Category Archives: Discipline

May 16th, 2012

The Difficult Choice

The times aren’t easy for market timers.  The market has declined around 6% since the April 2 peak of 1419.04 and the anxiety level is rising.  The question of every market  timers lips are: “Should we sell into this decline and, if so, how much?  Is this a collapse similar to the stealth bear market brought on by last year’s Federal budget deficit crisis, the S&P downgrade of US debt and the deepening lose of confidence in the Euro currency?  Or, as many have discussed before, are we merely going through a typical “sell in May” correction which, if we stay put, we’ll recover from relatively unscathed in the fall?

Contrarians might take the opposing side and ask “Should we take advantage of the opportunity presented by lower prices and begin to pick up some bargains while we have the chance?”  As the saying goes, that’s what makes a market.  Two diametrically opposing views leading to two opposite courses of action, both coming from the same set of facts.

Unfortunately, the chart of the S&P 500 doesn’t provide much insight as to the best course of action.  I first began surveying what I called a “congestion zone” on April 12 in “Identifying the Boundaries of Stock Chart Congestion Areas” and followed that up on April 23 with “The Lower Boundary is Becoming Clearer“.  Here we are, just over a month later, and without any clearer idea of what the boundaries of the zone are or whether we may have actually fallen through the bottom of the zone and began a downward trend.  The striking thing is the apparent similarity between March-April hump this year and the April-May hump last year.  Let’s hope the slide when the Index crossed below the 200-dma last year isn’t repeated this year.

The market index has fallen through the lower boundary of what could have been a flag pattern.  It fell below what I was hoping would be the neckline of a small head-and-shoulders pattern.  It fell below the 100-dma and is quickly approaching the 200-dma (which, coincidentally lies just above the 300-dma).  If last year is any example, then the selling could again be quick and deep.  But the recovery 4-6 months later was just as sudden and it may be so again this year.

The Market Momentum Meter was tested against nearly 50 years worth of stock market history and in the process identified the conditions (as reflected in the relative positions of the moving averages and the Index itself) under which exiting the market was the best strategy.  At other times, staying in the market, regardless short-term fluctuations, was the best long-term strategy.

So far, the Meter is still signalling a full commitment.  However, extrapolating further straight-line declines of an average -0.168% per day (the average daily rate of market declined between March 26 and yesterday’s close), the signal would turn a Cautious/Yellow when the Index hit approximately 1290 and a Bear/Red at 1240.  Coincidentally, those are the approximate levels of the 200-dma and of a long-term trend line that has been the locus of multiple pivot points since the Tech Bubble began in 2000, respectively.

Last year, however, the market’s decline was so steep and rapid that the Meter’s exit signal was too late.  Furthermore, the recover was rather quick so that it failed to signal a timely return.  Unfortunately, the difficult choice being faced is between violating our discipline and sticking to the discipline and risk further losses.

May 3rd, 2012

Rohrbach on Market Timing

I shouldn’t but I will anyway.  I shouldn’t whine but you’re all friends or you wouldn’t be reading this so I’ll borrow your shoulder to cry on and your ear to hear my complaint.  OK, here it goes, “I don’t understand why more of you haven’t subscribed?”

I happened across a series of interviews on Forbes.com with Jim Rohrbach of Investment Models about using moving averages to spot trend changes.  The essence of Rohrbach’s message is that:

