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Nine Business Lessons From Celebrities

  
  Education
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If you pay attention, you can find inspiration and lessons that you can apply to your business everywhere you look…

  • Lance Armstrong: Be disciplined. No business will succeed without a lot of hard work and discipline. Commit to it. Stick with it. Eventually, you’ll reach your destination.

  • Paula Deen: Be yourself (and be bold about it). You will naturally succeed if you build a base of followers who are naturally attracted to your personality. Don’t worry about being liked by everybody. Just let your own unique personality shine through.

  • Mr. Rogers: Be positive. I can’t imagine making it in business without a whole lot of optimism.

  • Ellen Degeneres: Have fun. The daily grind, even when you work for yourself, can be dull at times. Doing something you love, surrounding yourself with clients and connections that energize you, and taking time to appreciate the good things in life make it all worthwhile, and who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh every once in a while?

  • Bill Cosby: Keep learning. I used to be so intimidated by what I didn’t know. But I’ve come to realize that such a list is endless, so I just continue to work at it, and I learn more and more each day about how to build a successful business.

  • Carol Burnett: Be creative. Sometimes you have to improvise. You figure it out, and you come to enjoy the journey.

  • Oprah: Build a platform. To succeed in business, you have to have a group of people who believe in you, who want to hear what you have to say, and who want to support you in everything you do.

  • Jim Carrey & Steve Carell: Don’t take it all so seriously. You’re going to mess up, and you will look silly on occasion. Learn to be OK with that.

  • Maya Angelou: Be resilient. Things will not always be easy, but if you refuse to give up and keep bouncing back, they manage to work themselves out.

Atlanta Fed first quarter GDP estimate drops even further

  
Analysis, Education
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Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow falls to +0.5%

The Atlanta Fed’s tracking estimate for first quarter growth continues to point to a dismal start to the year.

Officials cut the tracker to +0.5% from +0.6% last wee

“The forecast for first-quarter real consumer spending growth fell from 0.6 percent to 0.3 percent after this morning’s retail sales report from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Consumer Price Index release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,” the release said.

 

Bill Gross' Advice To Traders As Stocks Crash- Stay out of the bathroom

  
Analysis, Education
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In a time when the S&P fluctuates with unprecedented velocity and investors need HFT-like reflexes to catch any momentum move, this may be the most practical advice to traders we have heard today.

In an email to Bloomberg, the former (and currently in contention for the title with Jeff Gundlach) bond king Bill Gross says to “stay out of the bathroom” as stock markets enter bear territory.

For those who ate Chipotle.coli for lunch, our condolences.

“Markets are recognizing the limited tools they now have to prop up assets AND real economies,” Gross, who manages the $1.3 billion Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, said in an e-mail.
Stocks fell around the world today, with U.S. equities trading at the lowest levels since August as oil plunged below $30 a barrel. Treasuries gained as U.S. economic data did little to ease concerns that global growth is slowing.


 
“Wealth effect constructed with paper – sometimes corrugated/strong, sometimes toilet/flimsy,” Gross said in a Tweet on Friday from the Janus Capital Group Inc. account. “Stay out of the bathroom.”
Gross warned in December that markets were headed for a fall and urged urged investors to de-risk their portfolios or “look around like Wile E. Coyote wondering how far is down,” a reference to the cartoon character whose schemes to catch the bird Road Runner always backfire, often with a plunge over a cliff.
In his e-mail, Gross said that zero-percent interest rates and quantitative easing created leverage that fueled a wealth effect and propped up markets in a way that now seems unsustainable.

His conclusion: “The wealth effect is created by leverage based on QE’s and 0% rates.”

In other words, it was all an illusion.

Richard Donchian’s Trading Rules (Father of TrendFollowing)

  
  Education
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Richard Donchian developed a plan in 1934 (no, that is not a typo) that he soon published as a set of guidelines. The majority of those guidelines are still relevant to every investor today:

  1. Beware of acting immediately on widespread public opinion. Even if correct, if will usually delay the move.
  2. From a period of dullness and inactivity, watch for and prepare to follow a move in the direction in which volume increases.
  3. LIMIT LOSSES, ride profits – irrespective of all other rules.
  4. Light commitments are advisable when a market position is not certain.
  5. Seldom take a position in the direction of an immediately preceding three-day move. Wait for one-day reversal.
  6. Judicious use of stop orders is valuable aid to profitable trading.
  7. In a market in which upswings are likely to equal or exceed downswings, a heavier position should be taken for the upswings for percentage reasons – a decline from 50 to 25 will net only 50% profit, whereas an advance from 25 to 50 will net 100%.
  8. In taking a position, price orders are allowable. In closing a position, use ‘market’ orders.
  9. Buy strong acting, strong background (markets) and sell weak ones, subject to all other rules.

(more…)

Follow Trends

  
Analysis, Education, US Market
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From Richard Russell:

Primary trends can be likened to the power of the ocean tides. Build a sand castle against the ocean tide, and the first wave will wash your castle away. Build a cement wall against the tide, and in a matter of years the cement wall will be reduced to sand and rubble…primary trends, one way or another, go to completion. Or to put it another way, a primary trend will go to completion, no matter what..I said from the beginning, “let the bear market fully express itself.” One way or another it will express itself regardless of the wishes of Washington or the Fed or the Treasury. Interfering with the primary trend will just drag out the situation and make it worse — it will be turning a menace into a Frankenstein…According to Dow Theory, neither the depth nor the duration of a bear market can be predicted in advance. In this bear market, the Dow could fall to 4,000 or 400. I honestly don’t know the answer. In my experience, primary trend tend to carry further than anyone expects. I do know this — yesterday the following broke below their June lows — the Dow, the Transports, the NYSE Composite (which includes ALL NYSE stocks), the S&P Composite, the NASDAQ and the Russell 2000. Any way you look at it, that’s bad action. Maybe just as bad, new lows on the NYSE surged to 164. Hundreds of stocks are breaking down, and even more are hovering just above their 52-week lows. The lower depths of this market are opening up like a giant graveyard. It is said that in a big bear market, stocks return to their original homes — Wall Street.”

Can it happen? Yes. Does anyone know for sure? No. Follow trends.

"Draghi Where's your Euros"

  
Analysis, Education
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Whilst we wait for the outcome of the current round of Cypriot negotiations, let’s have a jolly song to cheer things up. With no apologies whatsoever to Andy Stewart, TMM give you their version of the Scottish classic “Donald Where’s your Troosers”

“Draghi Where’s Your Euros”
I’m back for a while from the Cyprus Isle 
Where if you want your cash you’ll need some guile
And all the locals shout with bile, 
“Draghi, Where’s your Euros?” 
Let the debt blow high and the growth blow low
We’ll levy a tax on your depo
Russia won’t pay so the the Cyp’s all go,
“Draghi, Where’s your Euros?” 
I sat in on a conference call 
There was slippery talk between them all 
And I was afeared that Europe would fall 
‘Cause they wouldn’t give them Euros (more…)

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