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Unanswered phase one deal question is what imports China commits to (and the caveats)

  
Analysis, Politics
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Will there be a hard target? What about pricing?

Will there be a hard target? What about pricing?
Reuters today reports that China has pledged to buy nearly an additional $80 billion in manufactured goods from the US over the next two years plus $50B more in energy supplies. The deal also calls for Chinese purchases of agricultural goods to increase $32B over two years and imports of US services by about $35 billion.
However some of the details may be kept secret and instead we would get targets for four broad areas: energy, manufacturing, services and agriculture with a total near $200B above the 2017 baseline.
From the Chinese side they risk running afoul of WTO rules and the multilateral system they’re trying to uphold. However that could be mitigated by provisions in the deal that say the US will have to provide the goods at competitive prices.
Global Times editor (and party mouthpiece) Hu Xijin appeared to confirm the deal with that caveat:
As far as I know, China did make a commitment to expand imports from the US. China has a huge market which is growing quickly. It will be more of a test for the US whether it can provide enough products that Chinese market welcomes and are competitive in price.

Livermore on patience

  
Analysis, Education
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In a narrow market,when prices are not getting anywhere to speak of but move within a narrow range, there is no sense in trying to anticipate what the next big movement is going to be up or down. The thing to do is to watch the market, read the tape to determine the limits of the get-nowhere prices, and make up your mind that you will not take an interest until the price breaks through the limit in either direction. A speculator must concern himself with making money out of the market and not with insisting that the tape must agree with him. Never argue with it or ask it for reasons or explanations. Stock-market post-mortems don’t pay dividends.

Do you wish to gamble blindly in the hope of getting a great big profit or do you wish to speculate intelligently and get a smaller but much more probable profit?

Some Trading Secrets

  
  Education
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  • Stop placement
    • Don’t place stops at round numbers (which are common support / resistance zones).
    • Place stops below support zones (above resistance zones) to give price every opportunity to move in desired direction.
  • Trade with the trend
    • Select stocks that are moving with the general market and industry trends.
  • Enter on breakouts near the yearly high
    • Breakouts from chart patterns within a third of the yearly high perform best (statistically). If price doesn’t rise within a few days, consider selling immediately.
  • Exit only on expected significant price turns
    • Don’t be so quick to sell. Learn to predict significant price turns.
  • Use trendlines as sell signals
    • If prices are trending up and then drop below a trendline, the trend isn’t up any longer. However it doesn’t mean that the trend is down.
    • Victor Sperandeo’s criteria to determine if a trend has changed from up to down: (i) price drops below an up-sloping trendline, (ii) lower high (or failed breakout), (iii) lower low.
  • Ignore news
    • Don’t believe scenarios spun by news outlets.

12 Insights About Markets and Life

  
  Education
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12 insights about markets and life from reading Ken Roman’s The King of Madison Avenue and The Unpublished David Ogilvy.

1. Be unorthodox and imaginative in your hiring. Ready to hire people with unusual backgrounds. Would you hire this man for an advertising executive? “He is 38 and unemployed. He dropped out of college. Has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomat and a farmer. Knows nothing about marketing. And has never written any copy. Is interested in advertising as a career at the age of 38, and is ready to go to work cheap.” It was Ogilvy himself who 3 years later became the most famous copywriter in the world and built the eighth biggest ad agency.

2. Treat women as if they are as knowledgeable as your wife when you advertise to them. They don’t like to be talked down to or treated as robots. Peter Lynch and Jim Cramer are not the only investors who got 10 baggers from their wives.

3. The purpose of advertising is to sell a product. Make sure you go for the sale. Forget about aesthetics. Learn from the mail order ads where everything is tested, and no ad continues unless it pays it way. Forget about the 3rd and 4th moments in your quantitative measures and concentrate on making a profit on your trades.

4. Don’t show off or try to be funny. It doesn’t go well in print. It demeans the readers’ intelligence. If you show off in a trade or competition, it will defuse your energy, and take you away from the bottom line. (more…)

What Best Technical Analyst Do ?

  
  Education
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-Technicians believe that there is wisdom in price. That price has memory. That people who were inclined to buy at a certain price are somewhat likely to buy there again. Unless something’s changed, in which case their failure to re-buy (or buy more) at that formerly significant price level can be interpreted in an entirely new way – what was once an area of support on a chart becomes an area of resistance.

-Technicians believe that trends persist, in both directions, because market participants act on “news” at different speeds and act more boldly (or fearfully) the longer a particular movement in the markets goes on. This is why bull markets often end with a buying crescendo in the riskiest securities. Risk appetites grow as an uptrend persists, the desperation to participate gets stronger, it does not fade gently.

This is also why selling becomes more fierce when the market is at a 20% discount to its previous high than when it is at a 10% discount. “How could it be even more urgent to sell down 20% than it is down 10%?” someone would ask. Going by fundamentals, it isn’t. But investors only pay lip service to fundamentals. What they are more concerned with is owning less of the thing that looks stupid to own – and the lower it goes, the stupider it looks.

Unless you buy into the idea that rational behavior rules the investment markets. In which case, you’re reading the wrong writer 

-Technicians find truth in price, rather than attempting to parse the impossibly conflicted and intentionally obscured opinions of the commentariat. Technicians find meaning in the actual buying and selling activity happening today, not in the dusty old 10Q’s of 90 days ago or in the projected estimates being bandied about among the discounted cash-flow analysis crowd on the sell-side.

