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一个笨蛋的股指交易记录-------地狱级炒手

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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:11 | 显示全部楼层
« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
January 30, 2006Sentiment,,,,,againBullish sentiment, as I measure it, is off the charts tonight in a fashion it  hasn 't shown since December 2004 and the first quarter of 2005.  There are eight measurements I take and keep by hand daily. The five day 2CS which I show from time to time on charts is heading back to the extremes of several weeks ago. All of the one day readings of the others are in sell territory as well.


As I always wish to underline and make clear, these are not timing devices. They are more like a weather storm report. They suggest you wear a raincoat instead of shorts  and a t-shirt. The storm could blow over or be later than expected, but beware  those clouds on the horizon.


The big boys like to unload inventory into bullish enthusiasm, so they sometimes take a while to get it done. Besides the timerlines for this week, some work from another and honored source suggests the end of this week could be vulnerable.


January 30, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


January 29, 2006TimeSo far I am making no changes in my plan which has been in place now several months. Very slowly and selectively I am selling highly  appreciated stock funds on good strength days and holding short hedges. With that strategy,  raising cash (now to 39%), and  with modest metals and energy longs, total account values are rising nearly every day. But the risk is declining. Even with these large cash balances (earning 4.1% at Vanguard Prime Money Market), we are up 2% on the year, which is nothing for gunslingers but great peace of mind and decent cash flows for retired gunslingers.


There are two timelines in play, both shown on the chart in the black oval: one was for Friday or early Monday, the other for Thursday February 2, also known as "Groundhogs Day". The first line cross is so close to the  low of last Thursday that it might be a late buy.



Click on image for larger view.

This is an exciting position since I am at a riskless edge but with lots of cash for buying if I find I am wrong. My best guess still is that we go down into the 23rd of February's 77 week low. Sentiment as I measure it maintains its downward pressure. Loekke's  work and my own attempts at "reverse engineering" suggest a low in February and a secondary rise into spring or even early summer.
I am trying very hard to resist the urge to buy something that is outperforming, but everything I see looks overvalued or vulnerable except dollar cash. In the long run gold, silver, and stocks are excellent. I can't see the current situation lasting very long.


January 29, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


January 22, 2006The Great DebateKate Welling interviews are always of interest, but a new one she has done with Marc Faber and Louis-Vincent Gave is a must read:

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/2006/0112.html


January 22, 2006 in Long Wave | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)


2CS UpdateClick on image for larger version.


January 22, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


How Now Down Dow Click on image for larger version.


January 22, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


January 17, 2006Long term sentimentLong term sentiment a la mode de Loekke?



January 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


January 10, 2006Loekke, Kondratieff, Hays, and DentThe comment of January 4th  from Simon Ward is very welcome:


"'Tom,


I really appreciate the blog - many thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Some time ago you talked about a possible range shift in 2CS and a 1935-37 scenario. Would you mind saying a bit more about why you think the weight of evidence has shifted against this possibility?

I guess this is more or less the same as the Dent scenario:


http://www.hsdent.com/download/forecast10-05.pdf

,p>
BTW, have you seen that Helge Loekke - whom I believe you have mentioned before - is now updating his web-site again?


http://www.wcamodel.com


He is looking for surprising strength into April followed by a (serious?) bear phase.


Thanks again,

Best wishes,


Simon""

<



Simon, the 1935-37 scenario was based almost entirely upon a chart pattern. The more I looked at it, the more dissimilar the two times seemed in terms of stock market valuations, interest rates, inflation rates, etc. Valuation in particular is not conducive to a major expansion  of prices **barring  a hyperinflationary  bubble**.

Harry Dent ignores all of that and favors the FED/IBES valuation model, like fellow hyper-bull Don Hays, and an 80 year cycle. Dent does make a good case that the chart pattern of a high level consolidation horizontal channel is a bullish pattern. His favorite is 1923-24 after the post-WWI crash and recovery.

The 77 week cycle has been dominant for a long time now, and except for late March 2000, it has coincided with lows, not highs. Given the four year US presidential cycle, also due this year, I felt that the internal weakness I was seeing in the stocks was compatible with an early 2006 high and possibly a scary decline into late February 2006 when the 77 week cycle would normally be due.


If that were to happen, we  could then go on and have a 1935-37 bull market analog. And we may. But I have naturally had in mind what could happen if the stock markets continued to run up into February or March instead of falling. This is where Helge Sundar Loekke's big cycle update fits in and causes me concern. I don't recall ever seeing his projections after last October, so I am really grateful that you posted the URL to his update. His work is another piece of the puzzle, but an important piece, especially as the mometum peak of his master cycle is precisely in the 77 week cycle  time. Of course I have no knowledge of how he makes his "soup", but I have always liked it .

I sent Loekke an email overnight, and he confirmed his bullishness which he feels will have the momentum to last into April or May. I sent him the SP500 chart with the 77 week cycle (dash-dot blue vertical lines). He didn't comment on the cycle, but said SP500 might even get up to my red/pink line, which is over 1400!


My belief and bias is that we are in a long inflationary economic cycle wave up  from the disinflationary saucer bottom  of 1998/99 to 2001/03. This is the Kondratieff Wave, which has been much abused over the past 15 years by revisionists of several types. In the K Waves of the past 200 years, the hyperinflationary component came later in the 20-30 year upgrade. But this is the first possible non-"Western" cycle, so perhaps we will have early  hyperinflation instead of late. I still don't think so, although the past few months experience with gold, which I own and won't be selling for years, is trying to convince me otherwise.


If we are to have a meaningful stock market bottom in February or March we must start down soon, and I persuaded myself that we would do so after the normal seasonal high passed for stocks: close to New Year's Day for SPX and Dow and close to mid January for Nasdaq. However, cycles work for years and then  they don't work, so the 77 week isn't from sacred text. If Helge is correct and we top in late winter, we could go down until fall and still register a 4 year cycle low and a 2007 bull market. Or we could do a bear scenario.


My approach over the second half of last year has been to hedge both my opinion and my portfolio after being pretty bullish for three  years. January 2004 to now has been flat in some ways, although I have made a lot of money in very dynamic niche markets. We are going to break out one way or the other from this fairly flat range. I can make a case for either side, and I can't pretend to know the future, except for the advantage that the long economic wave gives me. Right now I could remove all the hedges I have  in thirty minutes  and be totally exposed to the long side, or I could double those hedges and be net short.  But I don't want to be day trading hedges.


From now until late February is very important as I see it, but it's getting a little late for it to be a major low leading to the 1935-37 bullish scenario.


I like Don Hays who was one of the few who was bullish, if early, into the 2003 low and who encouraged me greatly then, as did Joe Rosenberg of of Tisch/Loewe's/CNA.  Hays was short or flat into the 2000-2002 crash and lost his job over his convictions, which lends credibility to his opinions. I read Harry Dent's 2000 book in the late '90's, but it didn't quite work out as he expected, so I feel less confident in reading his work.


Thanks for the comments and questions.








January 10, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


January 01, 2006If you've been reading this blog for a while you know I began to "look for the exits" several months ago. I was bullish coming out of the October low. But as soon as an upmove was signalled as confirmed, I felt that it would top out by year end. This conviction was based upon fundamentals (see earlier  articles) as well as technical and sentiment findings.

George Slezak http://www.cot1.com/ has a "way with words". He recently rather colorfully summarized  the fundamental outlook this way:
"My thoughts on the market for the coming year, in light of the crushing consumer debt, failing real estate market, crippling energy prices, inverted yield curve, and soaring Gold price, and second year of a Presidential term is
NO PROBLEM FOR THE COMING YEAR!
No problem, as long as you are short!"


The problem for me at this point is that nearly everyone of any analytical stature, including George, expects a down year to one degree or another. About the most optimistic outlook I see around in public spots is that we will bottom in January or February for the four year or presidential cycle plus the 77 week and 11 week cycles, and then go back up. This past week everyone was spooked by the yield curve inversion, measured by the two year treasury yield going above the ten year yield.
It is so easy to get committed to a fundamental market opinion which then takes over like an evil spirit and dooms you to ignoring reality if the market goes against you. We all see that a lot in internet chat sites and everyday "real life". It's a good idea to have two (or more) market scenarios in mind which you can choose from to represent you as technical conditions warrant. As this is generally what I do anyway, I think it's a brilliant approach!
As I see it, the evidence still points to at  least an intermediate term one to two month swing down. With Santa's rally being front run by the Grinch, the pullback has most likely already started. The December 23 time line (at blue down arrow on the second chart below) that I mentioned many months ago seems to have been nearly exactly on the money for a final turn down.
I'll give you three ways to see these longer term and shorter term charts: click on the small images to get a somewhat larger pop-up image and/or click on the URL's for full-sized versions:
http://img315.imageshack.us/img315/8339/sp998mk.gif










http://img315.imageshack.us/img315/9038/sp037qy.gif



The first chart contains the  longer term bullish scenario which remains viable unless and until the October lows are exceeded on the downside. Ill go into the bullish fundamentals another time as right now the big chore is to get the down move confirmed (or not) as really underway.
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:12 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; January 2006 | Main | March 2006 &raquo;
February 26, 2006Gold and XAUGold bugs were raving at the end of January that new all time highs (>$850) were coming very soon. Seminars on gold options made bull market debuts. Despite being a long term gold bull (15 or more years to go), it's clear to me that wild exuberance leads to pullbacks.


The $50 pullback in gold in December barely registered on the XAU gold stock index.  But the second correction of $40 in February coming so soon after the first did get gold stock players' attentions. In fact the percent decline in XAU in February was 14.8% compared to the last meaningful pullback of 12.4% last October. It is a market maxim that the first pullback in a bull market which exceeds the last largest correction is grounds for alarm that a change in trend is due.


Further old gold market wisdom comes from looking at the ratio of gold's price to that of the XAU. Since the gold  bull market began in 1999, tops in XAU have been made when the gold/XAU ratio had weekly closes under 3.75: 3.63, 3.66, 3.73, 3.64, 3.81. On February 1 the ratio had an intra day low of 3.66, but by Friday the ratio had rallied to close at 3.81. However, on this ratio basis one could make a case for not only a larger correction--which we've had--but also  for a longer one. Other reasons were outlined in my brief December article for Gold Eagle.
















XAU itself has recovered very little of its 14.8% drawdown, and the daily MACD of XAU--not shown--remains negative. Even so the ratio of unhedged Newmont Mining (NEM) over hedged Barrick Gold (ABX) shows that gold stock buyers have not given up on their bullish views. On a daily basis the MACD of the two stocks prices has given a buy, while the weekly MACD remained bullishly unphased since last August.





























It's possible that the 23% pounding give to XAU stock FCX by several Indonesian government prounouncements, while XAU as a whole was down but 14.88%, might account for this disparity between the preference for NEM and the gold/XAU ratio spike. I still feel that the fundamental and technical ideas discussed in the Gold Eagle article still apply. However, this is a long term gold bull market, and I have sold nothing, since surprises in bull markets tend to be to the upside.  Both the NEM/ABX and gold/XAU ratios convince me that gold market sentiment is still quite exuberant which makes the market vulnerable. It would take new highs in gold and XAU to convince me that a longer and/or deeper correction isn't coming this year.



February 26, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


February 16, 2006Coming togetherThe market sentiment background has filled in nicely in the past two months, but technically I wasn't seeing the setup for a sell. Because of that I expected next week to be a low. But the market simply refused to sell off, or when it did so, it came right back up.


As of late today I feel most of the pieces are in place. We have a four point RPW (Reverse Point Wave) continuation pattern in place in SPX and SP futures underneath the January high. This is a continuation pattern setup for a downward move. There are also the 77 and 11 week cycles due early next week, which I had expected to be a low. If  it works, it will be the first time since March 2000 that the 77 week has been a high. Also on the same day next week there is an important timer line to the January SPX high. (See the daily SP futures chart below which does not have today's data on it.) It is more valid or commanding for a turn when it comes a bit early, so tomorrow before a three day holiday (in the US for Washington's and Lincoln's Birthdays) would be good for a high and on ly  one trading day from the "appointed day". Also today's high is on the bisect,  or Andrews median line, of the late January high to last week's low on SPX drawn from the last week of January's low (see the SPX 130 minute chart below).



Finally my Scottish trade entry system is set up for a sell. It will  need actual confirmation tomorrow, but with all the rest coming into play I will take a first short futures position tonight on globex with a fairly tight stop. The cash accounts, as I have mentioned, are fully hedged and weeded out and heavily in cash, so the futures positions will put me short





February 16, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


February 13, 2006Real & Real Estate ValuesMartin Whitman and Third Avenue Funds are among my favorite money managers. They are devoted to rooting out values the olde way and sticking with them: green  eyeshades, ten key calculators, tire kickers. Nor  are they ignorant of modern finance, being liquidation and ultra-deep value experts. These are not technical analysts and market timers,  and that's why I've liked them for some of my money


On a total return basis Martin's fund, TAVFX has done as well as any one of the greats over the past ten to fifteen years of wild ups and downs, including another New York favorite of mine, Societe Generale's (now First Eagle's) Global Fund (SGENX).


http://www.thirdavenuefunds.com/taf/documents/shareholderletters/aboutus-letters-05Q4.pdf


The recent Third Avenue Annual Report has some of the best market-based discussions of real economics and real world regulation that you ever will see: in Martin Whitman's report (pages 6-12). Then further on in the report (pages 20-25) see Michael Winer's seminar with  Martin and three of the giants of the securitized real estate market: Sam Zell, Milton  Cooper,  and Charles Ratner.


Bear in mind also that Whitman and Winer are now finding great conservative real estate values in pricey Hong Kong which Marc Faber and others are abandoning. A  great read for "real" estate securities investors.

Also don't forget Alpine Funds' EGLRX if you have the, ah,  yen for non US real estate securities in fund form.




February 13, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


February 11, 2006DrKW Fear & Greed IndexOn balance in life I am an optimist. Lots of bad things do  happen both to and around us, and we all die.  But as Maya Angelou, the poet, said, "I am convinced that the negative has power, and if you allow it to perch in your house, in your mind, in your life, it can take you over." I think she meant this on  several very important levels.


In daily and intermediate term life, including investing, I'm an optimist, most of the time. Given over 200 years of rising prices of investment vehicles in the US, the last 100 years of which are very well documented indeed, it is well  to have a bullish bias  for the longer term.  For some quite substantial meat to put onto these philosophical bones, see  "Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns" by Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton, Princeton University Press, 2002.


Given my preference, beliefs,  or bias, I generally do not pay much attention to those whom we might consider to be "perma-bears" on economies and markets. They will be right on occasion, as even the old broken clock tells time exactly, twice each day. My opinion  is that John Mauldin falls into that group, given his mentoring by Gary North and his close friendship with Bill Bonner, both great marketers of gloom and doom.


Nevertheless, Mauldin's gloom and doom sound brilliant to me when I am in one of my "could go down" periods of analysis. In Mauldin's latest free weekly letter http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/printarticle.asp?id=mwo021006 he presents a fascinating  sentiment indicator from James Montier of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.


Mauldin quotes from Montier: ""It is really a measure of relative risk adjusted momentum between global equities and bonds. When the risk adjusted performance of equities is high relative to the risk adjusted performance of bonds, then investors start to forget about the concept of risk altogether; they become totally focused on return. Irrational exuberance reigns (shown as a reading of above 1 in the chart below)." "In contrast, when bonds have performed well in risk adjusted terms relative to equities, investors tend to forget that things will generally get better at some point, so this creates the 'end of the world is nigh' kind of feeling (a reading of -2 in the chart below). Effectively, the measure captures the tendency towards extrapolation of the recent past/current situation into the indefinite future. Thus it serves as a contrary indicator."
Given Montier's interpretation of his own indicator there were some questionable top calls (>+1) on his chart from 1984-2006, all of which you can see yourself below. However if  one draws a line at +2 (as I have done on his chart) there have  been only three tops calls (and a famous near miss) since 1984: 1987, 1996, and now in 2006, with the very near miss in 2000. If you weren't investing in 1996 you may wonder about that one. But after an amazing year of marching up all through 1995, early 1996 was wildly bullish. Even with the pretty severe correction that year, Greenspan was moved to make his "irrational exuberance"  comment late in 1996.
My point is that Montier's indicator has good "genes" and a great performance history at tops. The >+2 cutoff is signalling a reversal to bonds from stocks. Personally I am not a fan of bonds due to where we are in the long term Kondratieff Wave cycle of inflation and interest rates. With short term rates as high or higher than 30 year bond rates, anything farther out than tomorrow in a money market fund seems very risky to capital.  But I am not a bond trader, and perhaps that's what bond lows are like. I"ll need to see some bond low confirmation to get long in  bonds, although my own work on  gold and commodities generally suggests a decent pause in the commodity bull market. In the Long Wave cycle, bonds and commodities will trade in opposite trends, but pauses and corrections occur in all trends, so a bond rally isn't at all impossible.
The other side of the momentum indicator is the irrational exuberance for stocks which I have been seeing and showing you  for a while in several different ways. My own fairly conventional market-based sentiment indicators have gone wild and topped in late December and again in January. Chairman MaoXian's media-based sentiment indicator reached an extreme point,  not seen since 2000, in the last days of December. Loekke's cycle work, which I see as a sentiment measure, Terry Laundry's T's, and other cycle studies are pointing to the same outcome.
Two of the prior sell signals for stocks on Montier's indicator (by my >+2 interpretation) were HUGELY rewarding, but 1996 was not. Nor  do I know his model or parameters. So  I would say that Montier's is predicting a stock correction but not necessarily a huge one .









February 11, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


February 09, 2006Stop Me Before I Cycle AgainI promise: this is my last cycle post for a while! But while looking at some blog sites that refer to this site I found a NASA sunspot cycle site which has a phenomenal cycle curve of the current sunspot cycle # 23.


Most cycle buffs are well aware of the history of sunspot cycles in market prediction. The ~11 or ~22 (double) cycle of  dark spots on the sun, due to turbulence, have been observed by astronomers  at least as long ago as 800 BCE in China and as early as 1100 AD in Europe.


The German-British astronomer Sir Wiliam Herschel made one of the first modern attempts to relate agricultural prices to the sunspot cycle in the earliest part of the 19th century. The sun is obviously the most important seasonal variant for traditional agriculture, so it stood to reason that variations in solar output (surmised as an effect of the cyclical dark spots) would affect supply of field crops.


Rather than repeat a lot of archived information, let me suggest you Google ""sun spot cycle ancient china"" for a good list of sunspot specialist websites of all kinds. Or if you ever see in a used book store (or on Ebay or Amazon) a copy of the thin monograph, "Astro-Economics" by LCdr David Williams, snap it up.


In any event, here is the amazing chart of Sunspot Cylce #23 by NASA. Look at that with a stock market index chart along side it. What does it all mean? "Who knows", as my professor of European history used to say.







February 09, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


Another Guru Despite losing sight of him once for about five years, I have followed Terrry Laundry's work for over 25 years.  His method is deceptively simple but capable of subtlety and power.  The basic principles are that price declines result in cash buildups, and that the length of time of the cash buildup will be the length of the subsequent price rise in time.



The name T Theory refers to the shape of the vertical centerpost on the low of the a cash buildup with equal horizontal arms to the starting times of the cash buildup and the end point of the subsequent rise. Laundry has used different indexes and different indicators over the years: generally a volume or price oscillator. Recently he has been working on interest rate oscillators as predictors of cash buildups and placements.


Laundry's current opinion for the next two years is quite similar to one I have been working out in synthesizing some longer term cycles, like the 77 week and four year, among others. As you know I have been looking for a decline into  late February for some time, possibly to coincide with the 77 week cycle and possibly to become the four year cycle low.  My own preliminary and experimental cycle shape looks like this:


Bear in mind that cycle amplitudes of the past did not match the price amplitude or change, but do suggest direction and timing.  2000 and 2003 were nearly exact. So if this has any merit at all, I would expect a choppy year  after a late winter low, perhaps with an autumnal decline coinciding with the seasonal pattern for stocks. Then, and as Laundry thinks, based on the completely different methods he uses, there would be a rally into the late  winter or spring of 2007  followed by a more substantial decline.  Please bear in mind that this is an attempt to predict the future and is probably more like a parlor game or science fiction than serious technical analysis.  My apologies to Loekke, Merriman, and others who do excellent cycle work. There are no guarantees on anything, of course, so take it as intended, as amusement or education.

Read Terry Laundry's work at his web blog: http://www.ttheory.typepad.com


February 09, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


February 04, 2006Helge Sundar Loekke's WCA ModelSimon Ward kindly reminded me a month ago that Helge Sundar Loekke had resumed posting the WCA Model to his website after a hiatus many of us had  feared would be permanent.


Loekke's Mega Cycle is based upon 100 years of cycle data, as I have  understood it; but it is proprietary so I have no firm  idea as to how it's done. However, one needn't know the details of internal combustion to enjoy and profitably use a Lexus or other competent automobile.


In the overall picture of technical analysis  of markets, and especially so with my own long economic wave bias and belief, I see work like Loekke's as a form of recurrent "sentiment cycles" or supply/demand forces.
Both Loekke and Chairman MaoXian are performing unique services for investors. We can thank them by visiting their sites. I have never had and don't  ever expect financial gain from them except for their insights which help me in my personal investing. Neither the Chairman nor Loekke give you an "all-in" or stand-alone system, of course, but the insights they give are of great benefit in planning, whether one is a long term investor or a weeks to months cycle swing investor.



The chart here is one of Loekke's showing his near term expectations for US Dow 30 stocks. See the rest at: http://www.wcamodel.com/
I have followed his work through most of the 2000-2003 bear market and since.


February 04, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


February 02, 2006Time Magazine Cover Sentiment, Search Engine StyleMy cyber-friend CS, also known as Chairman MaoXian, is a US citizen working in China. The chairman was  a sentiment mentor for me nearly a decade ago. He has found a way to tally what we all know as major information media market sentiment swings. The Time Magazine cover sentiment peak (or nadir) was well known to older market wizards, but the chairman has moved it onto new and much more  impressive grounds.


The beauty of the chairman's method for those of us using market sentiment data or polling is that it gives a totally new window on market mood swings




MaoXian's 2 February 2006 publication at his blogsite http://www.maoxian.com/ finds that sentiment his way was at a bullish peak at year's end. This fits hand in glove with several my own indicators in the last few days of December.  


Market tops in stocks are processes, not normally spikes, unlike those in commodities or interest rates. This means that various extreme measurements top out at different times, just as sectors and inividual stocks do. As I said the other day, one has to think of them as weather forecasts and not traffic signals.


Another reason to read the chairman's blog is for his stock picks. He is a child of the new media era, and his search and analytical skills distill a lot of the otherwise lost time of unfocused internet cruising when looking for good investment ideas.






February 02, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:13 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; February 2006 | Main | April 2006 &raquo;
March 20, 2006Breakout


March 20, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


March 19, 2006In uncertain times...As a followup to the last post, I offer this alternative to the very difficult task of timing the market. There are times when the future is clearer than  at others.

But in a sense "uncertain times" are most of the time. Whether we can reliably predict the future is arguable. However we can decide NOT to presume to predict the future and instead to ride the coat tails of some others who have proven ability to hedge the markets and come out on top decade after decade. And that's what I'm doing right now.


Here are five US mutual funds which can do this, and all in different ways. I would recommend studying them via MSN Money Funds (http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/research/fundwelcome.asp?Funds=1)
or FastTrack (http://www.fasttrack.net/INDEX.ASP) and other internet fund sites. Each is carefully selected by me for my own use. Each is different from the others. In several cases I have listed two versions: one is a load or retail fund and the other a no load or institutional version.


These five funds are the core of my long term  investment portfolios. The first four I have owned for years, the last one more recently. They are supplemented or "flavored" by ETF's and a small number individual stocks: HSGFX, DODBX, SGENX/FESGX, TAVFX, PASDX/PAAIX.


These have all demonstrated an ability to survive and do well during the wild bull and bear markets of the past decade and before.


As always, these are my choices for personal use. I don't work for them or anyone but myself.