  • “[You] can’t look into the future. If you can just identify when the trend changes, that’s all you need.”
  • “[Most traders] don’t know how to identify a change in the trend in the market, and it’s not that difficult, if you spend the time to try to figure it out.”
  • [most investors] are being told constantly by brokers, etc., ‘Don’t try to time the market…it can’t be done.’
  • [Rohrbach] “spent seven years working on the mathematics of that thing. I kept stumbling, but I finally came up with a way where I can take certain ingredients, which I’m not going to tell you what they are, and if I applied them to the mathematics, I could tell on a daily basis what the trend of the market was for that day.”
  • “Convert the action of the market into a number. That number represents the trend for today. If the market is going up several days in a row, that number will go up, and vice versa.  But you’ve got to know the ingredients, and you’ve got to use mathematics. Don’t listen to those guys on the Street, or wherever, who tell you the reasons for the market going up or down, because they have nothing to do with reality.”
  • “And you’ve got to stay in [Apple] if you’re really going to capitalize on this thing. If you get out because Apple dropped ten points today, that might be a big mistake…… Stay in, stay in, stay in. Even if the market goes down 200 points.”
  • “You don’t have to be smart. You have to be intelligent. You have to have a strategy that tells you when to get in and out….if you have something that’s worked for 40 years, then once you know where the market’s going, the trend of the market, then you can start playing around with individual investments.”
  • “Just play it with the market. It’s telling you—and I know that’s kind of difficult for the average person to do, and it’s also very difficult for them to have the discipline to act on every signal. Your emotions get involved in this game, especially when your money’s involved.”

I tell you all this because I want to demonstrate what I’ve been writing here about since starting this blog over six years ago are the same things that others in the know have been doing also.  I also studied the market’s action since 1963, almost 50 years worth of history, and came up with my own mathematical indicator as to the strength of the market’s momentum and direction; I call my indicator the Market Momentum Meter.

If market conditions remain relatively unchanged over the next several weeks, the Market Momentum Meter will approach a critical level early in June.  Members to Instant Alerts see what the Meter’s reading is each time I make a trade; each day’s reading is recapped in the Weekly Report.

Rohrbach charges $395/yr for his market timing service or, as he says, “about a dollar a day”.  My service is less expensive plus you can see how I translate my Market Momentum Meter into actual trades shortly after their execution.  I also keep track of the the performance of those trades in a Model Portfolio because market timing needs to be followed with a high success factor in stock selections (even the best in baseball strike  out once in a while).

The market is at a critical point.  Is it correcting or reversing?  Should you sell in May and go away or buy in anticipation of a market resurgence?  Become a member to see what I’ve done.  Don’t put it off, act now!

May 2nd, 2012

“Trading Around a Core Market Direction View”

Jim Cramer did one of his “I’m going to teach you ‘homegamers’ how to trade the same as I did when I was in my multi-million dollar hedge fund years ago” shows.  The point at which I was surfing through the show was when he was answering a viewer’s question about when to sell a winning position?  His answer was that if the viewer didn’t want to act like a novice trader, he needed to “trade around your core positions”.  But what does that mean?

According to the show’s transcript, the concept involves:

  • start by picking a stock about which investor has an opinion. They should believe the stock could go higher over the long term. It should be a great underlying company with a stock that could get tossed around by market volatility, but nevertheless has potential to push higher in the long haul.
  • Each time the stock jumps 3 percent, the investor sells 16% to make some profits and continue selling shares as the stock advanced until the position was reduced by 50%.
  • At that point, the investor would wait for the stock to be knocked down, so they can buy more shares.  When the stock declines 6%, the investor would buy back 16% and continue buying in increments until the original position was repurchased.

According to Cramer, “A lot of people think that trading is incredibly exciting and it can be, but if you’re good at trading around a core position, you should be pretty bored because all you’re doing is watching the stock move and trimming or adding to your position accordingly.”  It sounds simple enough but, I’m sorry, the market isn’t that accommodating and unless your portfolio has less than a handful of stocks to follow it sounds like just to much trading.

Rather than watching the daily trading patterns of individual stocks, I like to “trade around a core position” where the core position is my total portfolio and the trading is making essential a single investment decision: “How much should be invested and how much cash should remain at the present time.”  What I’ve found is that investing is essentially a risk and cash management strategy.  There are times when you should be fully invested (or more so when using margin) and other times when you need to be 100% in cash.

I arrived at that conclusion by watching the action of individual stocks and my total portfolio as compared with the S&P 500 Index.  What I’ve found is that the odds are that stocks tend to follow the market’s general direction; they may vary in degree but the direction of the movement is usually in the same direction.  Regular readers are familiar with a saying that I’ve quoted here often: “50% of a stock’s price movement can be attributed to the overall movement in the market, 30% to the movement in its sector and only 20% on its own.”  Here are several examples from today’s trading.  The blue line is the S&P and the black is the stock on a on minute chart:

  • TKR
  • EOG
  • CE
  • ALGN
  • LLTC

I could go on and on but you get the picture.  When the market goes up, most  stocks will go up; when the market goes down, individual stocks will likely go down.

