Technical Clues For Century Aluminum Company Investors

With all other things going on, Century Aluminum Company (NASDAQ:CENX) has been on a run — rising 32.47 percent in just three months. It looks like traders are happy with the stock. On the other side, analysts now consider Century Aluminum Company a sell, and a technical analysis of the stock is setting somewhat neutral outlook for now.

Let’s talk about the gap between analyst price targets for the next 12 months and Century Aluminum Company (CENX)‘s current share price. Normally this spread should be in positive territory, indicating that analysts expect an investment’s value to increase over time. Not so with Century Aluminum Company. The median target of analyst views collected by Yahoo Finance was as much as $-1.38 below CENX’s recent stock price. That’s the pessimistic view from Wall Street.

The stock has actually made strong gains in the past year, as the company has gathered a 139.47% return in the past twelve months. But even with this move, there is still plenty of room for the company to come back from a longer term perspective, and especially if we look to recent lows for the company as well.

The company’s share price is down -5.49% from previous highs of around $17.28 per share on June 09, 2017. On the bright side, the company’s share price has been on the rebound, up more than 171.25% since hitting lows of $5.53 on September 14, 2016.

Finally, from a technical perspective, there’s a strong possibility that the stock could enter into a new bull market after finding strong support between $15.49 and $15.93. In terms of pullbacks, $17.05 level is the first resistance point. Technical analysis can help recognize key technical price levels in the stock. Investors can use these support and resistance levels to refine their entries and exits from stocks.

Century Aluminum Company (NASDAQ:CENX) price is pointing towards neither exit nor entry barriers, according to a technical analysis tool called the Relative Strength Index (RSI). Last session Century Aluminum Company RSI was seen at 66.4. RSI measures the speed and change of a stock price to warn investors when a stock’s momentum has carried it too far. An RSI reading above 80 indicates that a stock is overbought while anything below 20 is oversold.

With these kinds of figures it is worthy to note that Century Aluminum Company (CENX) has been put into a sell territory, but there are few other spots to consider. The Stochastic %K for CENX is 83.53. Stochastics is a momentum indicator that uses basic support and resistance levels and integrates with the trend to give accurate buy or sell signals to traders. For stochastics, readings below 20 are considered oversold and you would only take buy signals if the indicator is below that level. A value of 80 is considered overbought and sell signals occurring below that level would be ignored. This leads to longer trades and should result in fewer losses.

14-day Williams %R for Century Aluminum Company (NASDAQ:CENX) moved to around 24.86. The interpretation of Williams %R is very similar to that of the stochastic oscillator, except that the stochastic oscillator has internal smoothing. The oscillator ranges from 0 to -100. No matter how fast a security advances or declines, Williams %R will always fluctuate within this range. Overbought and oversold levels can be used to identify unsustainable price extremes. Simply put, readings in the range of 80% to 100% indicate that the security is oversold while readings in the 0% to 20% range suggest it is overbought.