March 19, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


March 15, 2006If you're wrong, admit it and go onI have been very cautious and have been hedging my portfolio short since late last year.  I live off my net worth, so net worth insurance is at least as important to me as car, house, and medical insurance. But I don't  have to pay for portfolio insurance forever as I do with the others. I  can reduce my premiums payable selectively.


Some people get so devoted to their own opinions that they are impermeable to change. And they lose a lot in more ways than dollars. If your ego is more important to you than  money, enjoy your lonely and penurious future. For me money is just a way to live and enjoy my family and life, not  an ego game.


So I have been lifting some hedges the past few days. Mind you, I have been about 50% in  cash with the portfolio almost ideally hedged, and even so I am ahead a few percent on the year overall. So I had and have now the cash to act when I preceive I have been  "wrong".  And I don't consider sitting out a dance being wrong. I know too many people who lost their wealth and families by ego mirroring.


I might even be wrong now in  lifting hedges and therefore being more aggressively net long. But I won't be wrong for long, since I refuse to take big hits.


This stuff is more important in the near and long term than "nailing" a high or  low or  the perfect investment or penny stock. This probably won't appeal to people unless they are over 40 or are unusually astute. Long term compounding of interest and capital gains is the key to investment survival and growth.


The chart shows the lime green line coming up from the exact 1982 low through the 1998 low. It was resistance in January, and we closed right on it today. If we close above it on a  weekly basis, we are off to the races. I'm leaning that way now. The economic situation remains strong and so does monetary direction. Corporations are stressed to deliver product and have fat balance sheets. Buying new capacity is getting more expensive. Capital  spending to expand  may be more profitable at last  than buying competitors.






The full moon eclipse crazies have been out in force this week. A lot of people are very susceptible to full moon lunacy. That's a fact. Visit popular internet investment chat sites for details this week. So weeks like this are challenges to trends and beliefs.








March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


March 11, 2006Gold follow up
See the February 26, 2006 post for earlier comments and references. Both the continued direction of the Gold/XAU ratio and the downcross of the MACD of Newmont/American Barrick ratio confirm that this isn't a good time for gold stocks. If one is a trader it would have been, and may still be, a time to be lighter on longs, or be short, or hedged. Or to weight more heavily  toward the hedged gold stocks of which ABX is the prime example.



Personal preferences and portfolio considerations vary so much that even an investment advisor, which I am not, cannot give ideal suggestions for everyone.


If  one has been waiting to buy or add on to long gold stock positions, one can begin to plan how to do that.  Some people prefer to buy in gradually in small increments ("scale in"); some like doing the same only on big  down days; and some want to wait until they get reliable buy signals to begin  buying. No one can say with authority when the buy point will come and at what price level.




March 11, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Sentiment "Divergence" in Stock IndexesOne reason for current "divergences" of polling sentiment indicators versus flow of funds sentiment indicators is that this is a developing transitional period. The 2C Sentimeter (five day running total of daily VXO times daily CBOE P/C ratio) in 2005 shows the normal progression into a high leading to an intermediate term (1-4 month) correction in a bull market. The 2CS numbers get smaller into the final high showing a building up of bullishness.
Normally the sold out lows that result are also showing upward shifting, however October 2005 made a higher low price than May's low but sentiment was more bearish. It's counter-intuitive to customary sentiment analysis, but this October divergence shows that longer term sentiment is losing bullishness.
Then we see that, on successively higher peaks from December to February, bullish sentiment is diverging at highs as well as at intervening lows.
Thus longer term trend bullishness is waning both at short term highs and lows. Some trend followers who have been correct are gradually bailing out progressively since late July 2005. We are still getting very short term sentiment extremes, but they are just a bit less extreme. This sort of divergence is always confusing to sentiment analysts as we do not ever expect to see contra price trend divergences in sentiment.




March 11, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:14 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; February 2006 | Main | April 2006 &raquo;
March 20, 2006Breakout


March 20, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


March 19, 2006In uncertain times...As a followup to the last post, I offer this alternative to the very difficult task of timing the market. There are times when the future is clearer than  at others.

But in a sense "uncertain times" are most of the time. Whether we can reliably predict the future is arguable. However we can decide NOT to presume to predict the future and instead to ride the coat tails of some others who have proven ability to hedge the markets and come out on top decade after decade. And that's what I'm doing right now.


Here are five US mutual funds which can do this, and all in different ways. I would recommend studying them via MSN Money other internet fund sites. Each is carefully selected by me for my own use. Each is different from the others. In several cases I have listed two versions: one is a load or retail fund and the other a no load or institutional version.


These five funds are the core of my long term  investment portfolios. The first four I have owned for years, the last one more recently. They are supplemented or "flavored" by ETF's and a small number individual stocks: HSGFX, DODBX, SGENX/FESGX, TAVFX, PASDX/PAAIX.


These have all demonstrated an ability to survive and do well during the wild bull and bear markets of the past decade and before.


As always, these are my choices for personal use. I don't work for them or anyone but myself.





March 19, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


March 15, 2006If you're wrong, admit it and go onI have been very cautious and have been hedging my portfolio short since late last year.  I live off my net worth, so net worth insurance is at least as important to me as car, house, and medical insurance. But I don't  have to pay for portfolio insurance forever as I do with the others. I  can reduce my premiums payable selectively.


Some people get so devoted to their own opinions that they are impermeable to change. And they lose a lot in more ways than dollars. If your ego is more important to you than  money, enjoy your lonely and penurious future. For me money is just a way to live and enjoy my family and life, not  an ego game.


So I have been lifting some hedges the past few days. Mind you, I have been about 50% in  cash with the portfolio almost ideally hedged, and even so I am ahead a few percent on the year overall. So I had and have now the cash to act when I preceive I have been  "wrong".  And I don't consider sitting out a dance being wrong. I know too many people who lost their wealth and families by ego mirroring.


I might even be wrong now in  lifting hedges and therefore being more aggressively net long. But I won't be wrong for long, since I refuse to take big hits.


This stuff is more important in the near and long term than "nailing" a high or  low or  the perfect investment or penny stock. This probably won't appeal to people unless they are over 40 or are unusually astute. Long term compounding of interest and capital gains is the key to investment survival and growth.


The chart shows the lime green line coming up from the exact 1982 low through the 1998 low. It was resistance in January, and we closed right on it today. If we close above it on a  weekly basis, we are off to the races. I'm leaning that way now. The economic situation remains strong and so does monetary direction. Corporations are stressed to deliver product and have fat balance sheets. Buying new capacity is getting more expensive. Capital  spending to expand  may be more profitable at last  than buying competitors.






The full moon eclipse crazies have been out in force this week. A lot of people are very susceptible to full moon lunacy. That's a fact. Visit popular internet investment chat sites for details this week. So weeks like this are challenges to trends and beliefs.








March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


March 11, 2006Gold follow up
See the February 26, 2006 post for earlier comments and references. Both the continued direction of the Gold/XAU ratio and the downcross of the MACD of Newmont/American Barrick ratio confirm that this isn't a good time for gold stocks. If one is a trader it would have been, and may still be, a time to be lighter on longs, or be short, or hedged. Or to weight more heavily  toward the hedged gold stocks of which ABX is the prime example.



Personal preferences and portfolio considerations vary so much that even an investment advisor, which I am not, cannot give ideal suggestions for everyone.


If  one has been waiting to buy or add on to long gold stock positions, one can begin to plan how to do that.  Some people prefer to buy in gradually in small increments ("scale in"); some like doing the same only on big  down days; and some want to wait until they get reliable buy signals to begin  buying. No one can say with authority when the buy point will come and at what price level.




March 11, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Sentiment "Divergence" in Stock IndexesOne reason for current "divergences" of polling sentiment indicators versus flow of funds sentiment indicators is that this is a developing transitional period. The 2C Sentimeter (five day running total of daily VXO times daily CBOE P/C ratio) in 2005 shows the normal progression into a high leading to an intermediate term (1-4 month) correction in a bull market. The 2CS numbers get smaller into the final high showing a building up of bullishness.
Normally the sold out lows that result are also showing upward shifting, however October 2005 made a higher low price than May's low but sentiment was more bearish. It's counter-intuitive to customary sentiment analysis, but this October divergence shows that longer term sentiment is losing bullishness.
Then we see that, on successively higher peaks from December to February, bullish sentiment is diverging at highs as well as at intervening lows.
Thus longer term trend bullishness is waning both at short term highs and lows. Some trend followers who have been correct are gradually bailing out progressively since late July 2005. We are still getting very short term sentiment extremes, but they are just a bit less extreme. This sort of divergence is always confusing to sentiment analysts as we do not ever expect to see contra price trend divergences in sentiment.




March 11, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:15 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; March 2006 | Main | May 2006 &raquo;
April 30, 2006Aunt Nellie's DogDollar sentiment is hyper bearish everywhere I look. The usual anti-dollar talk is  of gold, commodity prices and the trade deficit. But every currency I follow is drooping in the face of a gold bull market. The following two charts present some technical analysis for a contrarian view to the bears and aunt Nellie's dog.





















April 30, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


April 27, 2006Bagpiper BuyAs of the close today, April 27, 2006, we have a Bagpiper buy. For tally purposes I am using 1315 as the reversal price. So the last sell was a break even, but I had a ten handle loss on the first sell.

This brings the total to +109.50 since December 1 last year. However, since March 1st I have a 23 point cumulative loss. This is a reflection of choppiness which is not kind to daily price bar trading systems.  The bagpiper is a trend following system, although it can change trend on a dime. Choppy periods are something one learns to live with in systems of this sort.




April 27, 2006 in The Bagpiper | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


April 24, 2006Confirmed SellThe bagpiper confirmed a sell today in ESM6 and SPM6. I will record the nearest round number to the CME pit settlement price of SPM6 as his sell price. This will be tallied as an add-on sell for record keeping purposes.


April 24, 2006 in The Bagpiper | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


April 23, 2006Show me the money...The stock markets remain fickle and enigmatic. Some broad stock indexes are making new all time highs at the same time that the Dow 30 and SPX are below their highs of 2000. NYSE breadth measured by advances and declines and the Mc Clelland Indexes remains weaker than the index price. John Hussman's value and breadth approach  has his HSGFX totally hedged and his gains at under 2% year to date.

An oddity is the American Association of Independent Investors' sentiment index (AAII)having more bears than bulls, normally seen only at intermediate or long term lows. http://www.hal-pc.org/~wsrafuse/BULL-BEARS.gif Normally AAII is heavily bullish when indexes are making or nearly making new highs, so it would be a miracle (or an anomaly in AAII's data) for them to be right at this time. My own sentiment measures are fairly high in the bullish ranges they have established over the past year, but not higher than in January or March.

Several cycle index makers feel a market downturn is due, and my own cycle index suggests a down turn followed by a rise to new highs inoi next year. But such studies are more like a game or an amusement and one can't bank them.

Lagging economic indicators have turned modestly down again  as they did in early 2005. Whe they turn down, lagging indicators are thought to be saying that "things are as good as they can be", but of course they can turn up again as they did last year.

The Bagpiper System is about to signal another sell unless the SP futures make new highs tomorrow. My portfolio remains pretty well hedged, but if we make new highs tomorrow I may remove some hedges and lighten up on golds which have had an enormous run.

Despite the above comments I am not bearish, and I think we have to be ready not to miss a big breakout and run up in various sectors which benefit from or adapt well to inflation. I take the inflation phase of Kondratieff very seriously, and the broad market should do well on a trend basis over time. By the way, I published the "Chart of the Year" on April 8, but then I got short term bullish based on the severe drop, and bought some long bonds the Thursday before Easter. They did well for a few days and then dropped back down near where I had bought them and I exited. Barring a recession in an inflationary phase, bonds are not place to be even for a "dead cat bounce".

The chart shows a plausible case for an upside breakout and larger run up in SP500. First note the Elliott Wave labelling from 2000 to the 2003 low. For a long while there after I wasn't sure whether or not there would be a "D" and then "E". I think it much less likely now for that to happen.

Most of us in the market have felt the lethargy and heaviness since early 2004, excepting hot Kondratieff sectors: metals, oil, and emerging markets primarily, and continuing  moves in small and mid caps. As late as last October the SPX had done nothing since March 2004. That, my friends, was a correction. I am labelling it here as a "running triple three" a b c with c being above the March 2004, hence "running". This is a bullish formation going into a third wave.

Price has risen above several important lines: the shallow downtrend line from 2000 was pierced and retested in December. Likewise a line up along the highs from March 2004 to March 2005 has been bettered. The thicker cyan line is not a true trend line, but I think it's important. It is the continuation of a line up from the 1982 low, at the start of the great bull market, through the 1998 low, which was the largest correction in that bull market until 2001/2002. It is a "moving average" or average weekly move of the bull market. The market of course went far below it in 2002, but now it has come back and surpassed that line  which is a sign of strength. If SP500 can stay above that line, it has a shot at new all time highs as many other indexes have already done  
Click on the chart for a larger version.



April 23, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


April 12, 2006China WorrySeveral bloggers I respect have remarked upon Richard Florida's April 7th  article for Financial Times: "Do not  get impaled on the spikes of China's success". Florida is Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University (NCAA "Final Four" in basketball) in  Fairfax Virginia.

Florida talks about the amazing uneveness of China's economic success. How localized it is to a few provinces, how shallow it is in terms of who participates, how thin their educated class really is, and how over-stretched it is in providing for its own citizens. The irony of this shallowness occurring in one of the few remaining communist countries needn't be overdone. Nor should the irony be missed that a lot of foreign capital has been thrown into the world's largest (potential) market willy nilly, as if capitalism and profit potential  didn't matter.

It will be easy for me NOT to pontificate since I have never been to China, except for Hong Kong, and I am rather weak in Chinese history in recent times. But from a market and geo-political perspective, which I do know,  it  has seemed to me for a while that China is at greater risk for a major market/economic crash than any other active economy.

Except for the densely talented regions detailed by Florida, China is still run by the Communist Party and Red Army. This is where most of the bad debts are and the corrupt management. Granted that the modern boomer/booster economy will have much unexposed corruption, but the other part will have to be far, far worse. Imagine New York's Eliot Spitzer on the loose in China exposing the weakness, venality and corruption! Oh my!

The defining moment for China is the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Property speculators and other boosters are, of course, counting on the Olympics to sell into, but for the Chinese government it is the keys to the kingdom. Everything is being propped up, deferred, suppressed, and polished up to make a statement: WE ARE THE WORLD. It's even more a turning point than the US presidential cycle. And it may turn out to be, as my European history university professor used to say about 1848 Europe: "it was the turning point of history upon which history failed to turn".

China's modern success really only began in the wake of the 1997 deflationary crash in Asia, and that crash set the tone for events leading to the bubble burst and decline to 2002-2003. If you've read my Kondratieff work you'll know that we are not going back into the Asian deflation and Western near deflation of the late 90's and early 2000's. But major crashes and economic pullbacks do indeed occur during inflations as they do during disinflations.

China is now overdone in many ways, and it is questionable whether they can navigate their way to the eternal Goldilocks economy with their untested greater leadership riding a tide not created by themselves. It used to be said that when the US caught cold, the world got pneumonia. Currently we might say, not entirely metaphorically, that if China gets a bad cold the world will get a bird flu pandemic.

I have no intent to make a prediction, but in my opinion the Achilles  heel of the world economy right now is China. Some of the fault lines--banks, intellectual property piracy, contract disputes, material support of islamist (and other) bad boys, undermining of US  energy sources--are well known, but many others are not.  And therein lies the problem. In addition, those with  real and valid axes to grind know about the Olympics.






April 12, 2006 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


April 10, 2006Bagpiper Sell Signal[size=0.8em]
Confirmed today on the 4:15 CME pit close: sell the long and reverse to short at 1305 SP/ES.

The long was bought one month ago at 1283 basis the March contract and rolled to the June contract (10 point difference), so the effective profit as of 04/10/2006 4:15 PM CME close is 1305-1293 or twelve points. Not a great trade, but still a profit. It's been a tough month for a daily bar  trader which is why everyone is scalping these days.  But I'm too lazy to scalp as a regular regimen.

Since 12/1/05 there is a cumulative profit of 119.5 SP points with 8 winners and 3 losers. That's about  40 points a month or nearly 11 points per trade.



April 10, 2006 in The Bagpiper | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


April 08, 2006Chart of the YearI posted this chart last June, and it is playing out beautifully in the concept of Reverse Point Waves, as Welles Wider called them, and as other people call broadening tops, "spandos" (Don Wolanchuk) and "pointers" (Steve G).

I have studied and learned an awful lot from all of them about this important form of analysis, but particularly from Steve G who developed the concept into  the core of a fantastic trading system in all time frames . Thanks guys!

In any event the chart had a 5 point reversal formation very long term into the high and then a 4 point continuation UNDER that high as an upward correction before falling again. There are other "pointers" visible on that chart, but the ones that are labeled are key.







April 08, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Crude Oil and the Kondratieff Wave
I found this chart today. Once you know what to look for, you will see examples of the Kondratieff Wave in many price, growth, incomes, interest rates and other data series.



Some observers will object that it was all due to geo-politics. But note how the drilling rig count  rose dramatically to meet demand and then fell off even more dramatically once demand was met by supply.


Then finally in 1999, when the rig count was at its lowest due to nearly two decades of downtrending prices and plentiful supply, a slight increase in demand in China and elsewhere exposed the parlous state of the whole oil supply infrastructure, and prices began to rise once more.


I needn't, but will, point out that all investors know that gold made its high also in late 1980 and its low in 1999 with a secondary or double bottom in 2001.


Long Wave websites and many books used to discuss the "why" of the Long Wave. The reasons advanced were many, including astrology and numerology, politics and sociology, but I think a simple argument for supply and demand can be made. When essential commodities are scarce, it takes a long while to get them geared up again.


First there is a period of some years before the new rising prices are taken as other than a momentary aberration in a bear market. Price didn't go down in a linear manner for the prior 20-30 years, so maybe this is merely another rally which will fizzle and die like the others did.


Then after five or more years there is realization or recognition that something must be done about shortages: by governments, industries, banks, labor and most certainly by end users and consumers. The financing of massive new supply infractructures to relieve the shortages takes time, and the phases of it are many. There are always a few projects that are ready to go, but most are not. For many crude commodities there begins a new round of the acquisition  of land for exploration, the exploration itself, the proving-up of the ore body or the gas or oil field, the financing of production and ports and pipelines and ships.


All this takes a decade or more in real market time. Engineers and laborers are in tight supply and must be trained, often housed, and paid. Government gets into the act by demanding higher payouts, taxes or outright expropriation, as we see. Environmentalists of the urban western type, as well as people living near these massive new projects, want their share an d/or try to slow the  projects.


As economic growth increases, demand rises, adding to the price pressures. Tire prices for machinery and the machinery itself rise. Labor begins to flex its muscles to share in the largesse. After 15 years the new productive structure has still not caught up to demand. Consumers/voters are angry and legislatures punish producers for their profits. These events have little effect upon  projects in the works or on the drawing boards, due to long lag times between deciding on a project and getting it into production. But gradually producers begin to pull in their horns a bit on new projects as many projects turn out not to have been as profitable as they looked, even at new higher prices.


This in turn puts more pressure on prices as investors become aware of producer reticence and shortages. Prices surge higher, and reticence is finally thrown to the winds as many new projects are undertaken at whatever the cost.


At last prices begin to show signs of stabilizing. Perhaps higher prices have finally inhibited demand, or supply has finally been able to satiate demand. Cost overruns on late projects are legion. Profits are dropping a bit.


The long down cycle is beginning with prices at historic highs, unemployment very low, wages high, GDP high and tax receipts even higher. It will take a long time for late projects to be completed, and when they do they will be selling into a saturated market at lower prices. Some will think this initial decline is just a minor correction in an even longer bull market, and this idea will persist for several years. Many people won't remember or even be aware of the last down wave. It will take a while to close down unneeded projects and get rid of them, or go through bankruptcy.


Well you get the picture. This is what happens in most crude goods categories: commodities that are necessary for new infrastucture and production, transportaion, utilities, homes, industrial buildings. And all of these have to be financed. So interest rates go up in the growth half of the cycle and go down in the slower growth phase when projects dry up. And so it goes.


So we know the commodity cycle and the bond cycle. But what about stock equities? That's what most poeople invest in.


I'll leave that mostly for another time, but here is a brief preview. In the growth phase of Kondratieff, stocks of productive companies, and services for them, do well as well as do commodity stocks. In addition many companies, whose market domination permits it, are able to raise prices a bit  faster than their expenses rise. They do well too. These companies may not all  be domiciled in your home market.
The best of the growth bull market is the first half: ten to fifteen years. After that interest rates and prices of supplies and labor begin to cut into profitability, and the stock market has a harder time. Toward the end there is almost always a rather severe bear market or two.


Notice that this runs counter to the everyday wisdom that rising interest rates are bad for stocks. Eventually that is true, but "eventually often takes quite a long time", depending upon the company and the industry and nation.


Also counter to conventional wisdom, many of the best bull markets in stocks occur during the slowdown of growth phase of 20-30 years when comomodity prices and interest rates are declining due to reduced demand and more than adequate supply: 1932-1946 and 1982-2000 are great examples. More on all this another time.


But do not be foooled into thinking that rising rates and prices always mandate a serious bear market in the near future. Reflation and inflation are good for stocks for a long time until inflation gets "too  hot". Although we can have bear markets and mini-crashes before inflation gets "too hot", the end of the current secular bull market has much longer to run than just 2002/3-2006.


April 08, 2006 in Long Wave | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


April 06, 2006Kondratieff SchematicsAs long as I am on the subject, I'll present these schematic diagrams of the Kondratieff wave form. The larger diagram is of unknown origin. I found it at a website without  attribution and have edited it for my purposes.  Whoever did the original thought that stock markets followed the Kondratieff wave, a common misconception. One version of this chart appeared in early versions of Frost and Prechter's book, and an even earlier one I have in an old Julian Snyder newsletter. It's such a simple schematic diagram that it has to be as old as the concept of the Kondratieff Wave itself.


Although the schematics imply that the tops and bottoms are V-shaped, both tops and bottoms actually take about five to ten years to complete. It makes more sense to talk of momentum tops and final tops and bottoms. But there's no need to get into that just now.


The smaller schematics show how the wave form varies a bit under different longer term political/economic regimes. The periodicity of about 53-54 years has held steady since the 18th century, although my own studies and those of others have found a range of 48-72 years back to the European middle ages. The average, however was, 53.6 years.



April 06, 2006 in Long Wave | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:16 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; April 2006 | Main | June 2006 &raquo;
May 21, 2006Not a prediction, but.....As you know I am a firm believer that the 54 year economic cycle of Kondratieff made its low from 1999 to 2003. The previous top formation ran from 1974-1980. Based upon previous cycles, the next cycle top could be as early as 1999 + 20 = 2019 or as late as  2003 + 27 =  2030. This would depend upon the schematic wave shape of the cycle which I have shown before:
























Long term bull and bear markets do, of course, have large and sometimes lengthy contra-trend moves. An example during the great stock bull market from 1982 to 2000 was the 1987-1990 bear market.

During this Kondratieff bull market the prices of crude and finished goods and interest rates will be in a bull trend for a long time to come. But they will have one or more lengthy and painful (for bulls) bearish contra-trend corrections. If we were to take 1999 as the beginning of this bullish Kondratieff cycle, as it was for gold and crude oil, we have already lived through a bit more than 25% of the total bull market for this cycle. Thus it would not be surprising if a larger correction were to occur at any time.

Although there are shorter cycles (Juglar, Kitchin, etc.) which some analysts and historians have used to time or predict these contra-trend or corrective movements within the long cycle of Kondratieff, I do not find them convincing. Also different commodities or finished goods will have different patterns within an overall bull market for physical assets. For example, cotton had four distinct bear moves in the long Kondratieff bull market from 1949 to 1980, one of which lasted four years and another which lasted five years!