Bottom line, it’s probably more important having a good sense of what the market will be downing this minute, this morning, this week, this month or the next six months than it is trying to predict what individual stocks will be doing.  Rather than timing sales of individual stocks by the price action of that stock,  it’s probably more worthwhile tying that transaction to what the market will be doing.  Rather than selling a stock because it’s gone up 10%, 20% or even 50%, you should time the sale to the health of the market or industry group.  Conversely, time purchases according to whether the market will be firm or if it’s on the verge of correcting or reversing.

“Trading around a core position” can lead to either major opportunity costs in lost profit or real losses from buying into a deteriorating stocks or market.  Figuring out market direction is probably time better spent then finding stocks with the most ideal stock charts.  When the market is rising it’s more important to throw money at a diversified portfolio (or even into index ETFs) than trying to find “the best” stocks to buy; when the market is falling, getting out of the way is more important than trying to decide which stocks will survive the downdraft and which won’t.

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April 12th, 2012

Identifying the Boundaries of Stock Chart Congestion Areas

I was traveling this week so, fortunately, I wasn’t able to react to the ups and downs of the market this week.  If I had, I would have been closing some really good positions on Monday and Tuesday and then kicking myself as I scrambled to put them back on Wednesday and Thursday.  The lesson to be learned that was reinforced yet again is to turn off the CNBC, tune out the noise of all those explanations (read “rationalizations”) for why the market had done what it had done and to focus intently on the longer term for true trend reversals.

For the past several weeks I’ve been writing to members in my Weekly Recap Report that

“This narrowing, trading range can’t continue indefinitely and, I believe, will in all probability be resolved with the market falling below the bottom trendline as contrasted with a highly unlikely blow-out cross above the upper boundary.  I’m guessing the cross (the “collision”) will take place as the market approaches the horizontal resistance trendline extrapolated to occur sometime towards the end of April.  Coincidentally, that also coincides with everyone launching into their seasonal ‘Sell in May and go away’ discussions.  Taking that course of action would have been the right move to take in 2010 and 2011 and could again be true this year.”

But even that wasn’t sufficient to call this week’s action as a reversal.  There are millions of investors around the world making a huge number of trading decisions every day.  It takes more than a few hours, days and even weeks of trading to have this ship, the market, list to the other side as the majority of them run from one side (the bull side) to the other (the bear side).

One of the most difficult challenges in charting is distilling from the daily action the true boundaries of emerging chart pattern that are emerging from the congestion of what will, with the clarity of perfect hindsight will be either an obvious reversal or consolidation pattern.  Boundaries require pivot points, the short-term reversals made be either the market or individual stocks.  I’ve inserted three possible bottom boundaries based on the market’s recent behavior:

The important take-aways from this exercise are:

  1. Don’t get wedded to one point of view or another too early as to the market’s future course (and that’s what we’re most interested in since it determines 50% of each stock’s performance).  Congestions, those times when sellers and buyers, bulls and bears, supply and demand are fairly much in balance struggling to take control of the future trend.
  2. Regardless of how astute or knowledgeable you may think you are, it’s nearly impossible to predict the outcome and nothing you do can change what the ultimate outcome will be.  The best course is to wait for the trend.
  3. Don’t get wedded to what you think will be the pattern likely to emerge.  Supply and demand is dynamic and constantly in flux.  It’s difficult making money during these congestion periods but profits are relatively easy to come by when either a bullish or bearish trend emerges.

It’s only after several pivot points are made over an extended period of time (weeks or months) that solidify the trendlines will you be able to determine whether the congestion will in all likelihood be a consolidation, a top reversal or a bottom reversal ….. and then the market will confound you further by either doing the opposite or continuing adding further clarity to the congestion area.

