Every once in a while you like to look back and review your notes to locate where your research was right and where it was wrong. The simple technique of following stock market leaders and the NH-NL ratio nailed the period of time when the market transitioned from an up-trend to churning to the “Big Decline”. We nailed it here on this blog and every reader was prepared for the imminent decline. No one can dispute that. Readers of this blog were told to move to cash to preserve capital in late 2007 and early 2008. Now, I am not talking about day traders but longer term traders or investors that work full time and do what I do.

The chart highlights in red where I was making the sell posts (the articles are listed below):

Anyway, I have been posting twits about the strengthening of the NH-NL ratio which is starting to tell me that the newest trend change is beginning. Yes, this is my first major blog post saying that my screens (market tools) are telling me to wake up because things are starting to change. It’s not time to jump in with both feet and buy every stock that’s up on above average volume but it’s time to sharpen the skills and be ready. We may look back and point to March and April of 2009 as the bottom of the market or at least the start of the changing trend.

We don’t have market leaders yet but when they appear, I will locate them, post up charts and talk about them nightly on twitter (twitter.com/cperruna). Too many stocks still have their 50-d moving averages below their longer term 200-d moving averages and new highs are still limited. However, new lows have dried up considerably and the NH-NL ratio has a moving average that is trending higher for about a month now. That’s the most sustainable trend for this ratio since the big decline started.

Stay tuned to the blog and my twits for follow-ups to my research on individual stocks and the overall trend.

In the meantime, take a look back at the numerous blog articles I posted in 2007and 2008 talking about a market decline, shorting stocks and selling in general. Learn from what the simple tools were telling us. I am far from a market genius and far from rich but I can make a few dollars following the leaders and the NH-NL ratio.

A Review of Articles Pointing to a Stock Market Decline in early 2008:

• May 23, 2008: Smelling Trouble
  

  The bottom line or point of today’s rant is the fact that I still feel that the market is headed for a decline or as I phrased it a couple weeks ago: The Big Decline (long term perspective of course).

• May 8, 2008: Market Distribution
  

  I originally started to point out market troubles back on March 14, 2008 in a post titled Snapshot Friday; I highlighted both the Dow Jones and NASDAQ with clear yellow shaded areas showing the 200-day moving averages pointing down for the first time since 2003 (that’s huge if you ask me).

• May 7, 2008: The Big Decline
  

  I am a positive person by nature and I prefer to buy stocks going up but I am starting to see several leading stocks struggle to hold new highs or fail to challenge recent highs. These patterns are familiar and they are suggesting that the recent bounce is the final stage before a possible market decline.

• January 23, 2008: Setups for Selling Stocks Short
  

  I wrote an article on October 15, 2007 titled How to Make Money Selling Short, precisely when the general market indexes were topping. I am not going to take full credit but subconsciously my charts were giving me signals that the market was showing the major red flags and signals of what we are seeing today.

A Review of Articles Talking about Selling, Profit Taking and Market Distribution in late 2007:

• 10/03/07: Is Shanghai a Nasdaq Déjà vu
  

  Well, the current two year rise of the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index looks remarkably similar to the rise of the NASDAQ of the late 1990’s and the charts below explain better than I can!

• 10/04/07: A Technique for Profit Taking
  

  What do you do in a market like today when you have profits in multiple positions but you don’t want to give it all back? You want to continue to ride the winners but at the same time, you want to maintain the unrealized gains in your account. HOW?

• 10/12/07: Distribution Day
  

  This was the largest showing of volume in two months and is not healthy because it was pure distribution. It was only the second distribution day over the past month so we can’t call this a bear run but please be on the lookout for a possible correction of 5%-10%. Technology stocks led the decline as BIDU gave back 10% of its amazing run.

Read more »

“Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.” – Ludwig von Mises

I’d love to find someone that can venture through a single day without reading, hearing or talking about the current state of the economy, the stimulus plan, the bailouts or ponzi schemes. It’s sickening but what’s worse is the fact how NO ONE talks about fixing the problem correctly. Does anyone learn from the past?

I didn’t read the stimulus package in its entirety (it appears that our representatives didn’t either) so take what I say with a grain of salt.

We can blame Bush, blame Clinton, blame Obama, blame Regan, blame Nixon, etc. – it’s all the same; they work for the same crooks, I mean corporation, the US Government!

Time magazine recently published a list of the top 25 people most responsible for this crisis but I would argue that their thinking is flawed and dated by at least 100 years. As Victor Sperandeo noted in his book, Trader Vic – Methods of a Wall Street Master, Thomas Jefferson understood better than any political leader in world history that government “profusion” can only be paid by the “labors of the people.” He knew that a growing government budget and an extension of the services government offers “under the pretense of caring for [the people]” can only come at the expense of private property and individual liberty.