There are important lessons to learn from behavior like this:

First, and most obviously, Kondratieff bull markets are not linear. They are volatile. Uptrend lines are drawn through lows. This is almost too simple  to mention, but pondering it briefly is worth while. This means there will be lows, and that there will be highs before these  lows.

Second, we shouldn't chase after rising prices since we will know that there will be contra-trend bearish periods when the market we missed becomes attractive again.

Third, when prices have risen dramatically we should take some profits from  time to time. We are not compelled to buy everything at the very lowest low and hold for two decades to sell at the exact high. We may want to keep a core position throughout, but few will want to sit through multi-month or multi-year contra-trend moves fully invested.

Fourth, for most people it will be too dangerous to short physical assets even in fairly clear cut contra-trend bear moves. The better way to play it for investors, as compared to speculators, is to consider long positions in the dollar and/or in dollar bonds during contra-trend bear moves in long term Kondratieff bull markets. If or when you have taken partial or substantial profits on gold or in energy stocks or real estate, you can begin to watch for times when bonds and the US dollar rally strongly. Normally during the Kondratieff bull market, both the dollar and bonds will be declining. By catching rallies in bonds and the dollar we are making profits during contra-trend moves and also hedging our remaining core positions on gold and other Kondratieff bull market assets.

At this time I can identify price patterns in bonds and the US dollar which could result in intermediate term bull markets for both. These patterns are usually accompanied by extremely bearish sentiment, and it's hard to find anyone who is bullish on the dollar or dollar bonds these days.

I'm showing the dollar via the chart labeled DM_EUR/USD. Western Europe (except Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and the UK) has adopted the DM_EUR or peg their currencies to it (Denmark). Greece and new world possessions of Euro members also use the Euro.

The governing bearish pattern for the Euro (bullish for the dollar) is a four point expanding triangle **below** a long term high. On the chart the major  high was in 1995, and the triangle  ("spando" is what Don Wolanchuk calls it) is labelled in large blue numerals. A smaller degree spando below a higher low began last year and has formed its own 4th wave (small red numerals) recently. Even numbers are at the extreme contra-trend spando points and odd numbers at the  extreme trend direction spando points. Thus at 4 or 6  points a continuation of the trend which carried into point one is likely to resume. And at 3, 5,  or 7 points a reversal to a new trend is likely.

The pattern for bonds is more complex but employs the same principles.  The blue numbers of 2001-2002  heralded a continuation upwards, and the 2003 top in bonds could be labeled 5. In 2003 bonds reversed down in a new trend. Then a new 4 point spando was formed under the 2003 high. This was the first such 4 point since 1981! As such it was a very bearish setup. The subsequent small red letters show a 5 point (reversal) into the larger degree blue 4, reinforcing the bearish evidence.

However, while most (estimated at 80%)  of 4 point spandos result in a continuation of the trend, 20% do not. And now bonds have put in a smaller degree 5 point. Although it  is not required, this new smaller degree triangle or spando (red) is contained by trend lines across the extremes, and bonds have just touched the lower line at the same time as making a 6 point. In a bad week for most assets, bonds rallied two points from about 105 1/2 to 107 1/2, so there is a reasonable chance for a good rally in bonds and lower odds for a longer term reversal  upwards. The fact that the dollar and bonds are showing similar patterns while gold and other comodities are looking toppy is helpful.






















May 21, 2006 in Long Wave | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


May 20, 2006Stock MarketThe fairly conservative mutual fund portfolio I outlined recently ("Current Portfolio", May 7, 2006) is down 2.2% from its peak on May 10, down 1% for the month to date and up 3.3% year to date. It is up 13.6% for the past year and up 14% compounded annually (before taxes) since Labor Day 2003 when I first set it up.

Most of my analysis is done on the S&P 500 index. This week it came down to the up trend line from March 2003 through the October 2005 low, and it almost touched the 61.8% level of the entire bear market of 2000-2003 from above. At the same time, sentiment measures are extremely bearish, hence bullish, as they were in October last year. Until the SP makes a failure high (lower than the recent high) and then a lower low than whatever this one turns out to be, the trend will not have changed.

There is a possible timer line for Monday and a bagpiper buy on, but lows often take several weeks to develop if it is to be.




May 20, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Gold: Back from MexicoI'm just back from a whirlwind tour of lower Sonora, northern Sinaloa, and western Chihuahua states.  I saw a lot of mining startups, many of which are reworkings of mines originally from the 16th to 19th centuries. Even in southern Arizona we are seeing the same phenomenon, particularly in copper.

Although the gold juniors and flyers are getting development funds by banks and venturers, they have a lot of competition for stock price support from the very large gold and silver metal ETF's in the US and elsewhere. Metals stock investors have long and bitter memories of the scams and failures of  the 1980's and 90's, so even if penny stock traders are willing to risk it on golds as well as on techs, the gold  majors are losing support as their costs rise and large portfolios get re-balanced. Holding the metals instead of always problematic stocks is appealing to those who are hedging portofolios rather than going for lottery-sized payoffs.

For nearly a year and a half I have expected to see a third wave high (second upwards push) from the 1999 low in gold. Gold's action has extended greatly, and the move from a year ago has comprised two thirds of the entire run from the 2001 secondary low.

From my perspective Elliott Wave is a way of describing events rather than being a highly probable predictive tool. Nevertheless it is a useful schematic diagram of where gold has been.

The first chart runs from the very large degree second wave low of 1976 to the present. The bull market from 1968 to September 1980 I have outlined in detail in this 2001 article at Gold Eagle: http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_01/drake043001.html

Since then we have had two major waves up with a corrective wave down from 1999 to 2001. I believe we are in a new bull market  since 1999 which will likely last another 15-20 years. However, with the recent retest of the orthodox high of 720 at the September  1980 high, one must acknowledge that very long term bears have a point in calling this current spike an X or B wave in a continuing bear market.

Given convincing evidence from all markets that the Kondratieff Wave bottomed from 1998 to 2003, I give the bears very low odds.






















The second chart is a closeup of the bull move from the 1999 low with my Elliott description. (The gold data are continuous one month forward COMEX gold futures.) If this labeling is correct, I would expect gold to decline at least to 560  at the end of the correction, and it could go lower during some part of the correction, and it could last many months. Recent sentiment, which I have discussed, suggests some sort of correction which may have begun this past week or two. One must be aware of the fact that runaway markets can subdivide their last wave and keep going after minor corrections, so it is never wise to close one's mind on a wave label.
I did lighten up on metals stocks in the week before last but did not and will not sell metals holdings.




May 20, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


May 12, 2006It had to happen.....Gold was grossly overhyped,  and 720 was the orthodox Elliott Wave top of the last bull market in September 1980. 723.45 is 35 times the pre-Roosevelt gold price from 1824 to 1934. Perhaps gold will just go on up anyway, but I cut back to 60% of peak price levels both on the metal stock fund and energy fund. No gold bullion was sold, nor will it be.

Practically every asset class went down yesterday and today, except GM. :) George Slezak, an ex CBOT bond pit  trader, says it  reminds him of the 1980 top when everything went down for weeks. I was trading commodites then, and I remember it vividly. Personally I think it's facile to compare that market and this one, although there are superficial similarities for sure.

My guess is that in the US stock indexes we are in Elliott wave c of a larger degree running wave 2 after the completion of wave 1 up from last October. I read and listen a lot, so I know  all the arguments about valuation, commodity wars, geopolitics, derivatives, US politics, the real estate flop, etc., etc. And there is no accounting for human panic. But I remain positive on the markets until we would see a low, a failure rally, and a new lower low.

Technically, yesterday and today in the SP500 futures June contract we had what's called a "three gap play" where three inter-day (overnight) gaps have been left behind in a rush to  the highs. Old timers from a hundred years ago knew that these will often get filled in a short term smash. Two were filled today. The third gap is from 1292.90 in the June contract, just below today's low of 1293.50. If my Elliott and "three gap play" ideas are correct we will fill that gap Monday, and maybe even take out the bottom  of that April 17 daily bar at 1286.70, and then go up.

I'm gone to Mexico for ten days tonight, so I'll miss all the fun of the market next week.  I feel fairly comfortable in funds which have all weathered previous severe bear markets pretty well, the bulk of which are themselves hedged in some manner. I feel better having cut back or "re-balanced" 40% of energy and metals stock funds.

A good place for ideas in markets like these is Carl Futia's site. We don't  always agree, but he trades a variety of markets and stocks I don't  trade, and we use a lot of similar methods from the past. He's also very steady and reliable under stressful conditions, a must. http://www.carlfutia.blogspot.com

See you week after next.


May 12, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


May 09, 2006A Sensible Rebuttal of Goldbug BalderdashGenerally people are content to let gold bugs rave in their specialized padded cells and internet niches. The only reason to do battle with them is that they recruit innocent but ignorant new people to join their radical visions, much as islamists recruit "martyrs". I know this because I operated on the fringe of goldbug-ism in the 1980's and 1990's. I was ignorant  and angry and attracted to gold.

Gold is still important to me, and I own it as a part of my investment portfolio, and gladly so today, but as I got deeper into economic history and the approximately half century long inflation cycle, I got a better perspective on gold as simply another inflation sensitive asset like cotton and soybeans, crude oil, and zinc, real estate and artistic collectables. Stocks and bonds are inflation sensitive too but in different ways. But gold goes up in bull markets during inflation and down in bear markets during disinflation.

Two events made me see the silliness of goldbug-ism. One was the about face performed by goldbugs after 1996 when gold went crashing down. All at once the "bugs" went from being inflationists to deflationists so they could still love gold above all else. The answer to this absurdity was that there had to be a cabal of conspirators preventing gold from pricing higher as it "should have".

One by one writers and sellers in the field of gold converted to the conspiracy theory rather than accept the fact of a disinflationary bear market that was also going on in most other commodities. Gurus and writers and sellers had to talk the talk of their rabid buyers or find a new profession. Many had put in decades on gold and simply had to mouth the new mythology in order  to make a living.

The other awakening came through re-reading 18th and 19th century history, particularly with regard to politics and economics. It became clear to me that the gold standard was part of the entire 19th century bourgeois reactionary regime which came into place on the final defeat of Napoleon and largely sketched out at the Council Of Vienna in 1815: very tight credit and very limited democracy. Credit busts were frequent and deep. Economies were easily strangled. There was and is no way now of going back to an economic world  tied to gold in our age of social democracy and integration of the world's poor.


Dr. Eckart Woertz, Program Manager Economics, Gulf Research Center, Dubai, UAE has written a very succinct article for Financial Sense which further explains the dead and absurd concepts still propagated by goldbugs.
[size=0.8em]http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2006/0509b.html





May 09, 2006 in Long Wave | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)


May 07, 2006A Current PortfolioThese are holdings in a current portfolio I manage. Those marked with an asterisk are held in a taxable account, the others in a tax-deferred account.

"Hedged": HSGFX, DODBX, VWINX                         35.7%

"Hot":      FAIRX,  VSTCX, SGENX, TAVFX, VHGEX     17%

"Niche:    VGENX*, VGPMX*, gold coins*                22.3%

Income:   VWALX*, HSTRX, money market fund      25%

If I count  the amount of the "hedged" funds which are in bonds, the "hedged" category becomes 26.8% and the income category 33.9%.

This is a portfolio for someone who is several years from retirement. The normal level for the inflation "Niche" segment is 15%, so when it is rebalanced the excess will be reallocated to VWALX which is a high yield municipal bond fund.

It may appear that there is little or nothing in foreign stocks, but if one looks at the percent of foreign stocks in many US funds today one finds surprises: steady old VWINX for exmple has 16% of its assets abroad, HSGFX 12% and DODBX 11%. TAVFX has 34%, FAIRX 16%, VGENX 36%, VGPMX 88%, and VHGEX has 57%. Most of these were calculated at year end and may be higher or  lower now, but my last calculation  was that this portfolio has 21% of total assets in non-US stocks plus 11% in gold coins.

Some of the goals were diversification but relatively low price volatility. The inflation niche has the highest volatility and that is why it needs careful attention to "pruning" or rebalancing. If one has thirty years to retirement, volatility can be a benefit long term.  But if one is going to need the money soon, the worst thing is a big drawdown just as one begins drawing funds.

Attention has been paid to tax efficiency by keeping taxable dividend payers in the un-taxed account and putting high yield munis and the inflation hedges in the taxed account.

The five funds in the "hot" segment could be reduced to just two or three for smaller accounts. One of those should be  SGENX/FESGX or VHGEX which do largely the same things.




May 07, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


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May 07, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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&laquo; May 2006 | Main | July 2006 &raquo;
June 29, 2006At LastSentiment has been compressed for weeks, not making lower lows, and the markets finally exploded today.

It's possible that a correction has been in effect in SPX and other indexes since 2004. The chart below shows that the recent correction is almost identical in percent as the one in 2004: about 9%. It's plausible that it is done. The  bullish percent of  NYSE charts more clearly shows the correction I am talking about.

However, I am a realist and  live on my money. I will be away for most of July. So I have sold some of my more agressive long positions on today's close and redeployed along the lines I have discussed in some of the recent portfolio posts. I am still long and committed, but I have decided to reduce volatility further as a prudent provider. Plus, who can argue with 5% money market funds at Vanguard for part of the portfolio while on vacation?































June 29, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


June 18, 2006ISEE and Sent Osc






































http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1350371205823.html











June 18, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 16, 2006WisdomTree IIThe best system for the past three years was buying and holding, and for three years before that selling and holding or sitting it out. My wistful desire for a simple trading system is futile. That's why I try to overcome the normal human inertia of following the sheeple.
Michael Steinhardt of WisdomTree used to talk about this endeavor as developing "variant perception", his humorous name for sentiment. But now after 40 years he is into portfolio selection. Perhaps that's a natural progression as you get older and have amassed enough funds to require a portfolio instead of just winging it on speculative vehicles time after time, week after week, year after year.
The idea of dividend weighting an index or fund or portfoio is very simple. Most measures of business activity can be faked: sales, overhead, compensation, earnings, book value, etc., but it's hard to fake a dividend. It's there or it isn't, and its value is unquestionable. That's a fundamental "black box system". So weight your index or portfolio by dividend heft instead of by capitalization. Especially since so much of long term gains comes from reinvested dividends.
Here's just one of the twenty Wisdomtree funds' ten year index total return compared to its benchmark. The idea speaks for itself:



June 16, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 15, 2006Sentiment Oscillator


June 15, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Portfolio BreakthroughMichael Steinhardt, truly one of the market wizards of our era (see Jack Schwager's "Market Wizards", and Jeremy Siegel are starting up a whole deck of new ETFs tomorrow. These new funds are based on a research finding: "From 1926 through 2004, reinvestment of dividends accounted for 96% of the stock market’s total return after inflation." (The Future for Investors, Jeremy Siegel, 2005).

This turns indexing, which I have never liked very much, on its head. Instead of indexing by cap weighting they are going to do it by dividend weighting! You have to register at their site to get into the really good material, since this is legally a "quiet time" around launch time, but they are launching 19 different sector funds, US and foreign, based on this concept. The ten year annualized total return differences between their indexes and an appropriate standard benchmark index range from a 108% advantage for Japaese small caps to a 230% advantage for European small caps. There is a 187% advantage for their US small cap index. All sectors and geographic regions are covered.
Funds which intelligently raise cash instead of always being fully invested have big advantages, which is one reason why I prefer them to index funds, but this Steinhardt/Siegel indexing is of comparable impact to being in tune with the market and raising cash near market highs. Very exciting!
http://wisdomtree.com



June 15, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 11, 2006Portfolio Balancing, Part Two
Even if you have 20 or 50 million dollars and several homes and other physical assets, a 1929-32 or 2000-2003 bear market could have reduced your investments to a solitary million, or worse, if you were leveraged and had mortgages and other debt as well. I personally know of one casualty of this magnitude, but there are stories everywhere about other people like the one person I knew.

My own awakening three to four years ago was realizing that low versus high volatility funds, or income versus capital gains funds, were a better way to diversifiy than simple bond versus stock portfolios which the marketers trumpet.  There are a lot of income funds which are run more or less like hedge funds. In this sense Dodge & Cox's Balanced Fund (DODBX, since 1931) is an income fund, and so is Vanguard/Wellington's Wellesley fund (VWINX). Both feature bonds of variable duration (maturity)and stocks paying high dividends or with superior growth. Since 1988 Wellesley Income Fund has returned 7.3% and Dodge & Cox Balanced has returned 10.6% annually. Berwyn Income Fund (BERIX)is another slighly more complicated balanced income fund which I like. Hussman Growth Fund is variably hedged in mid caps, but it also captures the short term interest rate on top of its hedge record. HSGFX returned over 13% per year from 2000 to today.

The other low volatility income fund development is in bond funds themselves. There are a lot of bond categories other than Treasuries and high-grade corporates: high yield (junk) bonds, foreign developed country sovereign bonds, foreign emerging market bonds, quasi-bond convertibles, and high yield municipals, among others. As in any other area of investment, there are people who are experts and who win consistently. Many of these categories trade more in line with equities but in a less volatile manner. Some of my favorites are Loomis-Sayles Bond Fund (LSBRX or LSBDX), Hussman Total Return Fund (HSTRX), and Vanguard hi-yield municipal bond fund (VWAHX or VWALX). These are funds with excellent long term management and performance in these challenging but rewarding areas. Pimco's Asset Fund (PAAIX or PASDX) is another income allocation fund much like a hedge fund and advised by Robert Arnott, but it has several layers of cost as it is a fund containing other Pimco funds.

To traditional investors these low voaltility income funds may sound exotic or risky--they did to me--but these funds have been around and have proved themselves over several decades. And they have very low cost structures compared to hedge funds which they emulate. They have returned 9-12% annually over the past 18 years with low price volatility or downside price loss. Funds of this type, including Wellesley, Dodge & Cox Balanced,
Hussman Growth and some of the others have become 70% of my overall retirement portfolio.

But we also need some exposure to volatility for long term capital growth and inflation protection. For that 30% of my total portfolio, I have divided it into six sectors which can be hot at different times: small caps, mid caps, globals, health, resource, and volatile incomes, about 5% of total portfolio in each.

In the small caps sector I have a new strategic Vanguard fund, VSTCX, paired with Perritt Micro-Caps, PRCGX. In the mid caps sector I really like Fairholme Fund, FAIRX. In the global sector I have my all-time favorite, First Eagle Global, SGENX or FESGX. In the health sector, I like mainly Vanguard Health Care VGHCX and a much smaller piece in Fidelity BioTech, FBIOX. In the resource sector Vanguard Energy and Vanguard Precious Metals, VGENX and VGPMX, and a few individual stocks. In the volatile income sector Vanguard REIT, VGSIX, and the Vanguard Utility ETF, VPU, or their mutual fund version, VUIAX work. All of these have excellent returns and do not all go up or down together.

I ran a simulated study of six low volatility and six high volatility stocks first from September 1, 2000 to March 11,2003 and then from March 11, 2003 to June 9, 2006. 70% of the portfolio is made up of equal amounts of the six low volatlity funds, and 30% is made up of equal amounts of the high volatility stocks. I added the annual total returns for each of the two major categories. Then I multiplied the categories by 0.7 (low volatility) or 0.3 (high volatility) and summed these. From 2000-2003 the total annualized return for the whole portfolio was 7.05% of which 0.7 times the 5.24 annualized total return was 5.24% from the low volatility funds. The six high volatility funds added 1.82% in total returns(6.05% times 0.3) for a grand total of 7.05% annualized total return during the worst bear market in a generation. Even though the SPX dropped 49% (-21.7% annualized) from its 2000 high to the March 11,2003 low, the simulated 70/30 portfolio gained 7% annualized.

Using the same approach and funds, from March 11,2003 to June 9, 2006 the low voalitilty funds contributed 7.44% annualized to the return (10.62 times 0.7) while the high volatility funds contributed 8.91% (30% of 29.7) for a grand total of 16.35% per year for the portfolio. SPX gained 15.28% during the same period.

For the whole period from September 1, 2001 to last Friday, the low voaltility funds returned 9.21 times 0.7 or 6.45% to the total, and the high volatility funds returned 19.91% times 0.3 or 5.67%. The total annualized return for the portfolio was 12.12% per year. The Vanguard Institutional class S&P 500 fund (VIIIX) with very low cost and with all dividends reinvested had a total annual return of -1.49% per year from September 1, 2000 to last Friday. 12% annualized returns for ten years takes $10,000 to $33,000, and by taking profits and rebalancing you would not have needed ANY market timing with this type of portfolio, even with the worst bear market in decades raging during the first half of the study.

Obviously I did not have this whole 70/30 portfolio at the time, and no one did. Husssman didn't even begin operations until 2000. I did own some of these funds, particularly the inflation sensitive metals, energy and real estate funds due to my Kondratieff bias beginning in 1999. I also had Dodge & Cox. The others are ones I discovered  while looking for low volatility gainers. But as my studies evolved over the past few years I have come to own all but one of them now and will add the one I don't have. (In my own account I have given Hussman Growth HSGFX a double weighting to the other low volatility income funds.) The point of the study is to demonstrate that low volatility income funds with good managements can reduce the volatility of a high beta capital gains portfolio, such as my 30% portion. Even the high volatility funds tend to have consistent gains but gains are of course much lower or absent during a severe bear market when the income funds are pulling the portfolio cart.

The fund keys are MANAGEMENT, CONSISTENCY, and LOW VOLATILITY. Two internet websites which have been of great help to me in finding such funds are  http://www.fasttrack.net and http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/research/fundwelcome.asp?Funds=1
FastTrack also has a splendid program which they sell, or sell the data for, but their free total return charts at their site are fabulous. FastTrack also will let you use their program and data for a month for free with no credit card disclosure. MSN also has a good free chart program one can download.

The two FastTrack charts below show the entire investment period, 2000-2006, one with the low volatilty funds, the other with the high volatility funds. For the study I made separate charts for each period, but these two will suffice to give you the flavor of the results as well as of the FastTrack program I am evaluating on their free trial.

Getting back to the fund study, I have mentioned in an earlier article that many of these funds have substantial foreign holdings, so despite the fact that I have only 5% in globals, the overseas markets are well represented overall. Many US funds now routinely contain world stocks in both general funds and in sector funds. The fact of the matter is that foreign and niche stock sectors, like the  30% of my portfolio, are much more volatile than seasoned large caps and US bonds. They tend to outperform greatly for 2-5 years and then lie dead for ages. They have been hot for five or six years now, so they may be due for a rest. This fits with my concept, which I have presented here at the blog, of an interlude in the Kondratieff Wave inflationary bull market. The important thing is to think long term but use intermediate term changes to adjust long term investments and trading. Gold and commodities may have peaked and the dollar and US bonds may have bottomed for a while, as I have previously suggested. We don't need to go overboard and dump or change all investments, but we can adjust them and take profits in extended niches and markets, which I have done. In fact I have made very few changes except to take profits in the metals, energy, and international sectors as a rebalancing exercise.

In this fund study I left out of consideration gold bullion coins and bars and silver which are held separately as a long term asset, like my home and other personal assets. They are a part of the larger picture but not immediately relevant to retirement investment planning.

Regard all of this series, and this whole site, as my diary of investment and my technical approaches to analysis. I am not and do not want to be an investment advisor, and am merely telling you what I am thinking and doing, for what it's worth. Do your own homework and due diligence.


























June 11, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 10, 2006Portfolio Balancing, Part OneSeveral academic studies of the 1970's and 1980's promoted the idea of balanced portfolios for reduced risk. Not that this was suddenly a new idea, but the devastating stock losses of the 1970's and 1980's made for a more attentive audience for the idea of not putting all one' s eggs in the same basket. Or perhaps put better, for putting several different eggs in one's big basket.