February 27th, 2012

2 x 10 Investment Lessons

Years ago, I regularly visited a site that offered nothing more than a wonderful,  limitless supply of Wall Street sayings, truths and rules-of-thumb.  When I found the market to be frustrating or demoralizing or I caught myself being giddy with optimism or self-satisfaction I would turn to the site and read some wise quotations from market pioneers or real, true stock market gurus.

I usually try to bring you fresh ideas and concepts but I need to bring this to your attention the following item which happens to be all over the Internet because 1) I think it’s so true and 2) you may have been missed it because today each of us is being continually inundated with information and data useful and otherwise.

Jeremy Grantham, British investor and co-founder and Chief Investment Strategist of one of the largest asset management firm in the world, Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), based in Boston.  Grantham is regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in various stock, bond, and commodity markets, and is particularly noted for his prediction of various bubbles.  He just contributed a list of his 10 lessons investors have to learn in order to survive and succeed as investors to MarketWatch.

Bob Farrell, formerly Merrill Lynch’s chief market strategist, pioneered technical analysis of stock movements and broke new ground using investor sentiment figures to better understand how markets and individual stocks might move.  Many years ago, he had come up with his own lost of 10 lessons for investors.

I’ve combined those two lists into new tablets of 20 commandments.  I suggest you click on the image, print it and post it prominently above wherever you make most of your investment decisions or do your trading.  Whenever you are confused and don’t really know what to do about a stock or about the market, read the list again … it will help clear your head and regain your balance.

February 17th, 2012

The Gestation and Rebirth of “Buy and Hold”

As January ended, I reiterated a hypothesis that the market was following the script written at the end of the 1970′s secular bear market by writing in That Old 1978-82 Analog Again,

“On the one hand, we might actually be escaping the Bear Market sooner than I had originally anticipated but, on the other hand, the analog may still be in play and we’re looking at a possible reversal for the remainder of 2012 in order to get back closer to the analog.  I guess if I had to choose between swallowing my pride at having missed a “forecast” and accepting the upside break out or meeting the forecast but delaying the opportunity of seeing a higher market again ….. I’ll live with having missed a forecast.”

Compare the two secular bear markets, note the similarity and draw your own conclusions (click on image to enlarge):

  • 1969-1980
  • 1999-2012

Combining the two charts in sequence produces the now familiar view:

For the past 5-10 years we’ve been listening to the mantra “Buy and Hold is Dead”.  Just do a search on the term and you see books, videos, TV clips, articles and blog posts …. I’ve probably even wrote it here several times over the past 6 years of this blog’s existence.  Not to be just a contrarian but because I believe it might be true, I now offer a heresy.  If we are witnessing the death of the current secular bear market might we not also be seeing the rebirth of buy and hold?

If the market over the next several quarter into early 2013 is laying the groundwork for a new bull market might it not be the right time to load up on stocks with great growth potential that you’ll want to hold for several years through several corrections?  It begins not with the search for specific names but with a reorientation of mindset to accept the possibility that the market can and will exit the secular bear market by crossing above the previous highs and finally move into uncharted waters.

Let me know if I’m being a cock-eyed optimist or that it might actually turn out to be a plausible scenario.

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February 14th, 2012

Is the Market Overvalued and Overbought?

I was struck by a post on Slope of Hope entitled “An Ongoing Balloon Ride” the major premise of which was that the the market has risen too far and diverged too far from its 400-dma such that there’s no questions “if this debt-filled balloon will disintegrate, but when“.  The writer’s premise is that the several times in the past when the Index has diverged as far as it has from its 400-dma have all been followed by a drop or correction.

I have my own database and decided to do my own research and gather my own facts to see whether I could replicate those results and come to the same conclusions.  My database goes back to 1963 and the moving average I rely on is the 300- rather than the 400-dma (but what difference does a hundred days make between friends).  The Slope writer visually picked the areas when the index diverged significantly from the moving average and eyeballed the subsequent change.  What I discovered was:

The S&P 500 Index is currently 6.38% above the 300-dma.  In the 12,089 trading days between March 12, 1963 and March 11, 2011, a spread between the index and the 300-dma of 5.00-7.99% occurred on one out of every 6 days, or 16.89% of the time.  One could almost say that this spread is “typical”, not large or overbought or stratospheric.  Actually,  it’s fairly typical.

