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A huge earnings calendar next week. 

A huge earnings calendar next week.

In addition to any escalation of the coronavirus, the stock markets will be tested next week by a plethora of earnings announcements.  The “Who’s Who” of companies will be announcing.  Below is the schedule of the major releases (subject to change):
Monday, January 27
  • DR Horton
  • Whirlpool
Tuesday, January 28
  • 3M
  • Starbucks
  • Apple
  • Pfizer
  • Lockheed Martin
Wednesday, January 29
  • Tesla
  • McDonald’s
  • Microsoft
  • Boeing
  • Facebook
  • AT&T
  • General Electric
  • Paypal
Thursday, January 30
  • UPS
  • Amazon
  • Coca-Cola
  • Electronic Arts
  • Biogen
  • Raytheon
  • Verizon
  • Northrop Grumman

Friday, January 31

  • Chevron
  • Honeywell
  • Caterpillar
  • Exxon Mobil
  • Colgate-Palmolive

EBITDA-Humour or Making Fool ?

EBITDA (earnings before interest expenses, taxes, depreciation and amortization): Earnings before I tricked the dumb auditor.

EBIT (earnings before interest expenses and taxes): Earnings before irregularities and tampering.

EBITDA

The Importance of Timing the Market

Any investor can find and research the “greatest” stock on the market; one with huge potential but if the general indexes are negative, it will most likely be the wrong time to buy. A stock with accelerating earnings, rising sales, an up-trending chart pattern and a strong industry group may sound excellent to buy on the surface but will mean absolutely nothing if the market is positioned to move in the opposite direction of your expectations. As soon as a stock is purchased, the time comes for an investor to make a decision to hold or to sell. If the position shows a profit, hold as your judgment is correct. If the position shows a loss, cut it quickly and don’t rationalize the situation before the loss doubles in size. Timing will play an important role in determining if you are right or wrong.

Losers must be cut quickly, long before they materialize into enormous financial disasters. The company and underlying stock may not be a loser but rather your timing may be premature to a strong movement, forcing you to sell on a pullback. After a stock is cut from your portfolio, the transaction must be forgotten about and eliminated from your subconscious mind and/or emotional bank. This may sound as if I am contradicting myself from Monday but I am not. I said the transaction must be eliminated from your memory bank but not the actual trade. (more…)

Bernard Baruch's Ten Rules.

   1. Don’t speculate unless you can make it a full-time job. 

2. Beware of barbers, beauticians, waiters, of anyone, bringing gifts of ‘insider’ information or ‘tips.’ 

3. Before you buy a security, find out everything you can about the company, its management and competitors, its earnings and possibilities for growth. 

4. Don’t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This can’t be done – except by liars. 

5. Learn how to take your losses quickly and cleanly. Don’t expect to be right all the time. If you have made a mistake, cut your losses as quickly as possible.

 6. Don’t buy too many different securities. Better have only a few investments which can be watched.

7. Make a periodic reappraisal of all your investments to see whether changing developments have altered their prospects.

 

8. Study your tax position to know when you can sell to greatest advantage. 

9. Always keep a good part of your capital in a cash reserve. 

10. Don’t try to be a jack of all investments. Stick to the field you know best. 

7 Scariest Things A Trader Can Do…..

  1. Taking a trade with NO EXIT STRATEGY that is a horror movie. It is dangerous to not have a stop loss when you enter a trade becasue if a trader thinks they bought in at a great price the price starts looking better the lower it goes, and terror of all terrors the trader adds more to the trade! It only takes one mistake letting one trade run into a huge loss and add to it to blow up an account.
  2. Shorting the strongest stocks in the market during a bull market is scary as they continue to go up.
  3. Going long a stock in a death spiral due to a business misstep or earnings decline is like riding a roller coast that generally ends up much lower when the trade is finally closed.
  4. “Going all in” on one trade, with this plan all it takes is one bad trade to blow up your account, those are scary odds.
  5. When you are losing you go from your trading plan to “plan B” “hoping” maybe even praying for a reversal. When a trade turns you religious and leads you to pray it is definitely time to get out!
  6. Asking for others opinions instead of following your trading plan or methodology is very scary, time for homework not tips.
  7. It is terrifying to watch someone fight a trend instead of follow it. The bigger they go against the trend the scarier it gets. They are trying to stand in front of an elephant walking and tell it where it should be going.

WISDOM FROM BERNARD BARUCH

From the SAME AS IT EVER WAS file: Bernard Baruch, a colleague and friend of Jesse Livermore’s, who made a fortune shorting the 1929 crash, and then who later advised presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt on economic matters, listed the following investment rules in his autobiography published in 1958 entitled Baruch: My Own Story.  These rules are still as applicable today.


1.  Don’t speculate unless you can make it a full-time job.
2.  Beware of barbers, beauticians, waiters–of anyone–bringing gifts of “inside” information or “tips.”
3.  Before you buy a security, find out everything you can about the company, its management and competitors, its earnings and possibilities for growth.
4.  Don’t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top.  This can’t be done–except by liars.
5.  Learn how to take your losses quickly and cleanly.  Don’t expect to be right all the time.  If you have made a mistake, cut your losses as quickly as possible.
6.  Don’t buy too many different securities.  Better have only a few investments which can be watched.
7.  Make a periodic reappraisal of all your investments to see whether changing developments have altered their prospects.
8.  Study your tax position to know when you can sell to greatest advantage.
9.  Always keep a good part of your capital in a cash reserve.  Never invest all your funds.
10.  Don’t try to be a jack of all investments.  Stick to the field you know best.