Thanks to the power of modern marketing, everyone now knows that she should have a mixture of stocks and bonds to reduce "risk". The first balanced mutual fund I know of was Wellington Fund which was started on July 22, 1929 by and is still advised by Wellington in Boston for Vanguard. The second surviving balanced fund was the Dodge & Cox Balanced Fund started in 1931 and still run by Dodge & Cox in San Francisco. Both funds had and have approximately 60-70% in stocks and the rest in bonds and/or cash. Wellington Fund gives a lifetime record from 1929 of 8.35% compounded annually, including reinvestment of all dividends and net of fund expenses, but not net of taxes. If you'd put $10,000 of Wellington one time only into a tax free trust on July 22, 1929 you would have had $6,020,254.33 as of Friday of this past week. And 1929 wasn't a great year to start investing. I wonder what the $10,000 was worth in 1932, and more important, what was the yield from the 1932 low to now? On the other hand, knowing that 8.35% came to a long term holder from a month before the worst bear market of the past 100 year began is also a comforting statistic.

There aren't a lot of data on how well bonds actually protect against devastating stock losses and vice versa over very long periods of time, but I found a summary of a survey done by Alliance Bernstein which sheds a bit of light on the subject: http://therightmix.alliancebernstein.com/TheRightMix/Overview.aspx?cid=25926&pid=1
The study only goes back to 1970, but it shows that in every stock bear market of more than a 10% decline  since 1970, bonds went up.

The two biggest bond bull markets during those stock bear markets were 1981-82 and 2000-2003 when funds like Wellington and Dodge & Cox actually made money while most funds lost hugely. But even if the bonds don't make you a lot of money in every stock bear market, they at least keep you from losing a lot more than if you had been 100% in stocks, as does cash. So there is clearly a benefit in stock bear markets from stocks/bonds mixing. Of course there is a cost in reducing your gains in roaring stock bull markets when bonds may reduce your overall gains. Nevertheless Wellington made 8.35% compounded over a very long period of time and that doubtless would have let you sleep better.

However, it occurred to me (and many others) that in an era of brilliant portfolio strategists and hedge fund growth world wide, I needed to rethink the standard idea of bonds and stocks. As I prepared to sail into retirement it became quite clear that I didn't want to have a big draw down early in that retirement period. A deep or very long bear market at the beginning of your retirement can devastate all your plans. Pre-retirement investment planning always seems to stress the need for bonds, but bonds can have bear markets too. as they did form the 1960's to 1980's and a bond bear will likely happen again once it becomes common knowledge that inflation is here to stay beyond rising gasoline prices.

What we need to get right when we're heading into retirement is generating income and reducing the volatility that comes with major bearish moves. The only sure way to do that is in money market funds or T Bills and bank CD's. Right now with some money market funds yielding 4.75%, a million dollars will bring you $47,500 per year or just under $4000 per month. With Social Security or other pensions, this may be enough if you own your home and live modestly.  Not too long ago money market funds were yielding 1% or less, so we all know that money market funds are not guaranteed. But you could spread a  million dollars around in 5-10 year bank CD's at 4-5% in enough banks to retain FDIC insurace coverage in case of bank failures. If you have enough money to generate income for a decent life, either in taxable or tax free short term money market instruments, by all means do it and forget the rest. Many people live very happily in just this manner.

I'm not beating the drum for Wellington Fund, but 4-5% in Tbills or money market funds or CD's is only half what you'd expect to get, on average, based on Wellington's almost 77 year history. Your same one million dollars in Wellington would get you $83,500 per year,on average, leaving you with your million dollars and just shy of $7,000 per month. You would get less than that some years and more in others, but you could safely take out $80,000 per year without too much worry. Based on data I have for total returns since September 1988, Wellington averaged 7% and Dodge & Cox Balanced Fund 10.6% per year. But you get the idea. Also bear in mind that if you are taking out a fixed amount each year you aren't compounding it, so your real yield will be smaller and before tax.

Another way to look at a million dollars at age 65 is as an annuity. If you structure your million dollars in T bills, zero coupon T notes and zero coupon T bonds at a 5% return, which is currently very nearly do-able, you could draw out $72,000 per year before taxes for the next 24 years before you run out of money. (See chart.)  That would make you 89 years old, beyond the current normal life expectancy for either a 65 year old American woman or man. Or you could buy multiple 30 year US treasury T bonds and cash one in each year. If you bought 25 of the 30 year T bonds at 5%, you could cash in one each year and collect the 5% on the remaining balance.

These are four fairly simple ways of providing a modest but steady income from a million dollars for your entire retirement at current interest rates. The lesson to be learned is that you need a fairly large amount of cash to start with in retirement and must  have a modest budget to make it, but it can certainly be done. Recent studies show that most people have or will have far less than a million dollars. I don't think they are all going to make 20-30% a year on their $250,000-$500,000, but apparently they think so.

I do think it is possible to increase your yield from 4-5% to a low volatility 7-8% or more with a little work and planning and with rigorous budgeting. $500,000 at 8% gets you $40,000, and with Social Security of $1000 per month that would give you $4,333 per month or more if you annuitize it as above. I realize that many reading this will have far in excess of a million dollars when they retire, as I do, but many do not, and the future looks quite bleak for them.

Next time I'll cover what I see as the important portfolio structuring approaches for increasing yields while keeping price volatility or downside risk fairly low.















June 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


2CS and 2SOThe main contribution of sentiment gauges is to tell you whether the market is in either a excessively bullish or bearish phase. In the past ten years I have run the 2C Sentimemeter (2CS) which is the five day running total of the daily product of VXO times the CBOE combined put/call ratio. A lower number indicates options buyers are bullish, and a higher number that they are bearish.

In the 1990's and up to 2003, tops were made when the 2CS was in the 60's. Since the bull market began in 2003, there has been a "range shift" so that it takes more bullishness to turn the market down and less bearishness to turn it back up than it did from 1996 to 2003.

A reading from 90 to 120 has always been sufficient for a low except during the 1998 crash, and 2002 and 2003 lows when readings exceeded 200.

Thus if the drop from May is a "normal" correction in a continuing bull market, we should turn up before long.

In late 2000 I started looking at a new indicator on a daily basis to see if I could improve on the slower 2CS. It evolved by spring 2001 to include an "amplified" options component plus up/down volume and breadth (up/down stocks) components in a "cocktail" of my own.

In this daily Sentiment Oscillator, under -3 and over +13 have indicated excessive bearishness and excessive bullishness respectively on a short term (days to weeks) basis.

In sentiment work there is always a danger of a "range shift" when longer term sentiment is changing. We saw that for the upside when sentiment ranges expanded upward in 2003-2004. this trapped a lot of bears who expected a resumption of the bear market when sentiment got "too" bullish on a short term basis. Instead all we got were modest corrections to the new bullish trend.

That can happen to bulls too, and it demands honesty and thoughtful observation. If this decline drags on with sentiment staying down under zero or -3, and/or a rally fails to be robust, the market may be telling us that the longer term trend has changed to down. I don't see that happening yet, but this drop is a bit deeper and quicker (momentum) than we've seen since August 2004, so it's best to be careful and to be honest with oneself.
































June 10, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 04, 2006Bagpiper: Final Words on the SubjectFrankly I got tired of trying to present a timely and useful service for free, and I have no desire to do it for money. Not surprisingly the method is something that cannot be canned and marketed as a sure thing. It is a method which gives early and very impressive hints of intermediate term trend changes, but it  requires for execution some judgement derived from other sources: sentiment, volume, long term cycles, experience, etc.

I may sometimes  refer to it in the future, but take it simply as a trend change signal as you would the mention of a moving average or trend line break.


June 04, 2006 in The Bagpiper | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


More UpSentiment got very bearish in the past few weeks, so much so that I suspect we have a good rally yet to come. I am working on putting my daily sentiment oscillators (2SO) into Excel so I can begin to show it. Normally it needs to get to 12-14 at least to signal that a downturn is coming, and under zero for an upturn. It got down to -9 and is still only up to 7.5.

The 2CS, which is a five day running total of the daily product of VXO and the CBOE P/C ratio, and which is "upside down" compared to price and the 2SO, got to a high of 100 the week before last and is now at 78. The 2CS has been reaching the 50's or 40's regularly at highs.


The ISEE ratio of their in house buy-to-open put /call ratio (kept by long time cyberfriend Chairman Mao) reached levels not seen since the 2004 swoon.  MaoXian's eclectic blog can be seen at: http://www.maoxian.com/ He always puts an index or ETF chart with his sentiment charts, but it is just a chart of interest and not directly related to the ISEE chart data.

































I have put together a portfolio of mutual funds which have decent gains but low volatility. Money in retirement funds and money earned in the futures accounts are invested in this long term failry conservative manner. I have had a lot of help from FastTrack's fine website

The total portfolio lost 2.7% peak to low on the May spill. It has recovered to 1.17% as of Friday.
The portfolio is up 4.35% on the year, up 12.84% from one year ago, and up 13.2% annualized from its inception on September 1, 2003.
http://www.fasttrack.net/ I am now using FasTrack's one month free trial of their program and whole data base. More on this another time, but I recommend the free website for seeing total return charts (dividends reinvested) on funds and stocks too. Their "ulcer index" and risk-adjusted return indicators are excellent ways to see what your fund choices "really" are doing for you.



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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:18 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; May 2006 | Main | July 2006 &raquo;
June 29, 2006At LastSentiment has been compressed for weeks, not making lower lows, and the markets finally exploded today.

It's possible that a correction has been in effect in SPX and other indexes since 2004. The chart below shows that the recent correction is almost identical in percent as the one in 2004: about 9%. It's plausible that it is done. The  bullish percent of  NYSE charts more clearly shows the correction I am talking about.

However, I am a realist and  live on my money. I will be away for most of July. So I have sold some of my more agressive long positions on today's close and redeployed along the lines I have discussed in some of the recent portfolio posts. I am still long and committed, but I have decided to reduce volatility further as a prudent provider. Plus, who can argue with 5% money market funds at Vanguard for part of the portfolio while on vacation?































June 29, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


June 18, 2006ISEE and Sent Osc






































http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1350371205823.html











June 18, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 16, 2006WisdomTree IIThe best system for the past three years was buying and holding, and for three years before that selling and holding or sitting it out. My wistful desire for a simple trading system is futile. That's why I try to overcome the normal human inertia of following the sheeple.
Michael Steinhardt of WisdomTree used to talk about this endeavor as developing "variant perception", his humorous name for sentiment. But now after 40 years he is into portfolio selection. Perhaps that's a natural progression as you get older and have amassed enough funds to require a portfolio instead of just winging it on speculative vehicles time after time, week after week, year after year.
The idea of dividend weighting an index or fund or portfoio is very simple. Most measures of business activity can be faked: sales, overhead, compensation, earnings, book value, etc., but it's hard to fake a dividend. It's there or it isn't, and its value is unquestionable. That's a fundamental "black box system". So weight your index or portfolio by dividend heft instead of by capitalization. Especially since so much of long term gains comes from reinvested dividends.
Here's just one of the twenty Wisdomtree funds' ten year index total return compared to its benchmark. The idea speaks for itself:



June 16, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 15, 2006Sentiment Oscillator


June 15, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Portfolio BreakthroughMichael Steinhardt, truly one of the market wizards of our era (see Jack Schwager's "Market Wizards", and Jeremy Siegel are starting up a whole deck of new ETFs tomorrow. These new funds are based on a research finding: "From 1926 through 2004, reinvestment of dividends accounted for 96% of the stock market’s total return after inflation." (The Future for Investors, Jeremy Siegel, 2005).

This turns indexing, which I have never liked very much, on its head. Instead of indexing by cap weighting they are going to do it by dividend weighting! You have to register at their site to get into the really good material, since this is legally a "quiet time" around launch time, but they are launching 19 different sector funds, US and foreign, based on this concept. The ten year annualized total return differences between their indexes and an appropriate standard benchmark index range from a 108% advantage for Japaese small caps to a 230% advantage for European small caps. There is a 187% advantage for their US small cap index. All sectors and geographic regions are covered.
Funds which intelligently raise cash instead of always being fully invested have big advantages, which is one reason why I prefer them to index funds, but this Steinhardt/Siegel indexing is of comparable impact to being in tune with the market and raising cash near market highs. Very exciting!




June 15, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 11, 2006Portfolio Balancing, Part Two
Even if you have 20 or 50 million dollars and several homes and other physical assets, a 1929-32 or 2000-2003 bear market could have reduced your investments to a solitary million, or worse, if you were leveraged and had mortgages and other debt as well. I personally know of one casualty of this magnitude, but there are stories everywhere about other people like the one person I knew.

My own awakening three to four years ago was realizing that low versus high volatility funds, or income versus capital gains funds, were a better way to diversifiy than simple bond versus stock portfolios which the marketers trumpet.  There are a lot of income funds which are run more or less like hedge funds. In this sense Dodge & Cox's Balanced Fund (DODBX, since 1931) is an income fund, and so is Vanguard/Wellington's Wellesley fund (VWINX). Both feature bonds of variable duration (maturity)and stocks paying high dividends or with superior growth. Since 1988 Wellesley Income Fund has returned 7.3% and Dodge & Cox Balanced has returned 10.6% annually. Berwyn Income Fund (BERIX)is another slighly more complicated balanced income fund which I like. Hussman Growth Fund is variably hedged in mid caps, but it also captures the short term interest rate on top of its hedge record. HSGFX returned over 13% per year from 2000 to today.

The other low volatility income fund development is in bond funds themselves. There are a lot of bond categories other than Treasuries and high-grade corporates: high yield (junk) bonds, foreign developed country sovereign bonds, foreign emerging market bonds, quasi-bond convertibles, and high yield municipals, among others. As in any other area of investment, there are people who are experts and who win consistently. Many of these categories trade more in line with equities but in a less volatile manner. Some of my favorites are Loomis-Sayles Bond Fund (LSBRX or LSBDX), Hussman Total Return Fund (HSTRX), and Vanguard hi-yield municipal bond fund (VWAHX or VWALX). These are funds with excellent long term management and performance in these challenging but rewarding areas. Pimco's Asset Fund (PAAIX or PASDX) is another income allocation fund much like a hedge fund and advised by Robert Arnott, but it has several layers of cost as it is a fund containing other Pimco funds.

To traditional investors these low voaltility income funds may sound exotic or risky--they did to me--but these funds have been around and have proved themselves over several decades. And they have very low cost structures compared to hedge funds which they emulate. They have returned 9-12% annually over the past 18 years with low price volatility or downside price loss. Funds of this type, including Wellesley, Dodge & Cox Balanced,
Hussman Growth and some of the others have become 70% of my overall retirement portfolio.

But we also need some exposure to volatility for long term capital growth and inflation protection. For that 30% of my total portfolio, I have divided it into six sectors which can be hot at different times: small caps, mid caps, globals, health, resource, and volatile incomes, about 5% of total portfolio in each.

In the small caps sector I have a new strategic Vanguard fund, VSTCX, paired with Perritt Micro-Caps, PRCGX. In the mid caps sector I really like Fairholme Fund, FAIRX. In the global sector I have my all-time favorite, First Eagle Global, SGENX or FESGX. In the health sector, I like mainly Vanguard Health Care VGHCX and a much smaller piece in Fidelity BioTech, FBIOX. In the resource sector Vanguard Energy and Vanguard Precious Metals, VGENX and VGPMX, and a few individual stocks. In the volatile income sector Vanguard REIT, VGSIX, and the Vanguard Utility ETF, VPU, or their mutual fund version, VUIAX work. All of these have excellent returns and do not all go up or down together.

I ran a simulated study of six low volatility and six high volatility stocks first from September 1, 2000 to March 11,2003 and then from March 11, 2003 to June 9, 2006. 70% of the portfolio is made up of equal amounts of the six low volatlity funds, and 30% is made up of equal amounts of the high volatility stocks. I added the annual total returns for each of the two major categories. Then I multiplied the categories by 0.7 (low volatility) or 0.3 (high volatility) and summed these. From 2000-2003 the total annualized return for the whole portfolio was 7.05% of which 0.7 times the 5.24 annualized total return was 5.24% from the low volatility funds. The six high volatility funds added 1.82% in total returns(6.05% times 0.3) for a grand total of 7.05% annualized total return during the worst bear market in a generation. Even though the SPX dropped 49% (-21.7% annualized) from its 2000 high to the March 11,2003 low, the simulated 70/30 portfolio gained 7% annualized.

Using the same approach and funds, from March 11,2003 to June 9, 2006 the low voalitilty funds contributed 7.44% annualized to the return (10.62 times 0.7) while the high volatility funds contributed 8.91% (30% of 29.7) for a grand total of 16.35% per year for the portfolio. SPX gained 15.28% during the same period.

For the whole period from September 1, 2001 to last Friday, the low voaltility funds returned 9.21 times 0.7 or 6.45% to the total, and the high volatility funds returned 19.91% times 0.3 or 5.67%. The total annualized return for the portfolio was 12.12% per year. The Vanguard Institutional class S&P 500 fund (VIIIX) with very low cost and with all dividends reinvested had a total annual return of -1.49% per year from September 1, 2000 to last Friday. 12% annualized returns for ten years takes $10,000 to $33,000, and by taking profits and rebalancing you would not have needed ANY market timing with this type of portfolio, even with the worst bear market in decades raging during the first half of the study.

Obviously I did not have this whole 70/30 portfolio at the time, and no one did. Husssman didn't even begin operations until 2000. I did own some of these funds, particularly the inflation sensitive metals, energy and real estate funds due to my Kondratieff bias beginning in 1999. I also had Dodge & Cox. The others are ones I discovered  while looking for low volatility gainers. But as my studies evolved over the past few years I have come to own all but one of them now and will add the one I don't have. (In my own account I have given Hussman Growth HSGFX a double weighting to the other low volatility income funds.) The point of the study is to demonstrate that low volatility income funds with good managements can reduce the volatility of a high beta capital gains portfolio, such as my 30% portion. Even the high volatility funds tend to have consistent gains but gains are of course much lower or absent during a severe bear market when the income funds are pulling the portfolio cart.

The fund keys are MANAGEMENT, CONSISTENCY, and LOW VOLATILITY. Two internet websites which have been of great help to me in finding such funds are
FastTrack also has a splendid program which they sell, or sell the data for, but their free total return charts at their site are fabulous. FastTrack also will let you use their program and data for a month for free with no credit card disclosure. MSN also has a good free chart program one can download.

The two FastTrack charts below show the entire investment period, 2000-2006, one with the low volatilty funds, the other with the high volatility funds. For the study I made separate charts for each period, but these two will suffice to give you the flavor of the results as well as of the FastTrack program I am evaluating on their free trial.

Getting back to the fund study, I have mentioned in an earlier article that many of these funds have substantial foreign holdings, so despite the fact that I have only 5% in globals, the overseas markets are well represented overall. Many US funds now routinely contain world stocks in both general funds and in sector funds. The fact of the matter is that foreign and niche stock sectors, like the  30% of my portfolio, are much more volatile than seasoned large caps and US bonds. They tend to outperform greatly for 2-5 years and then lie dead for ages. They have been hot for five or six years now, so they may be due for a rest. This fits with my concept, which I have presented here at the blog, of an interlude in the Kondratieff Wave inflationary bull market. The important thing is to think long term but use intermediate term changes to adjust long term investments and trading. Gold and commodities may have peaked and the dollar and US bonds may have bottomed for a while, as I have previously suggested. We don't need to go overboard and dump or change all investments, but we can adjust them and take profits in extended niches and markets, which I have done. In fact I have made very few changes except to take profits in the metals, energy, and international sectors as a rebalancing exercise.

In this fund study I left out of consideration gold bullion coins and bars and silver which are held separately as a long term asset, like my home and other personal assets. They are a part of the larger picture but not immediately relevant to retirement investment planning.

Regard all of this series, and this whole site, as my diary of investment and my technical approaches to analysis. I am not and do not want to be an investment advisor, and am merely telling you what I am thinking and doing, for what it's worth. Do your own homework and due diligence.


























June 11, 2006 in Portfolio Ideas | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 10, 2006Portfolio Balancing, Part OneSeveral academic studies of the 1970's and 1980's promoted the idea of balanced portfolios for reduced risk. Not that this was suddenly a new idea, but the devastating stock losses of the 1970's and 1980's made for a more attentive audience for the idea of not putting all one' s eggs in the same basket. Or perhaps put better, for putting several different eggs in one's big basket.

Thanks to the power of modern marketing, everyone now knows that she should have a mixture of stocks and bonds to reduce "risk". The first balanced mutual fund I know of was Wellington Fund which was started on July 22, 1929 by and is still advised by Wellington in Boston for Vanguard. The second surviving balanced fund was the Dodge & Cox Balanced Fund started in 1931 and still run by Dodge & Cox in San Francisco. Both funds had and have approximately 60-70% in stocks and the rest in bonds and/or cash. Wellington Fund gives a lifetime record from 1929 of 8.35% compounded annually, including reinvestment of all dividends and net of fund expenses, but not net of taxes. If you'd put $10,000 of Wellington one time only into a tax free trust on July 22, 1929 you would have had $6,020,254.33 as of Friday of this past week. And 1929 wasn't a great year to start investing. I wonder what the $10,000 was worth in 1932, and more important, what was the yield from the 1932 low to now? On the other hand, knowing that 8.35% came to a long term holder from a month before the worst bear market of the past 100 year began is also a comforting statistic.

There aren't a lot of data on how well bonds actually protect against devastating stock losses and vice versa over very long periods of time, but I found a
The study only goes back to 1970, but it shows that in every stock bear market of more than a 10% decline  since 1970, bonds went up.

The two biggest bond bull markets during those stock bear markets were 1981-82 and 2000-2003 when funds like Wellington and Dodge & Cox actually made money while most funds lost hugely. But even if the bonds don't make you a lot of money in every stock bear market, they at least keep you from losing a lot more than if you had been 100% in stocks, as does cash. So there is clearly a benefit in stock bear markets from stocks/bonds mixing. Of course there is a cost in reducing your gains in roaring stock bull markets when bonds may reduce your overall gains. Nevertheless Wellington made 8.35% compounded over a very long period of time and that doubtless would have let you sleep better.

However, it occurred to me (and many others) that in an era of brilliant portfolio strategists and hedge fund growth world wide, I needed to rethink the standard idea of bonds and stocks. As I prepared to sail into retirement it became quite clear that I didn't want to have a big draw down early in that retirement period. A deep or very long bear market at the beginning of your retirement can devastate all your plans. Pre-retirement investment planning always seems to stress the need for bonds, but bonds can have bear markets too. as they did form the 1960's to 1980's and a bond bear will likely happen again once it becomes common knowledge that inflation is here to stay beyond rising gasoline prices.

What we need to get right when we're heading into retirement is generating income and reducing the volatility that comes with major bearish moves. The only sure way to do that is in money market funds or T Bills and bank CD's. Right now with some money market funds yielding 4.75%, a million dollars will bring you $47,500 per year or just under $4000 per month. With Social Security or other pensions, this may be enough if you own your home and live modestly.  Not too long ago money market funds were yielding 1% or less, so we all know that money market funds are not guaranteed. But you could spread a  million dollars around in 5-10 year bank CD's at 4-5% in enough banks to retain FDIC insurace coverage in case of bank failures. If you have enough money to generate income for a decent life, either in taxable or tax free short term money market instruments, by all means do it and forget the rest. Many people live very happily in just this manner.

I'm not beating the drum for Wellington Fund, but 4-5% in Tbills or money market funds or CD's is only half what you'd expect to get, on average, based on Wellington's almost 77 year history. Your same one million dollars in Wellington would get you $83,500 per year,on average, leaving you with your million dollars and just shy of $7,000 per month. You would get less than that some years and more in others, but you could safely take out $80,000 per year without too much worry. Based on data I have for total returns since September 1988, Wellington averaged 7% and Dodge & Cox Balanced Fund 10.6% per year. But you get the idea. Also bear in mind that if you are taking out a fixed amount each year you aren't compounding it, so your real yield will be smaller and before tax.

Another way to look at a million dollars at age 65 is as an annuity. If you structure your million dollars in T bills, zero coupon T notes and zero coupon T bonds at a 5% return, which is currently very nearly do-able, you could draw out $72,000 per year before taxes for the next 24 years before you run out of money. (See chart.)  That would make you 89 years old, beyond the current normal life expectancy for either a 65 year old American woman or man. Or you could buy multiple 30 year US treasury T bonds and cash one in each year. If you bought 25 of the 30 year T bonds at 5%, you could cash in one each year and collect the 5% on the remaining balance.

