Sean and I have known each other for over a decade but there are still things he's interested in learning about my experiences. In this video, Sean asks me how playing baseball made me a better trader or investor. The key takeaways here are:
1) Hard Work and Mental Toughness
2) Preparation and knowing what you will do under any circumstance
3) Learning how to lose. If you fail 70% of the time on the diamond, you get inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Being able to take a loss and move on is part of the path to success.
We have to play the cards we're dealt. Like it or not, this is the environment we're forced to invest in, but only if you want to. You don't have to invest. Cash has been a viable option for 6 months. It's worked out great. Most stocks, sectors, US and International Indexes are still below their January 2018 highs. I can give you the exact numbers like we provide for our Institutional Customers, but just take my word for it. It's not even close. We've been in a 14-month sideways range, or downtrend, depending on who you ask. Either way, it's not an uptrend for most stocks.
Now, this 14-month nothing burger comes within the context of a major bull market in stocks, that arguably started in 2016. After a monster run throughout 2016 and 2017, the stock market, both U.S. and abroad, has consolidated those gains. It seems perfectly normal, and well deserved, if you ask me.
Do you live on the East coast and ever wonder what it would be like to be a trader on the West coast? Could you handle working on a much different schedule? In today's video, we chat with my pal Mehmet Gunay who I met during his time at SMB Capital when I lived in New York City. Today, he lives in San Francisco and seems to have adjusted pretty well to the time change and lifestyle. I would have to agree with him. I enjoy the west coast hours much better than when I lived in New York. The ability to do things after work with plenty of sun light left is very appealing.
We might be in a rangebound market for stocks, but one thing is for sure: the trend for Technical Analysis is up.
I've had a front row seat to the growth of this discipline and its practitioners for the past 15 years, since first starting my journey. I was half way through John Murphy's Technical Analysis of Financial Markets when I knew this was for me. Things only became more clear after that. As I read through Edwards & Magee and many other books, the way markets behaved just started making more and more sense.
The cool thing about working with smart people is being able to learn from them. Having Sean McLaughlin on our team has made everyone better, not just our clients but us as well. In today's video, we tackle the question of when it makes more sense to finance an options position by selling a different contract to collect the income vs simply just buying calls or puts. As usual, Sean does a nice job of explaining this in a way that anyone could understand.
Here's the video from a live interview I did on ET NOW, India's leading business news channel. It's amazing that I could not live further away than I currently do, yet we can still do this sort of thing. Their morning TV is my evening, but it works.
In this interview we discuss the ongoing rangebound market in US Stocks and then we shift gears to India's stock market. We talk about the rotation into small & mid-caps, key levels for both the NIFTY50 and Bank NIFTY as well as the relative strength we're seeing in the bank stocks, particularly ICICI and AXIS Bank.
Going through charts and coming up with conclusions is not just something you do once. For this to work, Technical Analysis has to be a lifestyle. Getting away from the screen regularly and coming back open minded is part of that work / life balance. In this conversation I talk about some of the struggles I've had personally trying not to let the implications of us being right in our assessment impact my decision making. Thanks to Donnie Hensley and Speedtrader for being a part of Chart Summit 2019.
One of the cool things about Chart Summit this year was that we were all surrounded by smart experienced market participants with unique styles and approaches to the market. When you have a collection of talent like this, I think it's wise to pull them off to the side and pick their brains. In this conversation, I ask Todd Gordon about Fibonacci Analysis and why he uses it so frequently. Some people like to dismiss it, and that's fine. If I didn't think it helped, trust me, I wouldn't use it. But it's been helping me every day for well over a decade. I really enjoyed this chat with Todd and I'm thrilled that he was able to be a part of the first ever live Chart Summit in Breckenridge, CO.
People love bragging about their best trades and how much money they made from them. I think it adds much more value to talk about the worst trade I ever put on and share the lessons I learned with all of you. This is one mistake that I will never forget and I have been a better investor because of it!
Chart Summit was a "Ski during the day and Chart at night" event held on February 22-23, 2019 in Breckenridge, CO. I co-hosted it with Brian Shannon and this is the video of my presentation:
The Top/Down Approach to Financial Markets using Technical Analysis
Every month I host a conference call for Premium Members of Allstarcharts. By now I think you've noticed that we're really increasing the content on our YouTube Channel, so I thought it would add some value to include some of the highlights from this month's call.
It's an hour long video call and about 150 charts, but here are a few things that stood out this month:
A weakening US Dollar has been a positive catalyst for Stocks
Freeport McMoRan is a good example of the types of stocks benefiting from Dollar Weakness, on both a relative and absolute basis
London FTSE100 breaking out of a multi-decade base makes it hard to be bearish stocks from any sort of intermediate-term perspective
Our "Dow Fab 5" is breaking out to All-time highs
Crude Oil is beginning its next leg higher, which makes sense with stock prices rising as well
When it comes to strategies, I've noticed that some investors try to force their approach on to the market, even if we're not in the type of environment where that strategy works. The first thing we want to do is identify what type of environment we're in, so that we can then create strategies to try and profit from it. To think we can build a system for a future environment that doesn't exist yet is foolish.
