VanEck Market Vectors Junior Gold Mining ETF (GDXJ) has only been on the market for 7 trading days, but in this limited timeframe it has outperformed its large cap peer, the standard Market Vectors Gold Mining ETF (GDX) by over 2%.

I am reluctant to write about Technical Communications Corp. (TCCO.OB), a microcap manufacturer of encrypted communications devices. It took me weeks to even accumulate a small position at the prices I wanted to pay. The stock is damn difficult to buy, at least near the bid.

But it's worth it. There are three reasons why I think that Technical Communications Corp. is a stock worth owning:

At first glance, Chinese microcap shipping concern Sino-Global Shipping America (SINO) has a lot going for it. The chart looks like it will at least retest highs around 5, which would be a gain of over 40% from here. The stock has a small float, over $6 million in cash on the balance sheet, and a miniscule enterprise value-to-revenue ratio of 0.19 (smaller is better). While Sino-Global is still losing a bit of money, it looks like it will generate positive cash flow in the near future. Typically that fundamental setup is a great place to enter a microcap stock.

Next to dedicated trading platforms, web browsers are the most important software programs used by most traders. They are a vital link to the information upon which our trading decisions are based. At the same time, they are unreliable. Every trader has had to reboot because a crashed browser is wreaking havoc with the rest of the system. As Murphy's Law would have it, these crashes usually occur at the worst possible moment — when we are in the middle of a big trade.

I have been loyal to Firefox for a long time, and love many of its plugins. However, it was never all that reliable, and has become less so over the past two years. I have tried everything, from adding memory to removing Google Gears. Some of these tips helped, but none made Firefox truly stable on any of my systems.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the perils of shorting Diedrich Coffee (Nasdaq:DDRX) going into the strong holiday season. One thing I hadn’t considered: a potential buyout.

After the bell Monday, DDRX shares were halted while the company announced that Peet’s Coffee (Nasdaq:PEET) would buy Diedrich in a cash and stock deal valued at $213 million. Peet’s will pay a combination of $17.33 in cash and stock worth approximately $8.67 for each DDRX share.

From a purely technical perspective, there are a lot of reasons why Diedrich Coffee (DDRX) might be tempting to short. Shares are up over a hundred-fold from their 52-week lows of $0.21. Resistance in the 25-26 area looks like it may hold, and momentum is fading.

Is gold setting up for a breather? It sure seems that way to me, and I have adjusted my portfolio accordingly. I took profits on nearly all of my gold mining stock positions on Wednesday, and (gasp!) actually have daytraded gold futures from the short side. Here are the signs that concern me:

1. Silver non-confirmation. For the last month, but especially the last few days, silver has noticeably underperformed gold. Coupled with the fact that silver was unable to get anywhere near all-time highs even as gold set records (not inflation adjusted), this is a signal that gold may correct. Of course, like any other divergence it could be reconciled by the lagging instrument catching up, but the divergence does increase the probability that gold pulls back.

With gold consolidating so close to all-time highs, the deck was stacked for a breakout. While the pundits pointed out plenty of good reasons why the metal should sink, perhaps even sharply, the gold chart showed that the path of least resistance was higher.

And that’s exactly where it went. Overnight, nearby gold futures broke through previous all-time (not inflation-adjusted) highs of $1033.90, and as I write the Dec contract is approximately $1032. Some will attribute the cause to concerns that Middle Eastern countries will switch away from the dollar. That may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but traders know there is more to the story. Gold had been consolidating for months. That it finally made a strong directional move should surprise no one.

I’m hearing a lot of stories from Interactive Brokers (IBKR) customers that lost their connection Friday afternoon.

Interactive Brokers stock chart

Champion Industries (CHMP) showed up on my latest run of the Century Club scan, a TA scan developed with MarketClub’s smart scanner. After a long descent, Champion Industries’ stock price may have bottomed.

The chorus calling for a top in gold continues to grow, but the metal isn’t listening. Over the weekend, a leading European analyst warned gold investors to liquidate positions, arguing that the market had reached a "frenzy."

He must be looking at a different chart than me. The December 09 Gold Futures contract traded on the Nymex doesn’t show a "frenzy." Even the most jaded eye could not find a parabolic blowoff move. Instead, the gold futures chart shows a series of 3-6 day consolidation patterns that were all resolved to the upside. Although a top can occur anywhere, that kind of stair-step movement does not generally signal a reversal.

It's that time of year again. The leaves are turning, football fills our Sunday afternoons, and microcaps face their strongest seasonal headwinds.

Nobel prize winner Eugene Fama and Kenneth French measured the annualized microcap returns by month from July 1926 to December 2004:

For three days, I have watched this flag pattern develop in gold (the chart below is Dec futures but it should be equally apparent in GLD and other instruments):

My views on gold are simple: its within 5% or so of all-time highs, recently broke positively out of congestion, and I’m not going to out-think the move.

At the same time, many traders for whom I have great respect have different views:

Despite the best efforts of Chuck Prince and Vikram Pandit, Citigroup (NYSE:C) (trend Δ update) is not a microcap, or even a smallcap. So forgive the style drift, but this story is too good not to share.

It turns out that Citi is using our taxpayer-funded insurance policy to peddle day-trading accounts to currency speculators over the internet. Here’s a screenshot showing the ad served by Google AdWords on Google reader today:

Tucows (Amex:TCX) may be best known for its eponymous website that distributes freeware and shareware, but most of Tucows’ revenues come from its Open SRS domain platform. At heart, Tucows is a domain registration business whose fortunes will rise and fall with the vitality of the internet, the margins of domain registrars, and its ability to protect and take market share.

Wednesday, Tucows reported Q2 2009 revenues of $20.0 million, down slightly from $20.5 million for Q2 2008, and net income of $4.5 million, or $0.07 per share, up from $2.2 million, or $0.03 per share, last year. The earnings were not all from operations — there were unusual gains of $2.0 million from the sale of an equity investment, $0.6 million related to assignment of patents, and $1.6 million from foreign currency exchange effects (note: last year’s results also benefited from some one-time gains).

Earnings season is not traditionally kind to Rentech (RTK) investors. For years, the stock drifted lower as the company posted loss after loss.

There was a time about two years ago when I received a barrage of emails and phone calls from contacts who were heavily invested in On2 Technologies (ONT). At the time, ONT shares traded at about 2.75.

Fortune Small Business is out with its annual FSB 100 list, which measures the fastest growing (by revenues) publicly-traded small business listed on U.S. exchanges. As always, it is both fascinating and frustrating.

Though the FSB 100 has many intriguing prospects, it is horribly laid out and almost impossible to assess in the format provided. For example, there’s no way on the FSB site to get a handle on the market cap of the list except one company at a time. It's another instance of a layout designed to generate unnecessary page views (and advertisement cpm’s) at the cost of reader convenience.