These are four fairly simple ways of providing a modest but steady income from a million dollars for your entire retirement at current interest rates. The lesson to be learned is that you need a fairly large amount of cash to start with in retirement and must  have a modest budget to make it, but it can certainly be done. Recent studies show that most people have or will have far less than a million dollars. I don't think they are all going to make 20-30% a year on their $250,000-$500,000, but apparently they think so.

I do think it is possible to increase your yield from 4-5% to a low volatility 7-8% or more with a little work and planning and with rigorous budgeting. $500,000 at 8% gets you $40,000, and with Social Security of $1000 per month that would give you $4,333 per month or more if you annuitize it as above. I realize that many reading this will have far in excess of a million dollars when they retire, as I do, but many do not, and the future looks quite bleak for them.

Next time I'll cover what I see as the important portfolio structuring approaches for increasing yields while keeping price volatility or downside risk fairly low.















June 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


2CS and 2SOThe main contribution of sentiment gauges is to tell you whether the market is in either a excessively bullish or bearish phase. In the past ten years I have run the 2C Sentimemeter (2CS) which is the five day running total of the daily product of VXO times the CBOE combined put/call ratio. A lower number indicates options buyers are bullish, and a higher number that they are bearish.

In the 1990's and up to 2003, tops were made when the 2CS was in the 60's. Since the bull market began in 2003, there has been a "range shift" so that it takes more bullishness to turn the market down and less bearishness to turn it back up than it did from 1996 to 2003.

A reading from 90 to 120 has always been sufficient for a low except during the 1998 crash, and 2002 and 2003 lows when readings exceeded 200.

Thus if the drop from May is a "normal" correction in a continuing bull market, we should turn up before long.

In late 2000 I started looking at a new indicator on a daily basis to see if I could improve on the slower 2CS. It evolved by spring 2001 to include an "amplified" options component plus up/down volume and breadth (up/down stocks) components in a "cocktail" of my own.

In this daily Sentiment Oscillator, under -3 and over +13 have indicated excessive bearishness and excessive bullishness respectively on a short term (days to weeks) basis.

In sentiment work there is always a danger of a "range shift" when longer term sentiment is changing. We saw that for the upside when sentiment ranges expanded upward in 2003-2004. this trapped a lot of bears who expected a resumption of the bear market when sentiment got "too" bullish on a short term basis. Instead all we got were modest corrections to the new bullish trend.

That can happen to bulls too, and it demands honesty and thoughtful observation. If this decline drags on with sentiment staying down under zero or -3, and/or a rally fails to be robust, the market may be telling us that the longer term trend has changed to down. I don't see that happening yet, but this drop is a bit deeper and quicker (momentum) than we've seen since August 2004, so it's best to be careful and to be honest with oneself.
































June 10, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


June 04, 2006Bagpiper: Final Words on the SubjectFrankly I got tired of trying to present a timely and useful service for free, and I have no desire to do it for money. Not surprisingly the method is something that cannot be canned and marketed as a sure thing. It is a method which gives early and very impressive hints of intermediate term trend changes, but it  requires for execution some judgement derived from other sources: sentiment, volume, long term cycles, experience, etc.

I may sometimes  refer to it in the future, but take it simply as a trend change signal as you would the mention of a moving average or trend line break.


June 04, 2006 in The Bagpiper | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


More UpSentiment got very bearish in the past few weeks, so much so that I suspect we have a good rally yet to come. I am working on putting my daily sentiment oscillators (2SO) into Excel so I can begin to show it. Normally it needs to get to 12-14 at least to signal that a downturn is coming, and under zero for an upturn. It got down to -9 and is still only up to 7.5.

The 2CS, which is a five day running total of the daily product of VXO and the CBOE P/C ratio, and which is "upside down" compared to price and the 2SO, got to a high of 100 the week before last and is now at 78. The 2CS has been reaching the 50's or 40's regularly at highs.


The ISEE ratio of their in house buy-to-open put /call ratio (kept by long time cyberfriend Chairman Mao) reached levels not seen since the 2004 swoon.  I am now using FasTrack's one month free trial of their program and whole data base. More on this another time, but I recommend the free website for seeing total return charts (dividends reinvested) on funds and stocks too. Their "ulcer index" and risk-adjusted return indicators are excellent ways to see what your fund choices "really" are doing for you.




June 04, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:19 | 显示全部楼层
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Trading the Elliott Wave.





1. General          :: top ::
FREE Elliott Wave Software Download! CLICK HERE to send a blank email to instantly get your download instructions for your FREE fully functional Elliott Wave Software. (PLEASE NOTE: After you send your blank email, an automatic response will be sent to your email with your download instructions. So please check your email.)
The Elliott Wave principle was discovered in the late 1920s by Ralph Nelson Elliott. He discovered that stock markets do not behave in a chaotic manner, but that markets move in repetitive cycles, which reflect the actions and emotions of humans caused by exterior influences or mass psychology. Elliott contended, that the ebb and flow of mass psychology always revealed itself in the same repetitive patterns, which subdivide in so called waves.
In part Elliott based his work on the Dow Theory, which also defines price movement in terms of waves, but Elliott discovered the fractal nature of market action. Thus Elliott was able to analyse markets in greater depth, identifying the specific characteristics of wave patterns and making detailed market predictions based on the patterns he had identified.
Fractals are mathematical structures, which on an ever smaller scale infinitely repeat themselves. The patterns that Elliott discovered are built in the same way. An impulsive wave, which goes with the main trend, always shows five waves in its pattern. On a smaller scale, within each of the impulsive waves of the before mentioned impulse, again five waves will be found. In this smaller pattern, the same pattern repeats itself ad infinitum (these ever smaller patterns are labeled as different wave degrees in the Elliott Wave Principle)
Only much later were fractals recognized by scientists. In the 1980s the scientist Mandelbrot proved the existence of fractals in his book "the Fractal Geometry of Nature". He recognized the fractal structure in numerous objects and life forms, a phenomena Elliott already understood in the 1930s.
In the 70s, the Wave Principle gained popularity through the work of Frost and Prechter. They published a legendary book ( a must for every wave student) on the Elliott Wave (Elliott Wave Principle...key to stock market profits, 1978), wherein they predicted, in the middle of the crisis of the 70s, the great bull market of the 1980s. Not only did they correctly forecast the bull market but Robert R. Prechter also predicted the crash of 1987 in time and pinpointed the high exactly.
Only after years of study, did Elliott learn to detect these recurring patterns in the stock market. Apart from these patterns Elliott also based his market forecasts on Fibonacci numbers. Everything he knew has been published in several books, which laid the foundation for people like Bolton, Frost and Prechter, to make profitable forecasts, not only for stock markets, but for all financial markets.
Next let?s first examine the patterns Elliott identified.
2. Basic Theory          :: top ::
According to physical law: "Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction". The same goes for the financial markets. A price movement up or down must be followed by a contrary movement, as the saying goes: "What goes up must come down"( and vice versa).
Price movements can be divided into trends on the one hand and corrections or sideways movements on the other hand. Trends show the main direction of prices, while corrections move against the trend. In Elliott terminology these are called Impulsive waves and Corrective waves.
The Impulse wave formation has five distinct price movements, three in the direction of the trend (I, III, and V) and two against the trend ( II and IV).

Obviously the three waves in the direction of the trend are impulses and therefore these waves also have five waves. The waves against the trend are corrections and are composed of three waves.

The corrective wave formation normally has three, in some cases five or more distinct price movements, two in the direction of the main correction ( A and C) and one against it (B). Wave 2 and 4 in the above picture are corrections. These waves have the following structure:

Note that these waves A and C go in the direction of the shorter term trend, and therefore are impulsive and composed of five waves, which is shown in the picture above.
An impulse wave formation followed by a corrective wave, form an Elliott wave degree, consisting of trend and counter trend. Although the patterns pictured above are bullish, the same applies for bear markets, where the main trend is down.
The following example shows the difference between a trend (impulse wave) and a correction (sideways price movement with overlapping waves). It also shows that larger trends consists of (a lot of ) smaller trends and corrections, but the result is always the same.

Very important in understanding the Elliott Wave Principle is the basic concept that wave structures of the largest degree are composed of smaller sub waves, which are in turn composed of even smaller sub waves, and so on, which all have more or less the same structure ( impulsive or corrective) like the larger wave they belong to.
Elliott distinguished nine wave degrees ranging from two centuries to hourly. Below, these wave degrees are listed together with the style we use to distinguish them:

Wave degree
Trend
Correction
Grand Supercycle
Supercycle
Cycle
Primary
Intermediate
Minor
Minute
Minuette
Sub minuette


In theory the number of wave degrees are infinite, in practice you can spot about four more wave degrees if you examine at tick charts.
This indicates that you can trade the investment horizon, which is most suited for you, from very aggressive intra day trading to longer term investing. The same rules and patterns apply over and over again. Now we will take a look at the patterns...




3. Patterns          :: top ::
Studying the patterns is very important in order to apply the Elliott Wave Principle correctly. The pattern of the market action, if correctly determined, not only tells you to what price levels the market will rise or decline, but also in which way (or pattern) this will happen.
When you are able to recognize the patterns, and apply these patterns correctly, you can trade the Elliott Wave Principle. This is not easy to accomplish, but after some study and with the help of our "detailed and personalized daily chart service" tool you will find it easier. Humans, with sufficient experience, can analyse markets in an instance, which is a requirement for trading.

Our daily chart service restricts itself mainly to the patterns mentioned in the Classic Elliott Wave patterns. We analysis these patterns using the Classic Rules.
We also use the Modern Rules, as mentioned under Modern Elliott Wave patterns, we have defined more patterns, which we have found after more than 10 years of research and experience, which definitions are more profitable in our view. This way we make available our knowledge and experience without any extra costs.
After looking at the big picture we then determine which rules are preferable.
Explaining the following descriptions, on the left you will find a picture of a bull market, at the right one of a bear market.
The pattern section depicts the structure, while the description gives additional information. The pattern should follow the rules and guidelines, which can also be derived from the picture. Furthermore the section, in which wave explains in which wave, as a part of a larger wave degree, the patterns normally occur. Last but not least the pattern must have an internal structure as described. This is very important to determine which pattern you are dealing with.
Classic Elliott Wave patterns          :: top ::
Below we have depicted all Elliott Wave patterns that are allowed under a very strict interpretation of the Elliott Wave Principle. Elliott detected most of these patterns, except for the Diagonal 2 pattern. The WXY and WXYXZ pattern have not been defined as such by Elliott, but he already had discovered these sort of combinations.
In our daily analysis we use the WXY and WXYXZ also for Double and Triple Zigzags. This is a much more consistent way of labeling these patterns, since now the ABC waves in waves W and Y are sub waves and an unfitting Wave X has been eliminated.
Because of this, in our daily analysis we no longer have to search for more than five waves. Using the old definition of for example a Triple Zigzag, the search was for eleven waves, apart from inconsistencies this would have slowed down our analysis considerably.
I. Trends          :: top ::
a. Impulse
Pattern

Description
Impulses are always composed of five waves, labeled 1,2,3,4,5. Waves 1, 3 and 5 are themselves each impulsive patterns and are approximately equal in length. Waves 2 and 4 on the contrary are always corrective patterns.
Rules and guidelines
The most important rules and guidelines are:
    • Wave 2 cannot be longer in price than wave 1, and it must not go beyond the origin of wave 1.
    • Wave 3 is never the shortest when compared to waves 1 and 5.
    • Wave 4 cannot overlap wave 1, except in diagonal triangles and sometimes in wave 1 or A waves, but never in a third wave. In most cases there should not be an overlap between wave 1 and A.
    • As a guideline the third wave shows the greatest momentum, except when the fifth is the extended wave.
    • Wave 5 must exceed the end of wave 3.
    • As a guideline the internal wave structure should show alternation, which means different kind of corrective structures in wave 2 and 4.
In which wave
Impulse patterns occur in waves 1, 3, 5 and in waves A and C of a correction( this correction could be a wave 2, 4 or a wave B, D, E or wave X).
Internal structure
It is composed of five waves. The internal structure of these waves is 5-3-5-3-5. Note that the mentioned 3s are corrective waves, which should be composed of 5 waves in a corrective triangle.
b. Extension
Pattern


Description
By definition an extension occurs in an impulsive wave, where waves 1, 3 or 5 can be extended, being much longer than the other waves. It is quite common that one of these waves will extend, which is normally the third wave. The two other waves then tend to equal each other.
In our pattern definitions we call it an Extension1 if the first wave extends, an Extension3 if the 3rd wave extends and an Extension5 if the 5th wave extends.
Rules and guidelines
The most important rules and guidelines concerning an extended wave are:
    • It is composed of 5, 9, 13 or 17 waves.
    • Wave 2 cannot be longer in price length than wave 1, so it should not go beyond the origin of wave 1.
    • Wave 3 is never the shortest when compared to waves 1 and 5.
    • Wave 4 cannot overlap wave 1.
    • Wave 5 exceeds the end of wave 3.
    • The extended wave normally shows the highest acceleration.
In which wave
Extensions occur in waves 1, 3, 5, and in A and C waves, when compared to each other.
Internal structure
As a minimum it is composed of 9 waves, though 13 or 17 waves could occur. So the minimal internal structure of the 9 waves is 5-3-5-3-5-3-5-3-5. Note that the 3s mentioned are corrective waves, which could be composed of 5 waves in the case of a corrective triangle.
c. Diagonal triangle type 1
Pattern

Description
Diagonals are sort of impulsive patterns, which normally occur in terminal waves like a fifth or a C wave. Don?t confuse them with corrective triangles.
Diagonals are relatively rare phenomena for large wave degrees, but they do occur often in lower wave degrees on intra-day charts. Usually Diagonal triangles are followed by a violent change in market direction.
Rules and guidelines
The most important rules and guidelines are:
    • It is composed of 5 waves.
    • Waves 4 and 1 do overlap.
    • Wave 4 can?t go beyond the origin of wave 3.
    • Wave 3) cannot be the shortest wave.
    • Internally all waves of the diagonal have a corrective wave structure.
    • Wave 1 is the longest wave and wave 5 the shortest.
    • The channel lines of Diagonals must converge.
    • As a guideline the internal wave structure should show alternation, which means different kind of corrective structures.
In which wave
Diagonal triangles type 1 occur in waves 5, C and sometimes in wave 1.
Internal structure
The internal structure of the five waves is 3-3-3-3-3.
c. Diagonal triangle type 2
Pattern

Description
Diagonal type 2 is a sort of impulsive pattern, which normally occurs in the first or A wave. The main difference with the Diagonal Triangle type 1 is the fact that waves 1, 3 and 5 have an internal structure of five waves instead of three. Experience shows it can also occur in a wave 5 or C, though the Elliott Wave Principle does not allow this. Don?t confuse this with corrective triangles.
Diagonals are relatively rare phenomena for large wave degrees, but they do occur often in lower wave degrees in intra day charts. These Diagonal triangles are not followed by a violent change in market direction, because it is not the end of a trend, except when it occurs in a fifth or a C wave.
Rules and guidelines
The most important rules and guidelines are:
    • It is composed of 5 waves.
    • Wave 4 and 1 do overlap.
    • Wave 4 can?t go beyond the origin of wave 3.
    • Wave 3) cannot be the shortest wave.
    • Internally waves 1, 3 and 5 have an impulsive wave structure.
    • Wave 1 is the longest wave and wave 5 the shortest.
    • As a guideline the internal wave structure should show alternation, which means that wave 2 and 4 show a different kind of corrective structure.
In which wave
Diagonal triangles type 2 occur in waves 1 and A.
Internal structure
The five waves of the diagonal type 2 show an internal structure of 5-3-5-3-5.
d. Failure or Truncated 5th
Pattern

Description
A failure is an impulsive pattern in which the fifth wave does not exceed the third wave. Fifth waves, which travel only slightly beyond the top of wave 3, can also be classified as a kind of failure. It indicates that the trend is weak and that the market will show acceleration in the opposite direction.
Rules and guidelines
The most important rules and guidelines are:
    • Wave 2 cannot be longer in price distance than wave 1, so it should not go beyond the origin of wave 1.
    • Wave 3 is never the shortest when compared to waves 1 and 5.
    • Wave 4 cannot overlap wave 1, except for diagonal triangles and sometimes in waves 1 or A, but never in a third wave. There should not be overlap between wave 1 and A.
    • Wave 5 fails to go beyond the end of wave 3.
    • As a guideline the third wave shows the greatest momentum.
    • As a guideline the internal wave structure should show alternation, which means different kinds of corrective structures.
In which wave
A failure can only occur in a fifth wave or a C wave, but normally not in the fifth wave of wave 3.
Internal structure
It must be composed of five waves.
II. Corrections          :: top ::
a. Zigzag
Pattern

Description
A Zigzag is the most common corrective structure, which starts a sharp reversal. Often it looks like an impulsive wave, because of the acceleration it shows. A zigzag can extend itself into a double or triple zigzag, although this is not very common, because it lacks alternation (the same two patterns follow each other). Notice that the zigzag can only be the first part of a corrective structure.
Rules and guidelines
    • It is composed of 3 waves.
    • Waves A and C are impulses, wave B is corrective.
    • The B wave retraces no more then 61.8% of A.
    • The C wave must go beyond the end of A.
    • The C wave normally is at least equal to A.
In which wave
Most of the time it happens in A, X or 2. Also quite common in B waves as a part of a Flat, (part of) Triangles and sometimes in 4.
Internal structure
A single Zigzag is composed of 3 waves, a double of 7 waves separated by an X wave in the middle, a triple of 11 waves separated by two X waves (see pictures below). The internal structure of the 3 waves is 5-3-5 in a single Zigzag, 5-3-5-3-5-3-5 in a double.
Example of a Double Zigzag

As you have noticed we have a more modern representation of the Double Zigzag using the labels WXY instead of ABCXABC. This is more consistent, since this way 2 zigzags of lower degree get connected to each other by waves of higher degree. On top if that, our automatic analysis needed such a consistent method of labeling to reach maximum performance. Instead of labeling 7 waves (ABCXABC), in our daily analysis we need to label only 3 waves (WXY). According to the same method a Triple Zigzag is represented by WXYXZ instead of ABCXABCXABC. This way the number of waves was reduced to five instead of eleven.
b. Flat
Pattern

Description
Flats are very common forms of corrective patterns, which generally show a sideways direction. Waves A and B of the Flat are both corrective patterns. Wave C on the contrary is an impulsive pattern. Normally wave C will not go beyond the end of wave A.
Rules and guidelines
    • It is composed of 3 waves.
    • Wave C is an impulse, wave A and B are corrective.
    • Wave B retraces more then 61.8% of A.
    • Wave B often shows a complete retracement to the end of the previous impulse wave.
    • Wave C shouldn?t go beyond the end of A.
    • Normally wave C is at least equal to A.
In which wave
It occurs mostly in B waves, though also quite common in 4 and 2.
Internal structure
As mentioned before a Flat consists of 3 waves. The internal structure of these waves is 3-3-5. Both waves A and B normally are Zigzags.
c. Expanded Flat or Irregular Flat
Pattern


Description
This is a common special type of Flat. Here the B wave is extended and goes beyond the (orthodox) end of the previous impulsive wave. The strength of the B wave shows that the market wants to go in the direction of B. Often a strong acceleration will take place, which starts a third wave or an extended fifth. If the C wave is much longer then A, the strength will be less.
Rules and guidelines
    • It is composed of 3 waves.
    • Wave C is an impulse, waves A and B are corrective.
    • Wave B retraces beyond the end of the previous impulse, which is the start of wave A. The C wave normally is much longer then A.
In which wave
This corrective pattern can happen in 2, 4, B and X. If it happens in 2 and C is relatively short, normally an acceleration in the third will take place.
Internal structure
It is composed of five waves, which have an internal structure of 3-3-5.
c. Triangles
Contracting Triangle:
Pattern


Description
A triangle is a corrective pattern, which can contract or expand. Furthermore it can ascend or descend. It is composed of five waves, each of them has a corrective nature.
Rules and guidelines
    • It is composed of 5 waves.
    • Wave 4 and 1 do overlap.
    • Wave 4 can?t go beyond the origin of wave 3.
    • Wave 3 cannot be the shortest wave.
    • Internally all waves of the diagonal have a corrective wave structure.
    • In a contracting Triangle, wave 1 is the longest wave and wave 5 the shortest. In an expanding Triangle, wave 1 is the shortest and wave 5 the longest.
    • Triangles normally have a wedged shape, which follows from the previous.
    • As a guideline the internal wave structure should show alternation.
In which wave
Triangles occur only in waves B, X and 4. Never in wave 2 or A.
Internal structure
It is composed of five waves, of which the internal structure is 3-3-3-3-3.

Expanding Triangle:

Ascending Triangle:
This is a triangle, which slopes upwards. This pattern has been implemented in the Modern Rules.

Descending Triangle:
This is a triangle, which slopes downwards. This pattern has been implemented in the Modern Rules.

Running Triangle:
This is a triangle where the B wave exceeds the origin of wave A.
d. WXY or Combination
Many kinds of combinations are possible. Below a rather complex example has been depicted.
Pattern


Description
A Combination combines several types of corrections. These corrections are labeled as WXY and WXYXZ if it is even more complex. It starts for example with a Zigzag (wave W), then an intermediate X wave, then a Flat (wave Y) and so on. A so-called double or triple three is also a Combination, but this pattern combines Flats separated by X waves.
Rules and guidelines
    • All types of corrective patterns can combine to form a bigger corrective pattern.
    • The rules and guidelines, as mentioned for other corrective patterns apply.
    • A triangle in a Combination should normally occur at the end.
    • Corrective patterns in a Combination normally show alternation.
In which wave
Generally a Combination occurs mostly in B, X and 4, it is less common in A and rare in 2.
Internal structure
For example a Zigzag, followed by a Flat, followed by a Triangle has the following internal structure:
5-3-5(Zigzag)-5-3-5(X)-3-3-5(Flat)-3-3-3-3-3(Triangle).

e. Running Flat
Pattern



Description
The Running correction is a rare special form of a failure. This pattern is a kind of Flat, with an elongated B wave and a very small C wave. According to theory wave C should be so short that it doesn?t get to the price territory of wave A. In our daily analysis we do not accept a C wave that fails to reach the price territory of wave A.
Instead of a running correction this could in theory be an extension in an impulsive wave, where the wave has subdivided in two (or more) 1,2 combinations. If the B is a clear three wave, then it is a Running correction, otherwise an extension. In practice there will not be any difference in market direction: in both scenarios the market will explode in the direction of the B wave, therefore we prefer to label it as an extension. For the sake of correctness we do included this pattern in our daily analysis.
Rules and guidelines
    • The B wave must be composed of three waves.
    • The C wave must be composed of five waves.
    • Wave C must be very short and normally will not reach the price territory of A.
    • Wave C must not retrace more than 100% of wave B but more than 60% of wave A.
In which wave
Most of the time it should occur in wave 2 or B.
Internal structure
It is a three-wave structure. The internal structure is
3-3-5.

X wave
Description
An X wave is an intermediate wave in a more complex correction. This wave is always corrective and can take many forms like a Zigzag, Double Zigzag, Flat, Expanded Flat, combination and a triangle.
Modern Elliott Wave patterns          :: top ::
In our Modern Rules observations and analysis we have defined extra patterns that are mostly hybrid patterns derived from the known patterns that have existed from the beginning. In addition, we allow for the occurrence of more patterns in some waves. For example, wave 1 may also contain a diagonal1, diagonal2 and impulse 2 pattern, in addition to the other trend patterns, that a classic interpretation accepts.
I. Trends          :: top ::
a. Impulse 2
Pattern

Description
An Impulse 2 is an uncommon pattern that resembles a normal impulse considerably. In our daily analysis we allow for a maximum retracement of 51.5% for wave 4 in an impulse or other trend pattern. Of course sometimes the retracement of wave 4 could be 51.6% and an impulse would then be eliminated, in spite of the fact that the limit was exceeded by 0.1% only. Naturally the Elliott Wave does not apply this strictly and the Impulse 2 pattern corrects for this problem. Apart from this, we have witnessed a retracement up to 62% for a wave 4 frequently in intra day charts.
Rules and guidelines
The same rules and guidelines apply as with a normal impulse except for the following:
    • Wave 4 is allowed to retrace between 51.5% and 62%, without penetrating the region of wave 1.
    • As a guideline, wave 4 very often is a Zigzag.
In which wave
Impulse 2 patterns mostly occur in waves 1,A or C, never in a wave 3!
Internal structure
It is composed of five waves. The internal structure of these waves is 5-3-5-3-5. Note that the mentioned 3s are corrective waves, which could be composed of 5 waves in a corrective triangle.