“I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers … We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.” – Thomas Jefferson

“The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.” – Ludwig von Mises

This blog entry is not about playing the blame game, pointing fingers or determining who is responsible but rather a move towards first discussing and then implementing responsibility and accountability based on how economics 101 truly works (without government interference). I am certainly not ruling out oversight and regulation but I am asking the government to just butt out of the free-market system we call capitalism. They will not make things better. For example, Ludwig von Mises once said:

“Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other.”

He made this statement more than half a century ago but the current administration is doing exactly that, spending an unprecedented amount of money (trillions when they look in the mirror and state the truth) on a stimulus plan that will most likely fail to achieve what its authors claim. I am not arguing that is won’t create jobs but how many jobs will be lost due to the new package. What will the net gain or loss total be once we look back in five or ten years?

The talking heads of the media offer no help as they skew the unemployment numbers every chance they get so they can “GET” their headlines. Even the president is talking about the economy and unemployment numbers reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. Really? What stats are they looking at? This is a sensitive topic as several of my family’s closest friends have lost jobs in recent months but the truth is the truth.

Business Week noted:

In the last year, the U.S. economy shed 3.4 million jobs. That’s a grim statistic for sure, but represents just 2.2% of the labor force. From November 1981 to October 1982, 2.4 million jobs were lost — fewer in number than today, but the labor force was smaller. So 1981-82 job losses totaled 2.2% of the labor force, the same as now.

Job losses in the Great Depression were of an entirely different magnitude. In 1930, the economy shed 4.8% of the labor force. In 1931, 6.5%. And then in 1932, another 7.1%. Jobs were being lost at double or triple the rate of 2008-09 or 1981-82. This was reflected in unemployment rates.

The latest survey pegs U.S. unemployment at 7.6%. That’s more than three percentage points below the 1982 peak (10.8%) and not even a third of the peak in 1932 (25.2%). You simply can’t equate 7.6% unemployment with the Great Depression.

Read more »

Happy New Year!

• Listen to My Audio Interview
• My Interview at StockTickr
• Position Sizing and Expectancy
• The Holy Grail of Trading: It’s not your System
• How to Create a Successful Stock Watch List
• My CANSLIM Screening and Buying Strategy
• Fundamental Screens and Scans
• CAN SLIM Breakdown
• Understand the ‘M’ in CANSLIM
• Paper Trading: Nothing to Lose, Nothing to Learn
• Focus on You
• Could you Trade Full Time?
• Position Size to Determine How Many Shares to Buy
• Trading Mistakes: Avoid at all Costs
• How to Calculate a Stock’s Pivot Point
• Do Not use Fundamental Analysis Alone!
• How to Short a Stock
• Learn to Focus when Investing
• Markets are not Efficient
• Point and Figure Charts

Times are tough, banks are failing, the government is bailing out everyone but the common guy and Madoff is the new Ponzi. With all of this in mind, nothing is new on Wall Street. We’ve been through this before and will come out the other end, one way or another. The question is: Are you a sheep?

I will refer to a couple of quotes I have posted numerous times on this blog:

“All through time, people have basically acted and re-acted the same way in the market as a result of: greed, fear, ignorance, and hope – that is why the numerical formations and patterns recur on a constant basis” – Jesse Livermore

“Wall Street never changes, the pockets change, the stocks change, but Wall Street never changes, because human nature never changes” – Jesse Livermore

The books listed below were found through a fabulous list provided by the Hess Collection from An Exhibit at The University of Toledo ’s William S. Carlson Library. February 22–April 30, 1999

As you can see, things will never change, as much as we wish they would because it’s in our DNA (we’re human).

Don’t these titles sound familiar:
How to Cope with the Developing Financial Crisis
By Ashby Bladen, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980.

Financial Crises
By Theodore E. Burton, New York: Appleton, 1931.

Our Mysterious Panics 1830-1930
By Charles Albert Collman, New York: Morrow, 1931.

Booms and Depressions: Some First Principles
By Irving Fisher, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1933.

Read more »

“Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”
~Albert Einstein

So, why are the same goons that created our mess trying to solve it?
The politics in our country is a joke!

By the way, we are not in a depression (the talking heads just won’t shut up). The restaurants and movie theatres are packed, the malls and box stores are packed, the parking lots are filled with SUV’s, etc…

Recession, yes, but we are NO WHERE NEAR a depression. Just some thoughts as I celebrate my grandmother’s 85th birthday; she lived through a “real” depression.

Yes, my post title is slightly misleading…