a glimpse of the SelfInvestors.com database screen that returns the top breakouts of the past 2 weeks.   Please go here to see a larger view of the screenshot. 

The screenshot shows only those breakouts with a combined fundamental and technical score of 50/60 or above.  To see the entire list as well as many other screens you’ll need to sign up for premium membership. 

The biggest winner in the period was Empire Resources (ERS), which vaulted more than 30% after clearing all time highs above 14.  In fact, many steel and aluminum stocks have done extremely well in the past couple weeks.

As a clear sign of strength of breakout stocks in the past couple weeks (and a good indicator of market strength as well), the worst performing breakout stock (First Republic Bank – FRC) dropped 8% from the breakout point.  No other breakout ended the period with a loss larger than 3%.

There are some nice looking opportunities in this group.. I’m short on time tonight so I’ll leave the charts to you.  However, if anyone would like a further analysis of any of the stocks above I’d be happy to add the chart at a later time.. Just go ahead and leave a comment.