But above all, technicians respect the power of sentiment more than their fundamentalist counterparts. And sentiment, after all, is how valuations actually come to be – the P in the PE Ratio or the PEG Ratio or the P/B calculation. In the real equation, the only one that counts, the P is what pays, not the E, not the EG and certainly not the B. Buffett would tell you the B (book value) is what pays over time (the market going from a voting machine to a weighing machine). But Buffett can afford to ride it out, having permanent capital under management and an ocean of insurance premiums sloshing in over the transom every hour of the day. Most market players do not.

Markets Will Be Markets

  
  Education
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The stock market is bipolar creature, driven by sentiment and irrational expectations. One day, it is an ingenious forward-looking mechanism that anticipates and discounts future events beautifully. Another day, it is a stubborn schizophrenic that can’t see further than its nose.

Markets constantly overreact to both, identified risks and opportunities. It is in the nature of financial markets to exaggerate, to magnify. This is why they are not always discounting the future. Sometimes, they are correcting previously incorrect view. Sometimes, they just go bonkers and send prices to levels that cannot possibly be justified by any future scenario. Boys will be boys. Markets will be markets. They’ll fluctuate violently, up and down and to levels that will seem incomprehensible to many. Indexing, robo-advising and social media won’t change that. The Internet might have made people smarter; but it hasn’t made financial markets more efficient. You could complain and whine about financial markets’ irrationality or you could find a way to take advantage of it. Or don’t. It’s your choice.

If you understand people’s incentives, you are very likely to predict correctly their future behavior and sometimes even influence it. Most incentives have expiration date. What is important today, might not be as important tomorrow. This applies perfectly to life, but not always in financial markets that live in their own world. Incentives require the existence of rationality. We have already made the point that more often than not, markets are not rational, but emotional, at least in a short-term perspective. As Howard Marks eloquently puts it: (more…)

6 Lessons from Paul Tudor Jones

  
  Education
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  1. I approach every stock with the understanding that my knowledge is imperfect, that I could be wrong and I give myself permission to make mistakes.
  2. If something falls more than 10% versus the market, I force myself to re-evaluate my thesis and think about how I could be wrong – what is the price action trying to tell me.
  3. I ask myself if I didn’t own the stock here, would I buy it today. If the answer is no, I sell immediately.
  4. If something falls below its 200-day moving average I sell 50% of the position right away, and again re-evaluate my thesis.
  5. If a position is causing me a lot of stress or is consuming an undue amount of time on a weekly basis, I cut 50% – the position is obviously too big.
  6. If I wake up worried about a position repeatedly, I cut it 50% immediately.

The 7-Trading Rules

  
Analysis, Education
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Here are the rules – they are not unique or new. They are time tested and successful investor approved. Like Mom’s chicken soup for a cold – the rules are the rules. If you follow them you succeed – if you don’t, you don’t.

1) Sell Losers Short: Let Winners Run:

It seems like a simple thing to do but when it comes down to it the average investor sells their winners and keeps their losers hoping they will come back to even.

2) Buy Cheap And Sell Expensive:

You haggle, negotiate and shop extensively for the best deals on cars and flat screen televisions. However, you will pay any price for a stock because someone on television told you too. Insist on making investments when you are getting a “good deal” on it. If it isn’t – it isn’t, don’t try and come up with an excuse to justify overpaying for an investment. In the long run – overpaying will end in misery.

3) This Time Is Never Different:

As much as our emotions and psychological makeup want to always hope and pray for the best – this time is never different than the past. History may not repeat exactly but it surely rhymes awfully well.

4) Be Patient:

As with item number 2; there is never a rush to make an investment and there is NOTHING WRONG with sitting on cash until a good deal, a real bargain, comes along. Being patient is not only a virtue – it is a good way to keep yourself out of trouble.

5) Turn Off The Television:

Any good investment is NEVER dictated by day to day movements of the market which is merely nothing more than noise. If you have done your homework, made a good investment at a good price and have confirmed your analysis to correct – then the day to day market actions will have little, if any, bearing on the longer-term success of your investment. The only thing you achieve by watching the television from one minute to the next is increasing your blood pressure.

6) Risk Is Not Equal To Your Return:

Taking RISK in an investment or strategy is not equivalent to how much money you will make. It only relates to the permanent loss of capital that will be incurred when you are wrong. Invest conservatively and grow your money over time with the LEAST amount of risk possible.

7) Go Against The Herd:

The populous is generally right in the middle of a move up in the markets but they are seldom right at major turning points. When everyone agrees on the direction of the market due to any given set of reasons – generally something else happens. However, this also cedes to points 2) and 4); in order to buy something cheap or sell something at the best price – you are generally buying when everyone is selling and selling when everyone else is buying.

These are the rules. They are simple and impossible to follow for most. However, if you can incorporate them you will succeed in your investment goals in the long run. You most likely WILL NOT outperform the markets on the way up but you will not lose as much on the way down. This is important because it is much easier to replace a lost opportunity in investing – it is impossible to replace lost capital.

As an investor, it is simply your job to step away from your “emotions” for a moment and look objectively at the market around you. Is it currently dominated by “greed” or “fear?” Your long-term returns will depend greatly not only on how you answer that question, but how you manage the inherent risk.

 
 

“The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.” – Benjamin Graham

 

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