The Darvas System in a Nutshell

I  truly admire  author and trader Darrin Donnelly for bringing the system thatNicolas Darvas used to make over $2 million in the stock market into modern times by really setting more precise metrics for the Darvas system. He uses moving averages we have today to look at possible price supports in addition to the price boxes that Darvas used. Below is a concise summary of the Darvas system in an up trending market.

While O’Neil is a brilliant trader who has helped thousands make better investment decisions, I feel that there are some aspects of the CAN SLIM system that, frankly, aren’t all that important in picking winning stocks.

Therefore, we offer a new, easy-to-remember acronym for the Darvas System:

D – Direction of the Market
A – Accelerated Earnings and Sales
R – Relative Price Strength (and Return on Equity)
V – Volume Increasing
A – Aggressive Growth Group
S – Sound Base Pattern

To further explain:

D – Direction of the Market

Is the market, as a whole, in an uptrend?  It is highly unlikely that a stock will have huge gains when the overall market is in a downtrend, so make sure the direction of the market is moving upward.

A – Accelerated Earnings and Sales

Is the company seeing increases in earnings and sales this quarter compared to the same quarter last year?

Normally, you want to see stocks with at least 40% increases in earning AND sales in the most recent quarter compared to the same quarter last year.  And remember, the higher the increase in earnings and sales, the better.  If you have a choice between a stock with a 50% increase and one with a 90% increase, definitely go with the 90% increase stock.

R – Relative Price Strength (and Return on Equity)

Is the stock outperforming most other stocks in terms of its price increase?

Darvas wanted to see stocks that had at least doubled over the past year before he’d consider buying.  If a stock has already increased a great deal over the past year, most investors are fearful of a steep decline, but many studies have shown that Darvas was right in his assessment; if a stock had already made a powerful move, it proved that it had the ability to move in such a fashion and therefore, was likely to do it again.

Another important characteristic of ideal Darvas stocks is a high Return on Equity.  Fund managers love to see a high ROE.  Some put a higher value on ROE than they do earnings and sales. (more…)

Freudian Trading Techniques

Attachment

When I was in college, I had a class in investment analysis. On one particular occasion, we had a group project which consisted of selecting a stock and then giving a recommendation on it. We chose a technology company whose earnings were shot and whose outlook was dismal. As we were deciding on what recommendation to offer, I suggested that  the stock was headed down and that we should recommend a sell. One of the gentlemen in the group immediately replied that he thought we might sound stupid for picking a stock and then recommending to sell it.

That’s when it dawned on me that the ego affects stock selection, evaluation, and recommendation significantly. I told this fellow that the data suggested that the stock was a sell. I also reminded him that the OBJECTIVE of the project was to a evaluate a stock, not to pick a winner. After some thought, I recalled that many analysts viewed the industries which they evaluated as THEIR industry. In doing so, those same analysts were often bullish much too often, including times when it was totally unprofitable to be bullish.

Mine is Better Than Yours

Another example is when I went for an educational seminar. There was no selling whatsoever and it was strictly educational. There were teachers from fixed income, equities, and real estate. Each speaker spoke about how the investment they were discussing was the best performing asset class in history. It was ridiculous but very illuminating. Individuals become emotionally attached when they use the word “my”. “My shoes, my car, my profession, and even my stocks are superior!” Then, I began wandering how detrimental this sort of thinking was. It eats away at profits and increases losses! (more…)

Ten Times When A Trader Should do Nothing

Ten Times When A Trader Should do Nothing

  1. When you are confused and don’t know what to do, do nothing.
  2. There are no set ups on your watch list, then don’t trade.
  3. You are a trend trader and there is no trend to trade.
  4. The market is extremely volatile due to headline risk.
  5. You want to make an option trade but the options are illiquid with a huge bid ask spread.
  6. If you are trying to trade supply and demand but the government keeps interfering with your market, pick a different market.
  7. Your stock reports earnings the next day and you expect a powerful move but it could easily go either way, wait until after earnings to trade.
  8. You are a momentum trader but their is not momentum, then wait.
  9. You play the long side only and the market is in a correction or a bear market, wait for a new trend to the upside.
  10. If you are not at your best mentally and emotionally then don’t trade until you are.

Per capita income in India is Rs 46,492

Per capita income of Indians grew by 14.5 per cent to Rs 46,492 in 2009-10 from Rs 40,605 in the year-ago period, as per the revised data released by the government today.

 The new per capita income figure estimates on current market prices is over Rs 2,000 more than the previous estimate of Rs 44,345 calculated by the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO).

Per capita income means earnings of each Indian if the national income is evenly divided among the country’s population at 117 crore.

However, the increase in per capita income was only about 6 per cent in 2009-10 if it is calculated on the prices of 2004-05 prices, which is a better way of comparison and broadly factors inflation.

Per capita income (at 2004-05 prices) stood at Rs 33,731 in FY10 against Rs 31,801 in the previous year, the latest data on national income said.

The size of the economy at current prices rose to Rs 61,33,230 crore in the last fiscal, up 16.1 per cent over Rs 52,82,086 crore in FY’09.

Based on 2004-05 prices, the Indian economy expanded by 8 per cent during the fiscal ended March 2010. This is higher than 6.8 per cent growth in fiscal 2008-09.

The country’s population increased to 117 crore at the end of March 2010, from 115.4 crore in fiscal 2008-09.

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