The markets had a cracking day today.

I’ve been reducing the number of shares in my portfolio, as I felt I had far too much of a “zoo”.

I’ve been experimenting with Stockopedia’s alert system, and I really like that you can trigger an alert based on any of their statistics.

One alert that was triggered this morning was Taylor Wimpey (LON:TW.) , which indicated that price was near support. TW released a trading update, too, which reported “Strong H1 trading performance”, which “traded at the upper end of our expectations for the period and we will report improvements across all of our key financial metrics at the time of our half year results on 31 July. We expect to report a UK operating profit margin for the first half of 2013 of over 13% (H1 2012: 11.2%*).”

The shares were up in early morning trading, so I decided to buy some at 100.64p (all-in costs). The markets have gone ballistic since then, and I’m pleased to see that TW closed up 7.1% to 103.8p.

I’m really liking my momentum strategy at the moment. Buying near support levels (I use the 50d SMA for this) is an idea I’m increasingly in favour of.

It was a difficult decision, though, because it meant selling something else in order to fund the purchase. I opted to sell Globo, Lamprell, and Regenersis. It’s not that I think there’s necessarily anything “wrong” with the shares, or that they were overpriced. It’s just that I thought that they had gone a bit “stale” chartwise. There’s still a lot of blue sky for a share like Lamprell, and Regenersis seems on a great growth path. In the end, you can’t own everything.

I see French Connection (LON:FCCN) is down again due to its connection with Nicole Farhi. The fashion chain collapsed into administration, and it appears that it owes money to FCCN. Some eminent investors have made a lot of money out of FCCN, whilst many have had their fingers burnt. I know I have, in the past. I tend to prefer staying away from disasters as of late, as I have no idea as to whether I’m going to make or lose money from them. FCCN just seems to flip and flop all over the place, and management seem to have…

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