24 Breakout Stocks: Flying in the Face of the Hindenburg Omen

(Story updated with more stocks that are picking up momentum.)
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The theory goes like this: two Hindenburg Omen indicators occur within a 30-day window, and it's an all-but-guaranteed trigger of a future stock market crash.

Unless it's not.

For those unfamiliar with the Hindenburg Omen, it is a technical abnormality that occurs when an unusually high number of companies in the New York Stock Exchange reach 52-week highs and lows at the same time. The proportion of New York Stock Exchange highs and lows must both exceed 2.5% of the total listed on the exchange.

And indeed, between mid- and late-August, two Hindenburg occurrences were in fact sighted -- sparking, at the time, widespread fears of a coming stock market crash. By the time the third one had occurred in late August without any devastating stock market event, many had stopped taking it seriously.

BGC Financial director and technical analyst Roger Volz said a confirmation of the Hindenburg signals was being prevented over the last few weeks by a fair amount of bearish sentiment that was already built into the market.

"You almost need to have buy speculation or a high degree of bullish sentiment built into the market to create environment for a market reversal or to break into the downside," he explained. "The speculative flow that would have been needed to come into play to create the environment that would allow for a market collapse or a very strong, major retracement just wasn't there."

Over the last few weeks, Volz was seeing a flow in search of high dividend-yielding stocks by major fund traders and a positive price action "swirling" around takeover names.