Articles

Don’t you wonder, when you invest in the stock market, “What are the odds that I’ll be successful?” and “What are the odds that I’ll be wiped out by some price shock?” Actually, it sounds better when it’s in a positive way, but it’s just the other side of the old “risk of ruin.” If […]

Our daughter trades, but she needs to make enough to live on. That bothers me because withdrawals constantly drain the account and makes it impossible to compound the returns, the key to accumulating wealth. I’m sure she’s not the only trader with that problem. The question that I ask is, “how much can you withdraw

I am always impressed by the detailed analysis of the TV financial commentators about yesterday’s market action. But then I remind myself that it was yesterday, not today or tomorrow. I read a lot of articles on forecasting, admittedly a difficult task. But there are some forecasts that are better than others. Recently, an attempt

It doesn’t seem possible and defies most financial theory. We’ve always learned that higher returns require higher risk. How is it possible to get more from less? But during the past few months there have been two articles that have gotten publicity, Moreira and Muir, Volatility Managed Portfolios (Yale, 2016), and Bilello, The volatility cycle

At the risk of being too “geeky,” not all markets will be profitable with all systems. Part of being successful trading is to know which strategies to apply to which markets. We can never be perfect because economics and supply/demand can change, but most markets can be put into a category that favors one trading

Besides showing a new trading strategy, we’ll look at why these statements aren’t true: Large companies cannot grow at the same rate due to their own weight Dogs of the Dow are a good investment because company performance rotates Arbitraging using only DOW stocks is a fool’s errand Analysts seemed to have looked at the

A long, long time ago, back in the 1990s, we had a method called “High-Momentum Trading.” It was a short-term strategy that took advantage of overbought and oversold conditions – not by fading them (selling overbought and buying oversold values), but by buying overbought and selling oversold situations. It does seem contrary to the concept

Is there a Christmas rally in the stock market? Is there liquidation at the end of the year? So far, our election predictions have been correct, that the day after the election will determine the direction of prices for the next three weeks. We’re now past that. What can we expect for the rest of

We’ve all heard a lot about averaging down, scaling in, waiting for a pullback, and other clever methods for entering a position. Most active investors, those who follow a medium to long-term trend, wouldn’t think that whether you enter on open following a signal, or the close, or even the next day, would make much

From the view of alternative investments, bonds have had the best returns for the past 40 years. Well almost. There are periods, some recent, where bond prices have gone down anticipating higher rates that never came. When we think of buying a bond funds, any of a large number of ETFs, the elephant in the