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I Say Lower Rates Below 0%!

  
Analysis, Education
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Richard Russell can write:

“The big advance from the May 2009 lows was a bear market rally. The good economic news of the last few months were a mixture of hopes, BS government statistics and rosy propaganda from bleary-eyed economists and the administration. There’s no point in my going over all the damage — the plunge in the NASDAQ, the crash in the Stoxx Europe 600 Index, the smash in the Morgan Stanley World Index, the gruesome fact that at 1071, the S&P 500 is 24% below its level of ten years ago. The damage in dollar terms is reported to be $5.3 trillion. That sounds to me to be a sh– load of money. And the tragedy is that our government has spent two trillion dollars in a vain attempt to halt or reverse the primary bear trend of the market. I said at the beginning, “Let the bear complete his corrective function.” One way or another, it’s going to happen anyway. Better to have taken the pain and losses — than to push the US to the edge of the cliff. Now with the stock market crashing, the national debt is larger than ever. In fact, it is so large that it can never be paid off, regardless of cut-backs in spending or increases in taxes. Had Obama or Summers or Bernanke understood this, they never would have bled the nation dry in their vain battle to halt the primary bear trend. As I’ve said all along, the primary trend of the market is more powerful than the Fed, the Treasury, and Congress all taken together. Our know-nothing leaders have boxed the US into a situation that is so difficult that, for the life of me, I don’t see how we’re going to get out of it. Well, there’s always one way — renege on our debt. Can a sovereign nation renege on its debt and in effect, declare bankruptcy? Sad to say, I think we may find out. One basic force that the world will have to deal with is deflation. This is the monster that Bernanke is so afraid of. To fight inflation is easy — you just raise interest rates and cut back on the money supply. But deflation is a totally different animal. Interest rates are already at zero. The money has been passed out by the trillions of dollars. The stimuli have been issued. What can Bernanke do in the face of deflation?” (more…)

Richard L. Peterson -Trading on Sentiment :Book Review

  
  Education

We all know that sentiment is a critically important ingredient in the pricing of tradable assets. But it is extremely difficult to move from this general and somewhat amorphous principle to a trading/investing edge. Richard L. Peterson takes up this challenge inTrading on Sentiment: The Power of Minds Over Markets (Wiley, 2016).

Peterson is the CEO of MarketPsych, a firm that in 2011 joined forces with Thomson Reuters to produce the Thomson Reuters MarketPsych Indices (TRMI), sentiment data feed covering five asset classes and 7,500 individual companies that Thomson Reuters distributes to its clients. As the Thomson Reuters website explains, these indices use “real-time linguistic and psychological analysis of news and social media to quantify how the public regards various asset classes according to dozens of sentiments including optimism, fear, trust and uncertainty.”

Odds are that, unless you’re a bank or hedge fund employee, you won’t have access to TRMI. Peterson’s book is the next best thing, although you have to realize that if you want to incorporate sentiment (not some proxy for sentiment) into your trading decisions and can’t do big data analysis yourself, you’re working with one hand tied behind your back.

Trading on Sentiment is divided into five parts: foundations, short-term patterns, long-term patterns, complex patterns and unique assets, and managing the mind.

To give a taste of this book (and to address something that affects everyone’s investments) I’ll focus on the chapter on sentiment regimes. As Peterson writes, “Context matters in financial markets. In the academic literature, differences in context are said to be a product of market regimes. A market regime is—in its most simplistic terms—a bull or a bear market. Recent academic research demonstrates that the performance of common investment strategies differs across market regimes, and these differences may be rooted in the divergent mental states of traders in each context (e.g., optimism in a bull market versus pessimism in a bear market).” (p. 270)

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Hesitation

  
  Education
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You are watching a stock that has all the signals you look for in an opportunity. The proper point to enter comes, but you wait. You second guess the opportunity and don’t buy the stock. Or, you bid for the stock at a price that is not likely to get filled if the opportunity does pan out the way you anticipate it will. As a result, you get left behind while the market pushes the stock higher. A short while after the initial entry signal, when the stock has made a decent gain, you decide to finally enter the trade. After all, the market has proven your analysis correct, so you must be smart, and right! Not long after you enter, the stock turns south and you end up with a losing trade. If only you had bought when you first thought about it.

The Solution

This is really just a confidence issue. You are either not confident in your ability to analyze stocks, or you are not confident in the methodology that you are using to pick trades. Therefore, you have to research your method so that you have the confidence that it works. Then, you have to start small, making trades that have a potential loss that you are comfortable with. As you gain confidence in your method and your ability, increase the trade size. With your new found confidence, stand in a crowded room and scream, “I am great!” Well, maybe don’t carry it that far.

22 Rules For Day Trading

  
  Education
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1.Time horizon is one year, not one day
2.Sangfroid wins.  Equanimity is more important than anything else
3.Make your own decisions; listen to yourself
4.When you sell a long, consider a 180 and shorting it (and vice versa)
5.Don’t buy a stock right ahead of an earnings call
6.Your performance is better when you don’t listen to underperformers.
7.Listen to analysts only for potential stock ideas- and do my own work
8.Don’t agree and don’t argue (when you differ in opinion)
9.Be humbly confident when things go your way.  Say “I got lucky this time”
10. Ego has no place here.  Trade to make money, forget pride.
11. Act without full information, while doing efficient work
12. It’s OK to make mistakes.
13. Correct mistakes early- sell on missed earnings/changed thesis, and buy back something you’ve sold if things change. 
14. Learn every day- build a new sheet – read filings- listen to calls
15. Don’t worry too much about what the crowd thinks
16. Don’t waste too much time on big Macro
17. “Sometimes you have to let the other guy make some money too”
18. Worrying is not doing
19. Don’t be a second-guesser or let them hover around you
20.  Sometimes you have to suffer first before you win.
21.  Just because the majority agrees on something doesn’t mean they’re right.
22.  Focus on The Game

Bernard Baruch on Information Overload and Inside Information

  
Analysis, Education
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Bernard Baruch Information Overload Inside Information 1957 My Own Story

Bernard Baruch on inside information: “The longer I operated in Wall Street, the more distrustful I became of tips and “inside” information of every kind. Given time, I believed that “inside” information can break the Bank of England or the United States Treasury”.
Baruch adds that most “inside information” is designed to mislead the gullible and that corporate insiders are just as likely to be led astray by their “infallible” informational advantage and belief in the company. His comments closely resemble Jesse Livermore’s sentiments on stock tips and insider information. 
Trading on tips: Echoing Joseph Kennedy’s anecdote about the stock-tipping shoe shine boy of 1929, Baruch relates his own tale of taxi drivers, shoe shine boys, and beggars offering hot stock tips and market analysis.
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