II. Corrections          :: top ::
a. ZigzagFlat
Pattern


Description
It is a common pattern that is exactly the same as a Zigzag, except for the fact that the B wave is allowed to retrace more than 61.8% of wave A.
b. Running Zigzag
Pattern


Description
Apart from contracting Triangles, a failure in a corrective pattern happens when the C wave is shorter than wave A and fails to go beyond the end of A. This mostly happens in Running Flats and or in Zigzags. It indicates strength in the direction of the main trend.
Rules and guidelines
    • The rules as mentioned with other corrective patterns apply.
    • Wave C fails to go beyond the end of wave A.
In which wave
Failures can occur in a C wave of wave 2, in a C or E wave of wave 4, in a C wave of wave B or X.

c. Failed Flat
Pattern

Description
This pattern is exactly the same as a Flat, except for the fact that wave C does not reach the end of wave A and therefore is shorter than wave B.
d. Running Flat (modern)
Pattern

Description
This pattern is exactly the same as a Running Flat, except for the fact that it must retrace more than 60%, if not we consider it to be a normal Running Flat. This distinction is necessary, because normally a Running Flat is rare. But if it retraces more than 60% and still fails to reach the end of wave A, it suddenly becomes much more probable the pattern will occur. In which case it will get a much higher score.
e. Ascending and descending Triangles
Description
These are mentioned under the Triangles description in the Classic patterns section. Basically these patterns are the same as common contracting triangles, except for the fact that ascending and descending triangles slope up or down.



4. Channeling          :: top ::
Channeling is an important tool not only to determine which sub waves belong together, but also to project targets for the next wave up.
Channels are parallel lines, which more or less contain the complete price movement of a wave. Although the trend lines of a Triangle are not parallel lines, they will also be considered as a channel. Underneath you see an example of a channel in an impulsive wave and all channels in a corrective wave. Note that all patterns in the section "Patterns" show their channels.
The picture of the corrective structure labeled A,B,C shows clearly how channels indicate which waves should be grouped together.

Waves of the same degree can be recognized by drawing channels. Especially this is the case for Impulse (5) wave structures, Zigzags and Triangles. If these waves do not equate properly, you have a strong indication to search for an alternative count.
Next you will learn how to draw channels and how to project targets using channels.
Targets for wave 3 or C
To begin with you should draw a channel as soon as waves 1 and 2 are finished. Connect the origin of wave 1, which has been labeled as zero, and the end of wave 2. Then draw a parallel line from the top of wave 1.
Generally this channel is regarded as not being very useful, but it is. First of all, the parallel line serves as an absolute minimum target for the 3rd wave under development. If the 3rd wave can?t break through the upper line or fails to reach it, you are probably dealing with a C wave instead of wave 3.
Furthermore the base line from 0 to wave 2 serves as a stop. When this base line gets broken, there is a strong probability that wave 2 (or B) gets more complex, thus wave 3 or C has not begun yet.
Keep in mind that wave 3 is normally the strongest wave and often will go far beyond the upper trend line.

Targets for wave 4
As soon as wave 3 is finished you can draw a channel by connecting the end of wave 1 and wave 3 with a trend line and drawing a parallel line from the end of wave 2. In this way you can project a target for wave 4. Keep in mind that normally the base line from wave 2 will be broken slightly by the price action of wave 4. The base line serves as a minimum target for wave 4. If wave 4 doesn?t come near the base line at all, this is a sign of a very strong trend. You are probably still in wave 3 or you should get ready for a blow off in wave 5.


Targets for wave 5
Method 1
As soon as wave 4 is finished you can draw a channel connecting the end of wave 2 and wave 4 with a trend line by drawing a parallel line from the end of wave 3. In this way you can project a target for wave 5. In most cases wave 5 will fail to reach the upper trend line, except when you are dealing with an extension in wave 5 or when wave 3 has been relatively weak. In an extension, which is also indicated by high volume and momentum indicators, a throw over can occur.

Method 2
Mostly wave 3 is the strongest wave showing a very fast acceleration relative to waves 1 and 5. If wave 3 indeed shows a nearly vertical rise or decline, then draw a trend line connecting wave 2 and 4 and draw a parallel line from wave 1(!). This parallel line will cut through wave 3 and will target wave 5. Experience shows this to be a very valuable channel.

Targets for wave D and E
As soon as wave B is finished you can draw a trend line connecting the origin of wave A and the end of wave B to get a target for wave D, provided a triangle indeed is developing. This is more certain after completion of wave C.
As soon as wave C is finished you can draw a trend line connecting wave A and the end of wave C to get a target for wave E. Wave E almost never stops at the trend line precisely, it either never reaches the trend line or it overshoots the trend line fast and temporarily.

Targets in a Double Zigzag
Drawing a channel is very useful to separate Double Zigzags from impulsive waves, which is difficult since both have impulsive characteristics. Double Zigzags tend to fit a channel almost perfectly, while in an impulsive wave the third wave clearly breaks out of the channel.

5. Fibonacci ratios          :: top ::
The Fibonacci series are a mathematical sequence in which any number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The sequence goes as follows: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and so on. The properties of this sequence appear throughout nature and also in the arts and sciences. Most notably the ratio of 1.618, the "Golden Mean", is very common, a relationship already discovered in ancient times. This number can be approached by dividing a Fibonacci number by its preceding number as the sequence extends into infinity. Besides, ratios of .618, which is the inverse of 1.618 are very prominent when analysing Fibonacci relationships.
Elliott didn?t discover the Fibonacci relationships himself, but this was brought to Elliotts attention by Charles Collins.
The wave counts of the impulsive and corrective patterns (5 + 3 = 8 total) are Fibonacci numbers, and breaking down wave patterns into their respective sub waves produces Fibonacci numbers indefinitely.
Analysing Fibonacci relationships between price movements is very important for several reasons.
First you can control your wave analysis. The better the Fibonacci ratios of your wave count, the more accurate your count is, because in some way or the other, all waves are related to each other. Secondly you can project realistic targets once you have defined the wave count correctly or you have distinguished different scenarios, which point in the same direction.
Since Fibonacci ratios manifest themselves in the proportions of one wave to another, waves are often related to each other by the ratios of 2.618, 1.618, 1, 0.618, 0.382 and 0.236. This fact can help you in estimating price targets for expected waves.
If, for example a wave 1 or A of any degree (or time frame) has been completed, you can project retracements of 0.382, 0.50 and 0.618 for wave 2 or B, which will give you your targets. Most of the time the third wave is the strongest, so often you will find that wave 3 is approximately 1.618 times wave 1. Wave 4 normally shows a retracement, which is less than wave 2, like 0.236 or 0.382. If wave three is the longest wave, the relationship between wave 5 and three often is 0.618. Also wave 5 equals wave 1 most of the time.
The same relations can be found between A and C waves. Normally C equals A or is 1.618 times the length of A.
You could even combine waves to find support and resistance zones. For example the net price movement of wave 1 and 3 times 0.618 creates another interesting target for wave 5.
It is worthwhile to experiment a lot with your wave count, Fibonacci will help you to solve the rhythm of the markets.
Targets for wave 1
The first wave, a new impulsive price movement, tends to stop at the base of the previous correction, which normally is the B wave. This often coincides with a 38.2% or a 61.8% retracement of the previous correction.
Targets for wave 2
Wave 2 retraces at least 38.2% but mostly 61.8% or more of wave 1. It often stops at sub wave 4 and more often at sub wave 2 of previous wave 1. A retracement of more than 76% is highly suspicious, although it doesn?t break any rules yet.
Targets for wave 3
Wave 3 is at least equal to wave 1, except for a Triangle. If wave 3 is the longest wave it will tend to be 161% of wave 1 or even 261%.
Targets for wave 4
Wave 4 retraces at least 23% of wave 3 but more often reaches a 38.2% retracement. It normally reaches the territory of sub wave 4 of the previous 3rd wave.
In very strong markets wave 4 should only retrace 14% of wave 3.
Targets for wave 5
Wave 5 normally is equal to wave 1, or travels a distance of 61.8% of the length of wave 1. It could also have the same relationships to wave 3 or it could travel 61.8% of the net length of wave 1 and 3 together. If wave 5 is the extended wave it mostly will be 161.8% of wave 3 or 161.8% of the net length of wave 1 and 3 together.
Targets for wave A
After a Triangle in a fifth wave, wave A retraces to wave 2 of the Triangle of previous wave 5. When wave A is part of a Triangle, B or 4 it often retraces 38.2% of the complete previous 5 wave (so not only the fifth of the fifth) into the territory of the previous 4th wave. In a Zigzag it often retraces 61.8% of the fifth wave.
Targets for wave B
In a Zigzag, wave B mostly retraces 38.2% or 61.8% of wave A. In a Flat, it is approximately equal to wave A. In an Expanded Flat, it usually will travel a distance of 138.2% of wave A.
Targets for wave C
Wave C has a length of at least 61.8% of wave A. It could be shorter in which case it normally is a failure, which foretells an acceleration in the opposite direction.
Generally wave C is equal to wave A or travels a distance of 161.8% of wave A.
Wave C often reaches 161.8% of the length of wave A in an Expanded Flat.
In a contracting Triangle wave C often is 61.8% of wave A.
Targets for wave D
In a contracting Triangle wave D often travels 61.8% of wave B.
Targets for wave E
In a contracting Triangle wave E often travels 61.8% of wave C. It cannot be longer than wave C!
Targets for wave X
Wave X minimally retraces 38.2% of the previous A-B-C correction; a retracement of 61.8% is also common.



1. General          :: top ::
The Elliott Wave Principle provides you with the most objective and disciplined method available for trading. Only a handful of patterns exist, sometimes easy to recognize especially in strong impulsive waves. The still validated patterns tell you where the market is heading, in what way (or structure) this will happen and under what circumstances the pattern will produce a stronger probability. Also the pattern will tell you when it is no longer valid due to the occurrence of an intolerable price action. This makes it possible to exactly determine your entry and exit points, which is an outstanding characteristic of the Elliott Wave Principle.
The key to forecasting markets lies in determining the probabilities of alternative scenarios. We do all that work for you, with our daily personalized chart service. If we find several alternative counts pointing in the same direction, we have found an excellent trading opportunity.
Some people, mainly those who can not successfully apply the Elliott Wave Principle themselves, will tell you either it is too complex and subjective or that the waves don?t exists at all, suggesting the market follows a random pattern.
Obviously the Elliott Wave Principle can get very complex- especially in corrective waves- since you will have to look for patterns, which contain patterns, which contain patterns etc. etc. But it will never lose its objectivity if you apply the rules and guidelines. The only problem is that sometimes it is not totally clear if the internal structure of a wave is a 3 wave or a 5 wave. In that case you will have to determine alternatives for both internal wave structures and look for other confirmations, such as channels, indicators and Fibonacci ratios.
Below we mention the key steps for Elliott Wave analysis and supply basic trading patterns to search for.
2. General directives for trading           :: top ::
Now you can use our daily personalized chart service, to trade profitably. The more probable an outcome the better the opportunities. The more the alternatives point in the same direction the more certain that the market will move accordingly.

Our daily analysis will generate an ever objective and consistent wave count for you and will always present the most probable outcome first, through applying objective rules and guidelines and through implementing a true Elliott Wave model.

Those who really would like to learn the Elliott Wave Principle must study the ins and outs. In the following, we offer some directives. These directives come from our own experience as well as from many publications on this subject. Of course every trader or analyst should find his own path to success.
Study the patterns mentioned under the section "Basic theory"
    • Know the rules and guidelines.
    • Learn the internal structure of the patterns, which will enable you to recognize a pattern within a pattern.
    • Remember that only waves 1,3,5, A and C can be impulsive waves.
    • All other waves are corrective, against the trend, and show overlap in their internal structure.
Design alternative scenarios by labeling a chart
    • Start labeling a chart by taking into account the following rules and guidelines:
    • Separate impulses from corrections, an impulse normally shows acceleration and no overlap, a correction shows a sideways pattern.
    • Waves of the same degree should have the same proportions, which is especially important for waves 2 and 4. A minuscule 4th wave cannot belong to a big wave 2 and so on.
    • Wave 2 can never retrace more than 100% nor go beyond the origin of wave 1.
    • Wave 3 normally is the longest wave and shows the most powerful acceleration.
    • In wave 3 there is never an overlap between wave 4 and 1, as occurs in fifth waves (and first or A waves.
    • Label the big picture, is it a three or a five?
    • Label more in detail, by labeling the smaller wave degrees initially, then go back to the large wave degrees, changing your labels if necessary.
    • Check if the required internal structure of your waves, comply with the rules and guidelines. For example a B wave never can consist of five waves and so on.
    • Check if the internal structure of the internal structure is correct. For example an (expanded) Flat consists of a 3 wave, again a 3 wave and a 5-wave structure. If this is not true, change your labeling.
    • Check your wave count for alternation, especially with waves 2 and 4. If wave 2 showed a simple Zigzag, wave 4 should show a complex pattern.
    • A corrective pattern mostly minimally carries into the territory of the 4th wave of the previous impulse wave.
    • Within a 5-wave impulse, two waves will tend to equality. If wave three is the longest, wave 5 will tend to equality with wave 1.
    • Use momentum indicators and volume to support your wave labeling. Wave 3 should have the highest momentum and volume (if it is the longest wave).
    • Calculate the Fibonacci relationships. If your wave count reveals a lot of reasonable Fibonacci ratios, you have found an interesting count.
    • Draw channels and determine if your wave count more or less fits these channels. The better the fit, the better the count.
    • Design as many scenarios as the Wave Principle allows, with regard to the wave degree or time frame you are analysing.Do the same for shorter and longer time frames (or lower and higher wave degrees) and try to narrow down alternatives by fitting them to a multiple of wave degrees. Assess the probabilities of these scenarios by studying their compliance with the permitted internal wave structure, the outcome of the Fibonacci ratios and the fit of the channels.
    • Draw the expected price action and pattern of each scenario you have designed, mark price levels where you get signals to enter or exit the market.
Design a trading system
    • Determine what time frame (or wave degree) you would like to trade.
    • Determine which patterns and alternative wave counts give the best trading opportunities, such as when several alternatives all produce a price movement in the same direction.
    • Determine objective entry points based on patterns.
    • Determine objective exit points, also based on patterns. You should for example exit a trade when a price movement makes your preferred wave count invalid.
Control your emotions
    • Don?t be afraid to take a loss if your stop gets hit. This means you will have to admit you were wrong on this trade. Don?t be afraid of loosing the (little) profit you have made and only exit if your system or wave analysis tells you to.
    • Follow the rules of the Elliott Wave Principle and don?t second-guess the market. Believe what the charts tell you, your stop will protect you.
    • Of course there will be loosing trades, a 100% score is impossible. But if you limit your losses (by executing your stop) and let your profits run, you should be very successful. So maintain your discipline and learn from all trades.
3. Trading example          :: top ::
Theory
In this section you will be shown how to recognize an impulsive wave from a corrective wave. In the same way as these basic patterns are compared and analysed here, you can do it yourself with all other patterns.
Suppose the market has experienced a big sell off. From the low it starts to rise. Wave 1 (or A) and wave 2 (or B) have been completed and the market starts to rise again. The first picture shows two scenarios possible, either an impulse (1,2,3) or an A,B,C correction. The pictures thereunder demonstrate which price action to expect in an impulse or in a correction:


The pattern can be an impulse only if the 4th wave does not overlap the first, a level indicated by the horizontal "stop" line. As soon as the price drops under this line- before wave 5 has been completed- you have your first signal of a pending correction (picture above at the right). This correction will be confirmed when the price drops under the origin of wave C, which is the end of wave B. Provided it doesn?t drop under the "confirmation" line, it could still be an extended 3rd wave that subdivides. In that case the C or 3 wave is only wave 1 of the third wave! You will find the pattern called extension under the chapter "Patterns".

Practice
Now we will try to apply the theory above in practice, step by step.

In the previous graph you have already recognized a structure consisting of three waves. Because there are three waves, we are dealing with a correction, which is a movement against the trend. Therefore the long-term trend is up and a new high will be reached.
Underneath will be shown what happened next. Basically there are two scenarios which could develop. Firstly the correction could be terminated at point C and (2), finishing a Single Zigzag. Secondly a Flat or Expanded Flat could be developing. Then this market at the minimum will reach its high in a 3-wave structure, decline again to approximately point C and (2). Thereafter the larger uptrend will resume and the market will reach uncharted territory.
With the above in mind it is crucial to determine if the rise will have the form of a 3 wave or a 5 wave. Let?s take a look at the picture:

To conclude, let?s take a look at the following price action:

By just looking at its form- the pattern has no overlap, you can tell this definitely is a 5 wave, not a 3 wave and indeed it reached the old high at 3000.
This 5- wave is the first wave of a larger wave degree, also composed of five waves. Therefore a minimal price increase of 25% (the same as wave 1) for the larger wave 3 can be calculated, which projects a target of approximately 4000.
Since the above chart displays the price action of the Dow Jones, we all know what happened. The market corrected a bit, accelerated again and met a major resistance at 4000 as the following picture demonstrates. Around 4000 again a correction developed, indicating that the main trend was still up and projecting even higher targets.
The same patterns evolve over and over again, enabling you to forecast the markets and explain what happened afterwards.

4. Simple, but effective trading strategy          :: top ::
Since all patterns or their sub patterns are either 3 wave or 5 wave structures, it follows that at the minimum always three waves will occur, no matter what happens.
Therefore if you concentrate on the 3rd wave, which will be a wave 3 in an impulse or wave C in a correction, you have a strong probability of making a profit.
The charts in the following pictures give an example of this strategy in a rising, as well as a declining market.





The information contained here was gathered from sources deemed reliable, however, no claim is made as to its accuracy or content.  This does not contain specific recommendations to buy or sell at particular prices or times, nor should any of the examples presented be deemed as such. There is a risk of loss in trading futures and futures options and you should carefully consider your financial position before making any trades.
Futures and options trading carries significant risk
and you can lose some, all or even more than your investment.

General Basic Theory Patterns Channeling Fibonacci ratios Trading the Elliott Wave FREE TRADES!


[ 本帖最后由 hefeiddd 于 2009-4-5 06:58 编辑 ]
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:21 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; August 2006 | Main | October 2006 &raquo;
September 23, 2006Sold Two daily readings above +15 with a fall away is usually enough to turn the market down.

Also the Bagpiper who has been very quiet confirmed the two preliminary sells of September 15 and 21.

With daily sentiment under zero but not under -5, we could see a bounce or sideways move this coming week.


September 23, 2006 in The Bagpiper | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


September 21, 2006Patterns and FibosLooking at the Euro Currency versus US Dollar we have to wonder why it didn't make a higher high above the late 2004 high  this May when gold and copper and crude petroleum were making extreme new highs.  

The obvious answer is that Europe also suffered from shooting star prices of crude commodity goods. And, to be sure, Europe still suffers from high unemployment relative to North America and has immigration problems, out sourcing "issues", etc.

Whatever the reason, the lack of an upside breakout denotes real weakness for EUR/USD, especially with commodities collapsing since May, along with US interest rates.

The chart merely documents that weakness. It shows a "head and shoulders" top whose traditional target is double the dxrop  down to the "neck line" (thick red horizontal at about the 1.16 price level). The Fibonacci divisions of the EUR/USD bull market since 2001 demonstrate that the low exchange rate of late 2005 was at the 0.382 level, and the rally since went up to the 0.146 Fibonacci level. "Fibos" are beloved by currency traders worldwide. If the head and shoulders projection were to hold true, it would go to the .764 (2 * .382) level which is close to that other Fibo of .786.

Why am I saying these things when I am a long term inflationary bull? Because it has been five to seven years (from 1999 or 2001) for inflation, and let's face it: it got very wild in May. Commodity markets are just as crazy, or more so, than equity or interest rate markets, and they do not go in one direction for years and years without major corrections. Remember human nature?

Then there was my favorite: the formerly deflationist gold bug nut cases finally got to be inflationists again, as before 1997. They are perfect! (Now they will have to revive the bank conspiracies to explain why gold is going down when the world is such a bad place and should tank.)

It's just a normal correction, although it could look very nasty before it's over.






September 21, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


September 12, 2006Gold StocksIn the weekly charts gold stocks remain in a correction that was signaled as early as February of this year.  Relatively hedged ABX remains stronger than unhedged NEM, and gold remains stronger than the XAU Index.  Until we see a change there isn't one, as Yogi might say. September 12, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)



Inflation Takes a Holiday   


September 12, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


September 09, 2006Daily Stock Market Sentiment


September 09, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


September 06, 2006It's a long long way from May to September....I've waited patiently all summer with a reasonably hedged portfolio. I needed and got the summer off.

After the May-June erasure of 3.9% of portfolio value, the summer rally has brought it all back. The major indexes made lower highs by Labor Day than in early May, but the porfolio got back to just above May highs. This is what I hoped for: to reduce downside risk by increasing quality so that the upside remains possible. I shorted indexes (RYTPX, RYVNX), as Hussman does (HSGFX), and concentrated on quality stock pickers. Tice (Prudent Bear- BEARX) tries to pinpoint the weakest stocks for shorting.

This was not just an academic exercise. I expected a drop into the normal four year cycle low which coincides with the presidential mid-term congressional elections. I've shown the chart of SP constant forward futures all summer. The Reverse Point Wave patterns have been set up for another leg down. The largest degree is a 4 point wave forming under the May high. This is normally  four to one odds in favor of resumption of a meaningful continuation downward.


Also within this last leg up there is a five point reversal (solid blue circles) and a larger degree five point reversal for the entire move up from the June low (red numerals). So all three patterns favor a decline.

In addition to the election and four year stock market cycles the SP futures annual cycle or "seasonal" pattern since 1982 favors a significiant September drop into October lows. The same is true of the Dow Jones 30 seasonal since 1928. Labor Day in the US is often a turning point in stocks, as in 2000. Even September 2003 ended lower than it started.


Sentiment, as I measure it, has become overdone on the bull side, adding to odds of a decline which may be starting today. "Moorso", a colleague on an internet chat site, produced this chart of the inverted 2CS so that bullish sentiment is measured as the five day running total of daily VIX times daily CBOE call/put ratio. I have done this indicator daily since 1996, and have found at least two ways to benefit from it. At highs one can simply look at the current level as compared to levels of the 2CS at historic highs. In Moorso's inverted version, when 2CS gets over 50, we should start looking for a top and reversal down. Another observation which was unexpected when I began looking ten years ago was that there is often a "sentiment divergence" at important turns. According to sentiment lore, sentiment should be the most bullish at the very top, but one sees that the most bullish time is several weeks before the high. Of course the 2CS is a five day reading so it is in a sense always a week late. But the divergences are greater than a week ahead. If you look at this year, the divergence has gone on all year! This what I refer to as catching a glimpse after dark of the smart boys getting out of Dodge City while the citizenry is asleep. And this is why I have been cautious and getting more hedged all year. The one day sentiment oscillator is also in the clouds again.


One small benefit of a summer off is reading. A friend sent me a copy of Robert Taylor's "Paradigm", a financial conspiracy thriller novel. The novel isn't as well written as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Lawrence Durrell or even Martin Cruz Smith. But it is about the financial markets and the fortuitous rediscovery of an ancient method of market timing, previosuly onlty known to “them”. To some of us this makes for a more exciting book than a political or archaeological thriller. Even my wife who is a real reader and a real writer-- and not a trader--found it fascinating.