One can look at both tails of the distribution as indications of how extreme the spread defining overbought or oversold situations, times when one needs to sell or has a true opportunity to buy.  In 2008 and 2009, at the depths of the Financial Crisis Crash, the market was over 35% below the 300-dma …. we should have all bought then but few had the nerve.  In August, 1987, the market was 24% above the 300-dma; a few months later, the market suffered it’s largest single daily decline in the October Crash …. we should have sold.

The market was more than 20% above the 300-dma also in 1983 as the market rocketed in celebration of its exit from the secular bear market of the 1970′s.  Rather than crashing, the market went into a horizontal consolidation lasting 15 months (just like the past 15 months?  I’ll leave that determination for you to make.)

So is the market now overbought?  Not if you use the 300-dma as a benchmark.  Did the Slope of Hope contributor select a seldom used 400-dma benchmark to prove his point?  It’s possible.  Where would the market have to be for it be overextended or overbought by these measures?  Somewhere around 1500-1550 …. interestingly, exactly the level of the market’s all-time high as measured by the S&P 500.

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February 9th, 2012

Will the Market Soon Cross into All-time New-High Territory?

There’s no question about it, I’m definitely in the minority.  First I wrote a piece entitled “KISS in Market Timing Too” in which I compared my approach to a complex algorithm developed by Ciovacco Capital Management called the Bull Market Sustainability Index (BMSI).

I followed that up with a piece yesterday entitled Market Momentum Turning, But Will It Accelerate? in which I see each of the four moving averages that I use in my Market Momentum Meter market timing tool having turned up and soon approaching a perfect bullish alignment (50-dma>100-dma>200-dma>300-dma).

Now I see something written by Ray Barros in Green Faucet entitled “S&P Nearing A Top?” in which he lists the following six indicators that have convinced him that the market is just one step like the failure of Greece debt negotiations away from collapsing into a bear market. Those six technical indicators are:

  • Price – Structure: The 12-Month Swing and 13-week swing show we are in a sell zone. Figure 3 shows that since the Dec 2, 2011 that the up move has been on declining volume and range. In this context this is bearish.
  • Time: Kress Cycles suggest we are in a window when a top is likely.
  • Momentum: Figure 4 shows that this up move has been on declining momentum.
  • Sentiment: The sentiment indicators I use suggest the S&P is skewed to the upside.
  • Normalised Volume: We saw a sell setup with ‘below normal range’ and ‘normal volume’.
  • PoMo: For me, this indicator generated a sell signal today.

He even includes charts depicting each of the above as supporting evidence like the one below:

However, I looked at those charts and what struck me was that: 1) they were so complicated and there was so much to digest that I couldn’t possibly make heads or tails of them and 2) I wondered what those signals might indicate if we hadn’t been in a secular bear market for the past 11 years.

The answer to his question of whether the market is approaching a top is definitely yes!  I have little doubt that the market will approach the previous all-time high of 1576 sometime this year or next.  The correct question to ask is will the market soon scale to new heights and cross into all-time new-high territory?”  Since my Market Momentum Meter is turning bullish at these loft levels, I hope the answer is yes and I think the answer will be yes.

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February 8th, 2012

Market Momentum Turning, But Will It Accelerate?

Many decry the lack of volume, conviction on the part of most individual investors, the lack of excitement about a market that just doesn’t seem to want to turn lower but instead inexorably continues to move higher.  Beneath the surface and behind the scenes, however, something is happening.  Many aren’t aware of it because of their focus always on today’s “Breaking News”, earnings reports or press releases.  What most don’t see is the change that’s taking place in the form of a slow turnaround in the trend of market momentum as measured by the moving averages.

In a piece entitled “Sweet Dreams” way back on October 14, 2010, I wrote:

…… have you taken a look recently at how the four moving averages (50- ,100- ,200- and 300-day) are converging as they were all trying to squeeze through the neck of a bottle? (click on image to enlarge)

First, it’s important to note that sometime next week, the dreaded “Death Cross” of the 50-dma crossing under the 200-dma that we were so fearful of at the beginning of July will be reversed and, by definition, will become the “Golden Cross”.

Also note that the four moving averages are transforming themselves into a bullish alignment so long as the Index itself remains above them all for the next month or so. That’s pretty monumental because it is a solid confirmation that a bull market is in place.

A few days before I’d written this piece, Europe’s Finance Ministers approved a rescue package worth €750 billion aimed at ensuring financial stability across Europe by creating the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF); six months later (May 2011), our stock market was 16% higher.

But the situation in Europe appeared to continue deteriorating. It became evident then that due to its severe economic crisis, Greece’s tax revenues were lower than expected making it even harder for it to meet its fiscal goals. Following the findings of a bilateral EU-IMF audit in June, further austerity measures were called for while Standard and Poor’s downgraded Greece’s sovereign debt rating to CCC, the lowest in the world.  Simultaneously, our stock market seemed to hit a wall; it cratered in August 2011.

The market now seems to be again trying to squeeze through the neck of that same bottle.  Last week, the Black Cross again turned back to Gold and  all four moving averages finally turned up this week.  Within a month or six weeks, the four moving averages will right themselves and we’ll see them in a perfect bullish alignment again.  Note the similarity between the 2010 above and what it looks like today:

I wrote to my members at the end of January that

“Going back 50 years, there haven’t been many periods when this convergence [of moving averages] has existed outside of market turns and that’s why I believe the market will soon begin trending higher. Obviously my anticipation isn’t based on an astute distillation and analysis of domestic or international economic and financial data. This prognosis is based on my read of the history of market psychology and behavior.”

The convergence continues to unfold.  Psychology is changing to match the more positive economic news.  We have begun adding to our positions with focus on select Industry Groups.  If there won’t be another surprise to hit us from left field (not intended as a reference to the elections this November) then we should continue putting cash to work as momentum begins really accelerating.

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February 3rd, 2012

Launching The Next Tech Bull Market

The big news today is that the Tech sector, as represented by the Nasdaq Composite Index, crossed into territory it hasn’t seen for more than 11 years (chart below is as of noon; actual close was 2905.66).  What this means is that the average Tech stock has surpassed the previous high set before the market’s collapse in the Financial Crisis Crash of 2007-09; new highs are breaking out in many tech stocks.

With the market measured in terms of my preferred benchmark, the S&P 500 Index) having risen by more than 22% since the October low, it’s probably a great time to ask the following two questions:

  1. What does “market timing” mean (or more correctly, what do I mean when I use the term “market timing?”) and
  2. With the market having gone up so far, it isn’t the time to jump in but rather the time to take profits and exit?

I’m not sure there are any “correct” answers to these questions …. and don’t let anyone who gives you an answer tell you that it is the correct one ….. there are only opinions.  So what I’m about to offer is my opinion and the discipline I intend to follow as hopefully the market enters into its next bullish phase.

To me, “market timing” means catching the beginning of a big wave and staying on until the end.  The most fun (read “fastest, easiest gains”) is in the earliest part of the ride; the hardest, roughest part is towards the end.  Earnings are multiples higher than they were in 2000 so, with the average tech stock now reaching heights it hasn’t seen in over a decade, I’d say this is the beginning of that ride.

That’s not to say that this ride won’t hit some bumps along the way.  There probably will be a retracement back to that resistance trendline at the 2007 high sometime over the next year in the form of a “buyers’ remorse correction” as many will second guess the advance in the light of some bad news (we can’t predict what that bad news might be but the “Talking Heads” in the business news media will create a story and claim that it’s the cause).  But that, too, will pass and the market of tech stocks will continue advancing.

Within the realm of possibility is seeing the Nasdaq Composite nearly double over the next 3-4 years and test its all-time high of 5132.32 made in March 2000.  It will take determination and iron nerves but it could also be extremely rewarding if you pick and stick with the right tech stocks and, if you make a mistake, quickly cut your losses.

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