“Paradigm” is worth a read is the same way that movies about trading are always interesting. But Taylor also presents his trading model from ancient Egypt based upon ocean tides, and he proposes that gravity is the primary cause of market movements. I was intrigued at once because of a paper I read several years ago by Ilia Dichev and Troy James of the University of Michigan Business School (2001), “Lunar cycle effects in stock  If you order it, tell them you were referred by a current reader of the Xyber9 site. You needn’t give my name as I get nothing personally. Taylor plans to extend the current one year free subscription if he gets enough book referrals. The book is $26 plus shipping. It may be a total lark, but it was a fun read and his predictions have a been as good since March as he said they would be: about 80% as to time and direction. File this under “keep an open mind”.






September 06, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:22 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; September 2006 | Main | November 2006 &raquo;
October 29, 2006Seasonal considerationsThe seasonal or annual price pattern for SP500 futures has been upside down for most of this year. Normally, based on 1982 to date, the market tops in February, and it bottoms in October.

The pattern for the DJIA from 1928 to present is similar except for a tendency to double top in February/March and double bottom in September/October.
These are averages of when the market has bottomed and topped, and are useful.

























Norman Fosback, building on earlier work by Arthur Merrrill, has cleanly documented in real time that there are smaller periods with the year which correspond to profitable, tradable, rising periods compared to all other patterns. you can read a bit about it at his website http://www.fosback.com/  I won't give away his proprietary and trade-marked method but many of the favorable periods are around month ends and major US holidays. We are in one right now and November and December have several others. Also there are four year and election cycles which you can Google and read about elsewhere.

The sum of all these statistical observations and cycle divinations is that the market should continue up from here. The sceptics and outright bears have all been wrong, and the markets have risen despite all of this and despite sentiment indicators and most certainly despite economic "thought".

I do believe that sentiment is often useful, but not always. This year has been a lot like 1993 or 1995 when volatility subsided or remained low throughout long advances. Also traditional sentiment analyses of stock and index options and futures open interest have not been helpful. These data are double-edged. It is well to remember that large scale buying of short hedges (put options and short futures) often accompanies the buying of stocks by large institutions and can be read as bullish, as are margin debt levels. 1995's do occur!

About a year ago I and several people I know discussed a ten year or decennial pattern wherein the mid part of the decade has a flat high consolidation follwed by a low volatility and very generous bull market. The range bound consolidation lasts one to more than two years before the breakout. Until the breakdown in May I was a big fan of this pattern, but I thought August was too late for it still to be operative. Well it wasn't too late, and the pattern may still be operative. I'll just show you the charts from the 1930's,  1980's 1990's and now, without comment.




























































Short term I expect a pullback, but it's possible we could see an extension of this low volatility breakout since August.


October 29, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Random walkers laughing up their sleeve?The SP500 is up ~3.0% since the end of September while my "hedged fund" is up only 0.65% .  So I was wrong about the short term expectations of a correction. In fact I have been wrong almost all year, and my total portfolio is up only 6.0% as of Friday. In my own defence, part of my "error" was an experiment in volatility reduction. As often explained here earlier, one can do that partly by selecting funds with histories of low volatility gains by diverse methods, and partly by putting on index hedges .  In 2006 the index funds themselves have been leaders as money gravitated back to large caps which are heavily represented in capitilization-weighted market indexes. I have only had the direct hedges since May, and the indexes only began to outperform later in the summer as the new craze for dividends began, but the hedges nearly outperformed the "hedged".

Also in my defense is the fact that my total portfolio never drew down more than 3.25% from any new high value during this year: that despite my still holding some metals and energy positions. So volatility capping has its rewards as well as its costs. The reward largely is "peace of mind" or a low "ulcer index".  

I am still looking  for a decline during which--hopefully at the end!--I can remove the active index short hedges  which have tied up less than 6% of assets but which hedged at a 10% rate due to their leverage.  Given the innate hedging of the diversified portfolio, the low volatilty funds largely employed by me, and a good bit of HSGFX from Hussman, additional active hedging with indexes is probably overkill on my part.

So I have proven sufficiently to myself that volatility capping is truly valuable to me but that it can be overdone. Since I will living on the portfolio after transitioning to retirement (unemployment) in a year or so, I needed to reposition and get a feel for these c0ncepts. I think of poor souls with high volatility index funds and stocks who retired at the end of 2000 and saw their equity decline by 20-40% in the first two years of retirement. That is a complete destroyer and a big  NO-NO for any investor at that point. And that is exactly where the random walkers like John Bogle are completely wrong.

However, most people reading this page are probably in asset growth mode rather than retirement. So I want to spend some time over the next few months explaining how their portfolio composition and approach needs to be entirely different especially if they are--as they should be-- putting new money in each month, quarter or year. When you are adding new money and automatically reinvesting dividends, volatility is your friend over the long term.


October 29, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


October 10, 2006Waiting for Gold StocksTen years ago at Kitco, my first internet trader site experience, Glenn Kafka taught me the value of the gold/XAU ratio. I had been a gold futures trader, gold analyst, and publisher for some years, but Kafka's ratio pointed out a new way for me to capitalize on sentiment, which I was just discovering.  Gold stock buyers tend to have greater emotional and price swings than gold metal traders. Largely this is due to the fact that a lot of bullion and gold futures players are non-emotional commercial hedgers, both long and short.

>p> In my view, gold is a story of the Kondratieff Wave, but Kafka's method, also backed by John Hussman more recently, is a decent way to capitalize on intermediate term (months to a few years) swings within the decades long Kondratieff Wave bull and bear markets. Whether or not you trade gold stocks or gold bullion or futures, the gold/XAU ratio is a good sentiment measure.

The two charts show the history of the ratio over the past few years. They suggest that gold stocks have not been crushed enough yet to be buys, which in turns says that gold has further down to go at some point.




These charts were made at different times with faciltities available to the public at StockCharts.com, but the ratio ranges are remarkably consistent since the new gold bull market began in 1999. Another factor that tells me gold stocks or gold are not yet buys is the premium over net asset value (NAV) being paid by buyers of Central Fund of Canada (CEF) which holds gold and silver bullion. As of today the premium is still 7.5%. At the 2005 lows one could buy CEF at a discount to NAV. The chart shows CEF price and NAV going back many years. John Hussman is an academic economist, and economists do not accept Kondratieff. The Long Wave is simply too long for data frameworks used by economists. But Hussman is also a money manager and has some excellent analysis for tradeable shorter term gold cycles: http://www.hussman.net/html/gold.htm Hussman currently is bullish on gold, and has gone to his maximum level of ~20% gold stocks in his Hussman Strategic Total Return (income) Fund. Read his well reasoned approach to gold. We differ in that he is expecting a period of staflation whereas I see a relatively less inflationary interlude in a long term inflationary bull market in which gold has and will continue to be weak for a while. In the longer term I think we both agree that gold will be stronger.


October 10, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:23 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; September 2006 | Main | November 2006 &raquo;
October 29, 2006Seasonal considerationsThe seasonal or annual price pattern for SP500 futures has been upside down for most of this year. Normally, based on 1982 to date, the market tops in February, and it bottoms in October.

The pattern for the DJIA from 1928 to present is similar except for a tendency to double top in February/March and double bottom in September/October.
These are averages of when the market has bottomed and topped, and are useful.

























Norman Fosback, building on earlier work by Arthur Merrrill, has cleanly documented in real time that there are smaller periods with the year which correspond to profitable, tradable, rising periods compared to all other pa I won't give away his proprietary and trade-marked method but many of the favorable periods are around month ends and major US holidays. We are in one right now and November and December have several others. Also there are four year and election cycles which you can Google and read about elsewhere.

The sum of all these statistical observations and cycle divinations is that the market should continue up from here. The sceptics and outright bears have all been wrong, and the markets have risen despite all of this and despite sentiment indicators and most certainly despite economic "thought".

I do believe that sentiment is often useful, but not always. This year has been a lot like 1993 or 1995 when volatility subsided or remained low throughout long advances. Also traditional sentiment analyses of stock and index options and futures open interest have not been helpful. These data are double-edged. It is well to remember that large scale buying of short hedges (put options and short futures) often accompanies the buying of stocks by large institutions and can be read as bullish, as are margin debt levels. 1995's do occur!

About a year ago I and several people I know discussed a ten year or decennial pattern wherein the mid part of the decade has a flat high consolidation follwed by a low volatility and very generous bull market. The range bound consolidation lasts one to more than two years before the breakout. Until the breakdown in May I was a big fan of this pattern, but I thought August was too late for it still to be operative. Well it wasn't too late, and the pattern may still be operative. I'll just show you the charts from the 1930's,  1980's 1990's and now, without comment.




























































Short term I expect a pullback, but it's possible we could see an extension of this low volatility breakout since August.


October 29, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Random walkers laughing up their sleeve?The SP500 is up ~3.0% since the end of September while my "hedged fund" is up only 0.65% .  So I was wrong about the short term expectations of a correction. In fact I have been wrong almost all year, and my total portfolio is up only 6.0% as of Friday. In my own defence, part of my "error" was an experiment in volatility reduction. As often explained here earlier, one can do that partly by selecting funds with histories of low volatility gains by diverse methods, and partly by putting on index hedges .  In 2006 the index funds themselves have been leaders as money gravitated back to large caps which are heavily represented in capitilization-weighted market indexes. I have only had the direct hedges since May, and the indexes only began to outperform later in the summer as the new craze for dividends began, but the hedges nearly outperformed the "hedged".

Also in my defense is the fact that my total portfolio never drew down more than 3.25% from any new high value during this year: that despite my still holding some metals and energy positions. So volatility capping has its rewards as well as its costs. The reward largely is "peace of mind" or a low "ulcer index".  

I am still looking  for a decline during which--hopefully at the end!--I can remove the active index short hedges  which have tied up less than 6% of assets but which hedged at a 10% rate due to their leverage.  Given the innate hedging of the diversified portfolio, the low volatilty funds largely employed by me, and a good bit of HSGFX from Hussman, additional active hedging with indexes is probably overkill on my part.

So I have proven sufficiently to myself that volatility capping is truly valuable to me but that it can be overdone. Since I will living on the portfolio after transitioning to retirement (unemployment) in a year or so, I needed to reposition and get a feel for these c0ncepts. I think of poor souls with high volatility index funds and stocks who retired at the end of 2000 and saw their equity decline by 20-40% in the first two years of retirement. That is a complete destroyer and a big  NO-NO for any investor at that point. And that is exactly where the random walkers like John Bogle are completely wrong.

However, most people reading this page are probably in asset growth mode rather than retirement. So I want to spend some time over the next few months explaining how their portfolio composition and approach needs to be entirely different especially if they are--as they should be-- putting new money in each month, quarter or year. When you are adding new money and automatically reinvesting dividends, volatility is your friend over the long term.


October 29, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


October 10, 2006Waiting for Gold StocksTen years ago at Kitco, my first internet trader site experience, Glenn Kafka taught me the value of the gold/XAU ratio. I had been a gold futures trader, gold analyst, and publisher for some years, but Kafka's ratio pointed out a new way for me to capitalize on sentiment, which I was just discovering.  Gold stock buyers tend to have greater emotional and price swings than gold metal traders. Largely this is due to the fact that a lot of bullion and gold futures players are non-emotional commercial hedgers, both long and short.

>p> In my view, gold is a story of the Kondratieff Wave, but Kafka's method, also backed by John Hussman more recently, is a decent way to capitalize on intermediate term (months to a few years) swings within the decades long Kondratieff Wave bull and bear markets. Whether or not you trade gold stocks or gold bullion or futures, the gold/XAU ratio is a good sentiment measure.

The two charts show the history of the ratio over the past few years. They suggest that gold stocks have not been crushed enough yet to be buys, which in turns says that gold has further down to go at some point.




These charts were made at different times with faciltities available to the public at StockCharts.com, but the ratio ranges are remarkably consistent since the new gold bull market began in 1999. Another factor that tells me gold stocks or gold are not yet buys is the premium over net asset value (NAV) being paid by buyers of Central Fund of Canada (CEF) which holds gold and silver bullion. As of today the premium is still 7.5%. At the 2005 lows one could buy CEF at a discount to NAV. The chart shows CEF price and NAV going back many years. John Hussman is an academic economist, and economists do not accept Kondratieff. The Long Wave is simply too long for data frameworks used by economists. But Hussman is also a money manager and has some excellent analysis for tradeable shorter term gold cycles:  Hussman currently is bullish on gold, and has gone to his maximum level of ~20% gold stocks in his Hussman Strategic Total Return (income) Fund. Read his well reasoned approach to gold. We differ in that he is expecting a period of staflation whereas I see a relatively less inflationary interlude in a long term inflationary bull market in which gold has and will continue to be weak for a while. In the longer term I think we both agree that gold will be stronger.


October 10, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:24 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; October 2006 | Main | December 2006 &raquo;
November 20, 2006Stealth Bull IIAlthough there's no doubt of a bullish phase in the US stock markets since 2002-2003, many writers have recently revived the idea that it has been a rather tepid bull and is therefore doomed to failure with a resumption of a secular bear market.  The secular bear is said to have started somewhere between 1997 and 2001. Truly the bull has been tepid for long periods of time, at least for large indexes.

StockCharts's Bullish Percentage of SPX stocks demonstrates breadth by individual stock  bullish breakouts from point and figure charts as a percent of the 500 SPX stocks. The current weekly version shows the long consolidation or rest from early 2004 to the summer of 2006. The brisk move in BPSPX from the July 2006 has itself made a break of  the trendline down from 2004.

The second chart shows the SPX itself with an Elliottt wave labeling of that period from 2004-2006 as a three wave correction. The completed portion is shown as 1 and 2 to  this past July, but could be considered to be A and B. The two charts make a convincing argument for a continuing bull market. None of this says there couldn't be a pullback at any time, but a longer bullish phase seems likely.























November 20, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:25 | 显示全部楼层
December 25, 2006Seasonal Tides and LifeThe Dow 30 seasonal since the 1960's, as well as seasonals for SP500 futures since their 1982 inception (not shown), were "upside down" for much of 2006 until October when the powerful year end odds continued the strong uptrend from summer.  The Dow shows a double top tendency for January and February, while the shorter historical seasonal for SP500 futures normally has topped higher and then has fallen away in mid February. Seasonals are like sports scoring and only tell you what has happened before, but they are useful for handicapping the market. The coming week is one of the stronger seasonal weeks even though it has low low volume.



Last week's drop of  nearly 25 points in the SP500 would fall under the rubric of "year end book squaring" which includes portfolio re-balancing, hedging, and tax selling.  We might see some "bonus buying" this week. The very short term sentiment measures got re-balanced. The Dow has stayed in its trading band of the last six months but is nearing the up trendline. Several timing methods point to tomorrow for a short term swing turn.

No changes have been made in the mutual fund portfolio, but over the next few months I'll need to separate  higher yield investments from capital gain investments and get the former into tax free retirement accounts and the latter in taxable accounts.  As I get closer to mandatory,  and fully taxable, withdrawals from retirement accounts, I want to keep the higher yield funds away from the tax man and compounding as long as possible. Everything coming out of tax-deferred accounts is taxed as income, so it's wise to get capitals gains sources and non-taxable sources into the otherwise taxable accounts. So high-yield US municipals bonds and  funds which throw off little income but a lot of capital gains need to go there. Both moves minimize taxes and keep one from falling into all the traps of progressive taxation of all sorts.

Those who are still in the accumulation and growth phases of portfolios needn't give this much thought and planning. When you are young you can just decide how much volatility you can live with. Generally with each passing decade your volatility threshhold needs to be reduced. You can recover from a 1987 or 2000-2002 event if you are in your 20's and 30's, but after that you can't risk a 50-90% wipeout and expect to come back by retirement time.

Partly by luck and partly by natural aversion to pain I managed to avoid big drawdowns in 1973-74, 1987, and 2000-2002, but I saw a lot of contemporaries awaiting retirement who were substantially wiped out by 2000-2002.

Most of us don't like to think about these matters as they bring home the fact that we are all and always growing "older". So try to think of it from the mathematical viewpoint: when you are 60 years old you have far fewer years in which to recover from a huge drawdown than you do when you're 25.  And this is really linear with a flip of the coin at each successive year. Any year could see a bear market. (This is not a prediction, just the luck of the draw.)

If  it's too painful to think about it very much or to do anything about it actively, just use those convenient retirement funds which major fund families offer, labeled "Retirement 2020" and so forth. Or hire an investment advisor, which I am not, to get you properly positioned.

None of this has anything to do with speculation. I am talking about what you do with your winnings from speculation and from working and chance inheritance or the lottery. In any event I try not to speculate after December 15 until January. The odds are we will see come sort of market retracement in January and February, but as we saw this year the market can persist to May, or later.


December 25, 2006 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


April 06, 2007Dow and i-Rates: 1934-2007


April 06, 2007 in Long Wave | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


Kondratieff 4The year long lull in the long upward inflationary wave may be ending. The long wave itself bottomed from 1999 to 2003 well down from its long wave top formation of 1974-1980. The chart labeled "30 years of the US 30 Year Treasury Bond" tells the whole story visually.

Nearly all  the analysts who understood the long deflation-inflation cycle of Kondratieff have retired or died. The ones you will find at dedicated bearish web sites are derived from the revisionists of the 1980's and 90's who failed to recognize that those decades were disinflationary for interest rates and producer prices and commodities and bullish for stocks. They thought gold and oil fell due to a conspiracy instead of lack of demand and oversupply. They also thought stocks went up only because of manipulation. They ignored the rust belt, and the agriculture disaster and oil depression of the 1980's and 90's. While bonds of the highest credit ratings more than doubled in price, the long wave revisionists were lost in a desert of their own making. They still are, so ignore them if you happen to see them posting elsewhere or publishing yet another Kondratieff Wave book.

An economic cycle which lasts more than 50 years cannot be used for short term trading, but it is always wise to know which way the 25-30 year long half cycle of deflation or inflation is headed and not bet against it too long.  All you really need to know is that prices, interest rates and stocks had all bottomed by early 2003. They will be headed upwards for some years. At some point, most likely in a decade to fifteen years or so, interest rates will finally get high enough to impact corporate earnings in most sectors and stocks will top out and  trade sideways to down while everything else will continue to rise for another five to ten years.

I am not predicting that bonds will be down Monday and never trade higher again this year. But the persistence of inflation, even in the face of a short term housing price decline, and the persistent weakness of the US dollar, convinces me that the lull which began last year in commodity prices and as early as 2004 in bond rates is ending soon or has ended.

It's not an emergency, merely a reminder from the markets that we are still in a long term inflationary era which began in this decade. Financial stocks will not do as well as most other sectors, and if you need income and can't afford to lose very much capital, it will be better to stay in the lowest cost money market funds (VMMXX) or TBills, or in CD's and TNotes up to two year maturities.

I want to rephrase the stock part of my analysis and emphasize that this does NOT mean a bull market top in stocks is due. Every time stocks have a pullback it will be attributed to rising interest rates, but don't be frightened out of holding US and selected foreign stocks. They are a better long term hedge against inflation than gold. (Nor am I anti gold: I continue to own gold, but one doesn't have to own gold to profit from inflation.) See my earlier article on "61 year investments" for details. And remember that US interest rates rose from the 1940s to 1981, but stocks also went up from the 1940's until the early 1970's when interest rates finally got too high. It is when rates get "too high" that you will want to own gold or add to what you already own.








April 06, 2007 in Long Wave | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)


30 years of the US 30 year Treasury bond


April 06, 2007 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:27 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; May 2007 | Main | July 2007 &raquo;
June 15, 2007Long Term Cumulative NYSE A/D




Pete Glass recently posted a good analysis at Crystal Ball Forum--an excellent subscription site with both a generally bullish and a generally bearish forum and lots of good ideas on both forums*-- on the NYSE daily advance/decline line (A/D)  together with a daily NYSE A/D chart from way back in the 1920's, which chart was attributed to Peter Eliades.


The stand-alone daily A/D "line" or ratio is very useful for short term market breadth measurements as we all know, but in my opinion cumulative long term A/D is, and has always been, misunderstood by analysts.

For example, why did NYSE A/D make a bottom between 1932 and 1942? Why did it peak in the late 1950's? Why did it make a bottom from 1974 to 2001? Why has it been flying since then?





July 07, 2007Overbought?


July 07, 2007 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)










&laquo; July 2007 | Main | September 2007 &raquo;
August 20, 2007HUSSMAN and the FED MODELJohn Hussman runs a mid cap stock mutual fund (HSGFX) which he hedges with put options on both the Russell 2000 and S&P 500 indexes. The concept is that superior stock selection will beat the sector index averages over time and give us an even better risk/reward rating if the good stocks are bought and the average stocks are sold against them via puts. This is the basic stuff of long/short hedge funds. Hussman's bias is toward "value" stocks based upon standard, historic value analysis. And his record is decent, especially from 2000 to 2004 when hedging or not hedging made the real difference between victory and defeat if you were long.


My starting date for total return data for HSGFX (http://www.FastTrack.net) is from November 21, 2000. For the four years from that date to November 21, 2004, Hussman's compounded total return was 15.7% annually while the Russell 2000 total return index was up 8.5%. Since November 21, 2004 to last Friday, however, Hussman's rate of return is 5% annually while many stock and bond funds have rewarded us with much more generous returns. The Russell 2000 total return index itself is up 9.1% compounded since November 21, 2004. I also remember reading Hussman's analysis during the second half of the 1990's when he was managing private accounts in much the same manner as he's done with HSGFX which started up in 2000. He was bearish nearly the whole time from 1997 to 2000 on value grounds, as were many classically trained or philosophically inclined analysts and managers. So basically it's good to follow Hussman in bear markets and in the initial rebounds off the bear market lows. But most of the time, absent the wipeout of the century when P/E ratios of all stocks go to 6, he is going to earn a bit more or less than the T Bill rate unless we experience a mid-cap value rally exceeding all other stock capitalization sectors and during which Hussman's picks outperform the average mid-cap.

Why am I bringing up Hussman's highly mixed but decent record? Largely becase he has been pounding the table on market analysts who follow the so-called "FED Model" in which stock earnings should match or trend toward the interest rate on the ten year US Treasury Note. Ed Yardeni was an early booster of the FED Model and Don Hays is a current leader of the pack which includes many securities industry sellers to the public who want us to buy for any reason that's popular. This is Hussman's latest essay:

Hussman's intellectual crusade currently, in addition to constantly pointing 0ut how over-valued the stock markets are, is to show that interest rates and corporate earnings growth tracking between 1982 and 2000, the meat of the FED Model fanatics, were coincidental or accidental and are not the rule in most eras. My view is that both the FED Model and the Hussman views are overly simplistic and/or miss the point of the true relationships of corporate forward earnings, the nominal US Treasury ten year note yield, and stock market returns.





I have put a logarithmic chart of the Dow 30 index above Hussman's recent chart of forward SP 500 earnings and the ten year Treaury note yield. If we look at the record since 1948, it's quite clear that stock market returns were positive when ten year note yields were low or falling EVEN THOUGH forward earnings were falling from 1948 to 1966 and from 1982 to 2000! You could just as well insist that falling forward earnings are good for stocks as to say that a rising yield on the ten year was bad for stocks. Then look at 1966 to 1982 when forward earnings were rising rapidly along with note yields: earnings and rates both went up but stock returns were flat for 16 years. Both camps in this issue are wrong, or "partially right": both Hussman and the FED Model folks. They miss the fact that low or falling interest rates are good for stocks regardless of projected forward earnings, but that there comes a time when rates get "too high" for stocks. And I don't think there is a specific nominal interest rate number that turns the tide, and the stock market to down. The last "too high" time came in 1966-68 and will come again in due course, as readers of this site know well about the longer term interest rate and inflation cycles. Hint: inflation-adjusted or real interest rates and earnings rates are more germane to the issue. Nevertheless, the Goldilocks "too hot" or the "just right" nominal interest rate is a simple and effective guide to stock returns.
So far rate rises worry us from time to time, as they always should, but stocks are still surviving...so far. Interest rate cycle theory says we should have another ten years or more of stock market rises before interest rates get "too high" for comfort or profit. That doesn't mean a rampant bull market or that we can't have periodic larger corrections, but we shouldn't have a persistently flat or seriously down market as we did from 1966-1982 until rates get "too hot" even though the P/E cycle is contracting.
The bottom line is that stocks rise when interest rates are low (even if they double as between 1948 and 1966)or when interest rates can be seen to have stopped going up (from 1982). When rates are high and/or rising more rapidly, they (and the inflation they reflect) neutralize the effect of quite large nominal increases in earnings (1966/69-1980/81.




August 20, 2007 in Market Economics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


August 18, 20072CS Sentimeter 1997-2007In 1996 when CBOE's VIX became more readily available to small private investors on the internet,  I got interested in sentiment measuring. I started calculating the daily product of the two indicators: the CBOE VIX and the CBOE combined Put/Call ratio. I had noticed that sometimes one or the other of the two was the leader or more indicative of current sentiment, and it seemed logical to combine them. I soon decided on a five day running total of the product of the two numbers as being sufficient short both to center near price highs and lows and to register sentiment extremes fairly well. I still do the 2CS by hand each day as I still draw some graphics  charts by hand,  being a survivor from before personal computing.

The monthly chart of the SP500 since 1997 shows only the extremes of the 2CS Sentimeter (red) near those price extremes. We have had two bull markets since 1996, one nasty bear market and several crashes in both bull and bear markets. So I have developed a feel for this indicator.

I'll let the chart speak largely for itself except to point out the obvious. There have only been three greater extremes of bearish sentiment than our current reading indicated by the 2CS since 1996: the two bear market panic lows of 2002, the post 9/11/2001 panic low and the 1998 Russian default and LTCM panic low. Therefore I think this current episode qualifies as a panic even if it's only a 10% decline in most US averages. If one looks at the pattern of changing levels of the 2CS at successive highs and lows, I think there are some hints perhaps for the next few years. But I also think we can be pretty certain of making a good low and sustaining a good or excellent rally in the markets rather soon. It's possible we've already put in a low, but it's too soon to say on the basis of this indicator alone.








August 18, 2007 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:28 | 显示全部楼层
&laquo; July 2007 | Main | September 2007 &raquo;
August 20, 2007HUSSMAN and the FED MODELJohn Hussman runs a mid cap stock mutual fund (HSGFX) which he hedges with put options on both the Russell 2000 and S&P 500 indexes. The concept is that superior stock selection will beat the sector index averages over time and give us an even better risk/reward rating if the good stocks are bought and the average stocks are sold against them via puts. This is the basic stuff of long/short hedge funds. Hussman's bias is toward "value" stocks based upon standard, historic value analysis. And his record is decent, especially from 2000 to 2004 when hedging or not hedging made the real difference between victory and defeat if you were long.


My starting date for total return data for HSGFX (http://www.FastTrack.net) is from November 21, 2000. For the four years from that date to November 21, 2004, Hussman's compounded total return was 15.7% annually while the Russell 2000 total return index was up 8.5%. Since November 21, 2004 to last Friday, however, Hussman's rate of return is 5% annually while many stock and bond funds have rewarded us with much more generous returns. The Russell 2000 total return index itself is up 9.1% compounded since November 21, 2004. I also remember reading Hussman's analysis during the second half of the 1990's when he was managing private accounts in much the same manner as he's done with HSGFX which started up in 2000. He was bearish nearly the whole time from 1997 to 2000 on value grounds, as were many classically trained or philosophically inclined analysts and managers. So basically it's good to follow Hussman in bear markets and in the initial rebounds off the bear market lows. But most of the time, absent the wipeout of the century when P/E ratios of all stocks go to 6, he is going to earn a bit more or less than the T Bill rate unless we experience a mid-cap value rally exceeding all other stock capitalization sectors and during which Hussman's picks outperform the average mid-cap.

Why am I bringing up Hussman's highly mixed but decent record? Largely becase he has been pounding the table on market analysts who follow the so-called "FED Model" in which stock earnings should match or trend toward the interest rate on the ten year US Treasury Note. Ed Yardeni was an early booster of the FED Model and Don Hays is a current leader of the pack which includes many securities industry sellers to the public who want us to buy for any reason that's popular. This is Hussman's

Hussman's intellectual crusade currently, in addition to constantly pointing 0ut how over-valued the stock markets are, is to show that interest rates and corporate earnings growth tracking between 1982 and 2000, the meat of the FED Model fanatics, were coincidental or accidental and are not the rule in most eras. My view is that both the FED Model and the Hussman views are overly simplistic and/or miss the point of the true relationships of corporate forward earnings, the nominal US Treasury ten year note yield, and stock market returns.





I have put a logarithmic chart of the Dow 30 index above Hussman's recent chart of forward SP 500 earnings and the ten year Treaury note yield. If we look at the record since 1948, it's quite clear that stock market returns were positive when ten year note yields were low or falling EVEN THOUGH forward earnings were falling from 1948 to 1966 and from 1982 to 2000! You could just as well insist that falling forward earnings are good for stocks as to say that a rising yield on the ten year was bad for stocks. Then look at 1966 to 1982 when forward earnings were rising rapidly along with note yields: earnings and rates both went up but stock returns were flat for 16 years. Both camps in this issue are wrong, or "partially right": both Hussman and the FED Model folks. They miss the fact that low or falling interest rates are good for stocks regardless of projected forward earnings, but that there comes a time when rates get "too high" for stocks. And I don't think there is a specific nominal interest rate number that turns the tide, and the stock market to down. The last "too high" time came in 1966-68 and will come again in due course, as readers of this site know well about the longer term interest rate and inflation cycles. Hint: inflation-adjusted or real interest rates and earnings rates are more germane to the issue. Nevertheless, the Goldilocks "too hot" or the "just right" nominal interest rate is a simple and effective guide to stock returns.
So far rate rises worry us from time to time, as they always should, but stocks are still surviving...so far. Interest rate cycle theory says we should have another ten years or more of stock market rises before interest rates get "too high" for comfort or profit. That doesn't mean a rampant bull market or that we can't have periodic larger corrections, but we shouldn't have a persistently flat or seriously down market as we did from 1966-1982 until rates get "too hot" even though the P/E cycle is contracting.
The bottom line is that stocks rise when interest rates are low (even if they double as between 1948 and 1966)or when interest rates can be seen to have stopped going up (from 1982). When rates are high and/or rising more rapidly, they (and the inflation they reflect) neutralize the effect of quite large nominal increases in earnings (1966/69-1980/81.




August 20, 2007 in Market Economics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


August 18, 20072CS Sentimeter 1997-2007In 1996 when CBOE's VIX became more readily available to small private investors on the internet,  I got interested in sentiment measuring. I started calculating the daily product of the two indicators: the CBOE VIX and the CBOE combined Put/Call ratio. I had noticed that sometimes one or the other of the two was the leader or more indicative of current sentiment, and it seemed logical to combine them. I soon decided on a five day running total of the product of the two numbers as being sufficient short both to center near price highs and lows and to register sentiment extremes fairly well. I still do the 2CS by hand each day as I still draw some graphics  charts by hand,  being a survivor from before personal computing.

The monthly chart of the SP500 since 1997 shows only the extremes of the 2CS Sentimeter (red) near those price extremes. We have had two bull markets since 1996, one nasty bear market and several crashes in both bull and bear markets. So I have developed a feel for this indicator.

I'll let the chart speak largely for itself except to point out the obvious. There have only been three greater extremes of bearish sentiment than our current reading indicated by the 2CS since 1996: the two bear market panic lows of 2002, the post 9/11/2001 panic low and the 1998 Russian default and LTCM panic low. Therefore I think this current episode qualifies as a panic even if it's only a 10% decline in most US averages. If one looks at the pattern of changing levels of the 2CS at successive highs and lows, I think there are some hints perhaps for the next few years. But I also think we can be pretty certain of making a good low and sustaining a good or excellent rally in the markets rather soon. It's possible we've already put in a low, but it's too soon to say on the basis of this indicator alone.








August 18, 2007 in Technical Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:43 | 显示全部楼层
Welcome as a member to The NEW McLaren Report Subscribers--the new office phone number is 07-5559 0350 .You can check the most recent reports below, or use the left menu to go throuch each year and month's report archieve.
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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-3 16:44 | 显示全部楼层
Welcome as a member to The NEW McLaren Report Subscribers--the new office phone number is 07-5559 0350 .You can check the most recent reports below, or use the left menu to go throuch each year and month's report archieve.
Remember, the purpose of investing or trading is to find a trend, enter that trend with limited risk and stay with that trend until it becomes at risk. Trends can be analyzed on a 5 minute, 60 minute, daily, weekly or monthly basis. It doesn’t matter if one is trading or positioning; an understanding of trends is the critical factor. That is the purpose of this service, to teach you everything there is to know about trends in real time.


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 楼主| 发表于 2009-4-5 07:09 | 显示全部楼层
Elliott wave principleFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (December 2007)
The Elliott wave principle is a form of technical analysis that attempts to forecast trends in the financial markets and other collective activities. It is named after Ralph Nelson Elliott (1871–1948), an accountant who developed the concept in the 1930s: he proposed that market prices unfold in specific patterns, which practitioners today call Elliott waves. Elliott published his views of market behavior in the book The Wave Principle (1938), in a series of articles in Financial World magazine in 1939, and most fully in his final major work, Nature’s Laws – The Secret of the Universe (1946).[1] Elliott argued that because humans are themselves rhythmical, their activities and decisions could be predicted in rhythms, too. Critics argue that the Elliott wave principle is pseudoscientific and contradicts the efficient market hypothesis.
Contents[hide]

[edit] Overall designThe wave principle posits that collective investor psychology (or crowd psychology) moves from optimism to pessimism and back again. These swings create patterns, as evidenced in the price movements of a market at every degree of trend.



From R.N. Elliott's essay, "The Basis of the Wave Principle," October 1940.


Practically all developments which result from (human) socialeconomic processes follow a law that causes them to repeat themselves in similar and constantly recurring series of waves of definite number and pattern. R. N. Elliott's model, in Nature’s Law: The Secret of the Universe says that market prices alternate between five waves and three waves at all degrees within a trend, as the illustration shows. As these waves develop, the larger price patterns unfold in a self-similar fractal geometry. Within the dominant trend, waves 1, 3, and 5 are "motive" waves, and each motive wave itself subdivides in five waves. Waves 2 and 4 are "corrective" waves, and subdivide in three waves. In a bear market the dominant trend is downward, so the pattern is reversed—five waves down and three up. Motive waves always move with the trend, while corrective waves move opposite it.

[edit] DegreeThe patterns link to form five and three-wave structures which themselves underlie self-similar wave structures of increasing size or higher "degree." Note the lower most of the three idealized cycles. In the first small five-wave sequence, waves 1, 3 and 5 are motive, while waves 2 and 4 are corrective. This signals that the movement of the wave one degree higher is upward. It also signals the start of the first small three-wave corrective sequence. After the initial five waves up and three waves down, the sequence begins again and the self-similar fractal geometry begins to unfold according the five and three-wave structure which it underlies one degree higher. The completed motive pattern includes 89 waves, followed by a completed corrective pattern of 55 waves.[2]
Each degree of a pattern in a financial market has a name. Practitioners use symbols for each wave to indicate both function and degree—numbers for motive waves, letters for corrective waves (shown in the highest of the three idealized series of wave structures or degrees). Degrees are relative; they are defined by form, not by absolute size or duration. Waves of the same degree may be of very different size and/or duration.[2]
The classification of a wave at any particular degree can vary, though practitioners generally agree on the standard order of degrees (approximate durations given):
  • Supercycle: multi-decade (about 40-70 years)
  • Cycle: one year to several years (or even several decades under an Elliott Extension)
  • Primary: a few months to a couple of years
  • Intermediate: weeks to months
  • Minor: weeks
  • Minute: days
  • Minuette: hours
  • Subminuette: minutes

[edit] Behavioral characteristics and wave "signature"Elliott Wave analysts (or "Elliotticians") hold that it is not necessary to look at a price chart to judge where a market is in its wave pattern. Each wave has its own "signature" which often reflects the psychology of the moment. Understanding how and why the waves develop is key to the application of the Wave Principle; that understanding includes recognizing the characteristics described below.[2]
These wave characteristics assume a bull market in equities. The characteristics apply in reverse in bear markets.
Five wave pattern (dominant trend)Three wave pattern (corrective trend)Wave 1: Wave one is rarely obvious at its inception. When the first wave of a new bull market begins, the fundamental news is almost universally negative. The previous trend is considered still strongly in force. Fundamental analysts continue to revise their earnings estimates lower; the economy probably does not look strong. Sentiment surveys are decidedly bearish, put options are in vogue, and implied volatility in the options market is high. Volume might increase a bit as prices rise, but not by enough to alert many technical analysts.Wave A: Corrections are typically harder to identify than impulse moves. In wave A of a bear market, the fundamental news is usually still positive. Most analysts see the drop as a correction in a still-active bull market. Some technical indicators that accompany wave A include increased volume, rising implied volatility in the options markets and possibly a turn higher in open interest in related futures markets.Wave 2: Wave two corrects wave one, but can never extend beyond the starting point of wave one. Typically, the news is still bad. As prices retest the prior low, bearish sentiment quickly builds, and "the crowd" haughtily reminds all that the bear market is still deeply ensconced. Still, some positive signs appear for those who are looking: volume should be lower during wave two than during wave one, prices usually do not retrace more than 61.8% (see Fibonacci section below) of the wave one gains, and prices should fall in a three wave pattern.Wave B: Prices reverse higher, which many see as a resumption of the now long-gone bull market. Those familiar with classical technical analysis may see the peak as the right shoulder of a head and shoulders reversal pattern. The volume during wave B should be lower than in wave A. By this point, fundamentals are probably no longer improving, but they most likely have not yet turned negative.Wave 3: Wave three is usually the largest and most powerful wave in a trend (although some research suggests that in commodity markets, wave five is the largest). The news is now positive and fundamental analysts start to raise earnings estimates. Prices rise quickly, corrections are short-lived and shallow. Anyone looking to "get in on a pullback" will likely miss the boat. As wave three starts, the news is probably still bearish, and most market players remain negative; but by wave three's midpoint, "the crowd" will often join the new bullish trend. Wave three often extends wave one by a ratio of 1.618:1.Wave C: Prices move impulsively lower in five waves. Volume picks up, and by the third leg of wave C, almost everyone realizes that a bear market is firmly entrenched. Wave C is typically at least as large as wave A and often extends to 1.618 times wave A or beyond.Wave 4: Wave four is typically clearly corrective. Prices may meander sideways for an extended period, and wave four typically retraces less than 38.2% of wave three. Volume is well below than that of wave three. This is a good place to buy a pull back if you understand the potential ahead for wave 5. Still, the most distinguishing feature of fourth waves is that they often prove very difficult to count.Wave 5: Wave five is the final leg in the direction of the dominant trend. The news is almost universally positive and everyone is bullish. Unfortunately, this is when many average investors finally buy in, right before the top. Volume is lower in wave five than in wave three, and many momentum indicators start to show divergences (prices reach a new high, the indicator does not reach a new peak). At the end of a major bull market, bears may very well be ridiculed (recall how forecasts for a top in the stock market during 2000 were received).
[edit] Pattern recognition and fractalsElliott's market model relies heavily on looking at price charts. Practitioners study developing price moves to distinguish the waves and wave structures, and discern what prices may do next; thus the application of the wave principle is a form of pattern recognition.
The structures Elliott described also meet the common definition of a fractal (self-similar patterns appearing at every degree of trend). Elliott wave practitioners say that just as naturally-occurring fractals often expand and grow more complex over time, the model shows that collective human psychology develops in natural patterns, via buying and selling decisions reflected in market prices: "It's as though we are somehow programmed by mathematics. Seashell, galaxy, snowflake or human: we're all bound by the same order."[3]
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[edit] Fibonacci relationshipsR. N. Elliott's analysis of the mathematical properties of waves and patterns eventually led him to conclude that "The Fibonacci Summation Series is the basis of The Wave Principle."[1] Numbers from the Fibonacci sequence surface repeatedly in Elliott wave structures, including motive waves (1, 3, 5), a single full cycle (5 up, 3 down = 8 waves), and the completed motive (89 waves) and corrective (55 waves) patterns. Elliott developed his market model before he realized that it reflects the Fibonacci sequence. "When I discovered The Wave Principle action of market trends, I had never heard of either the Fibonacci Series or the Pythagorean Diagram."[1]
The Fibonacci sequence is also closely connected to the Golden ratio (ca 1.618). Practitioners commonly use this ratio and related ratios to establish support and resistance levels for market waves, namely the price points which help define the parameters of a trend.[4]
Finance professor Roy Batchelor and researcher Richard Ramyar, a former Director of the United Kingdom Society of Technical Analysts and Head of UK Asset Management Research at Reuters Lipper, studied whether Fibonacci ratios appear non-randomly in the stock market, as Elliott's model predicts. The researchers said the "idea that prices retrace to a Fibonacci ratio or round fraction of the previous trend clearly lacks any scientific rationale." They also said "there is no significant difference between the frequencies with which price and time ratios occur in cycles in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and frequencies which we would expect to occur at random in such a time series."[5]
Robert Prechter replied to the Batchelor-Ramyar study, saying that it "does not challenge the validity of any aspect of the Wave Principle...it supports wave theorists' observations," and that because the authors had examined ratios between prices achieved in filtered trends rather than Elliott waves, "their method does not address actual claims by wave theorists."[6] The Socionomics Institute also reviewed data in the Batchelor-Ramyar study, and said this data shows "Fibonacci ratios do occur more often in the stock market than would be expected in a random environment."'[7]
Example of The Elliott Wave Principle and The Fibonacci Relationship


From sakuragi_indofx, "Trading never been so easy eh," December 2007.


The GBP/JPY currency chart gives an example of a fourth wave retracement apparently halting between the 38.2% and 50.0% Fibonacci retracements of a completed third wave. The chart also highlights how the Elliott Wave Principle works well with other technical analysis tendencies as prior support (the bottom of wave-1) acts as resistance to wave-4. The wave count depicted in the chart would be invalidated if GBP/JPY moves above the wave-1 low.

[edit] After ElliottFollowing Elliott's death in 1948, other market technicians and financial professionals continued to use the wave principle and provide forecasts to investors. Charles Collins, who had published Elliott's "Wave Principle" and helped introduce Elliott's theory to Wall Street, ranked Elliott's contributions to technical analysis on a level with Charles Dow. Hamilton Bolton, founder of The Bank Credit Analyst, provided wave analysis to a wide readership in the 1950s and 1960s. Bolton introduced Elliott's wave principle to A.J. Frost, who provided weekly financial commentary on the Financial News Network in the 1980s. Frost co-authored Elliott Wave Principle with Robert Prechter in 1979.

[edit] Rediscovery and current useRobert Prechter came across Elliott's works while working as a market technician at Merrill Lynch. His fame as a forecaster during the bull market of the 1980s brought the greatest exposure to date to Elliott's theory, and today Prechter remains the most widely known Elliott analyst.
Among market technicians, wave analysis is widely accepted as a component of their trade. Elliott Wave Theory is among the methods included on the exam that analysts must pass to earn the Chartered Market Technician (CMT) designation, the professional accreditation developed by the Market Technicians Association (MTA).
Robin Wilkin, Global Head of FX and Commodity Technical Strategy at JPMorgan Chase, says "the Elliott Wave principle… provides a probability framework as to when to enter a particular market and where to get out, whether for a profit or a loss."[8]
Jordan Kotick, Global Head of Technical Strategy at Barclays Capital and past President of the Market Technicians Association, has said that R. N. Elliott's "discovery was well ahead of its time. In fact, over the last decade or two, many prominent academics have embraced Elliott’s idea and have been aggressively advocating the existence of financial market fractals."[9]
One such academic is the physicist Didier Sornette, visiting professor at the Department of Earth and Space Science and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA. In a paper he co-authored in 1996 ("Stock Market Crashes, Precursors and Replicas") Sornette said,
"It is intriguing that the log-periodic structures documented here bear some similarity with the 'Elliott waves' of technical analysis …. A lot of effort has been developed in finance both by academic and trading institutions and more recently by physicists (using some of their statistical tools developed to deal with complex times series) to analyze past data to get information on the future. The 'Elliott wave' technique is probably the most famous in this field. We speculate that the 'Elliott waves', so strongly rooted in the financial analysts’ folklore, could be a signature of an underlying critical structure of the stock market."[10] Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire commodity trader, calls Prechter and Frost's standard text on Elliott "a classic," and one of "the four Bibles of the business" --
"[McGee and Edwards'] Technical Analysis of Stock Trends and The Elliott Wave Theorist both give very specific and systematic ways to approach developing great reward/risk ratios for entering into a business contract with the marketplace, which is what every trade should be if properly and thoughtfully executed."[11] Pauline Novak-Reich in her provocatively entitled book, "The Bell Does Ring; Timing the Australian Stock Market with Gann and Elliott Strategies" counters the claims of the Efficient Market Hypothesis of Eugene Fama in an exposition that integrates Elliott Wave Theory with the Gann approach. [12]
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[edit] CriticismThe premise that markets unfold in recognizable patterns contradicts the efficient market hypothesis, which says that prices cannot be predicted from market data such as moving averages and volume. By this reasoning, if successful market forecasts were possible, investors would buy (or sell) when the method predicted a price increase (or decrease), to the point that prices would rise (or fall) immediately, thus destroying the profitability and predictive power of the method. In efficient markets, knowledge of the Elliott wave principle among investors would lead to the disappearance of the very patterns they tried to anticipate, rendering the method, and all forms of technical analysis, useless.
Benoit Mandelbrot has questioned whether Elliott waves can predict financial markets:
"But Wave prediction is a very uncertain business. It is an art to which the subjective judgement of the chartists matters more than the objective, replicable verdict of the numbers. The record of this, as of most technical analysis, is at best mixed."[13]
Robert Prechter had previously said that ideas in an article by Mandelbrot[14] "originated with Ralph Nelson Elliott, who put them forth more comprehensively and more accurately with respect to real-world markets in his 1938 book The Wave Principle."[15]
Critics also say the wave principle is too vague to be useful, since it cannot consistently identify when a wave begins or ends, and that Elliott wave forecasts are prone to subjective revision. Some who advocate technical analysis of markets have questioned the value of Elliott wave analysis. Technical analyst David Aronson wrote:[16]
The Elliott Wave Principle, as popularly practiced, is not a legitimate theory, but a story, and a compelling one that is eloquently told by Robert Prechter. The account is especially persuasive because EWP has the seemingly remarkable ability to fit any segment of market history down to its most minute fluctuations. I contend this is made possible by the method's loosely defined rules and the ability to postulate a large number of nested waves of varying magnitude. This gives the Elliott analyst the same freedom and flexibility that allowed pre-Copernican astronomers to explain all observed planet movements even though their underlying theory of an Earth-centered universe was wrong.
However, Robert R. Prechter Jr. set an all time record in the United States Trading Championship by returning 440% in a monitored real-money options account in the four month contest period. [17] During the contest, he traded using the Elliott Wave Principle. In December 1989, Financial News Network named him "Guru of the Decade".[18] In 1990 - 1991, Prechter served as president of the Market Technicians Association.

[edit] See also
[edit] Notes

[edit] References
  • Elliott Wave Principle: Key to Market Behavior by A.J. Frost & Robert R. Prechter, Jr. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN 0-471-98849-9
  • Mastering Elliott Wave: Presenting the Neely Method: The First Scientific, Objective Approach to Market Forecasting with Elliott Wave Theory by Glenn Neely with Eric Hall. Published by Windsor Books. ISBN 0-930233-44-1
  • Applying Elliott Wave Theory Profitably by Steven W. Poser Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN 0-471-42007-7

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