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Table Of Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................3-4
Stock Market Lifecycles.........................................................................5-6
Who Are We Trading Against?.................................................................7-9
How Do Funds Invest?..........................................................................10-14
Sector Rotation...................................................................................15-18
The Bond Market..................................................................................19-21
Aussie/Yen Carry Trade..................................................................... 22-24
When leaders Fall...............................................................................25-30
The Feds Impact on the Markets.........................................................31-36
Portfolio Management.........................................................................37-39
Conclusion...............................................................................................40
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Introduction
I
dont
know
the
Vice
Presidential Debate in
1992 where General
Stockdale opened it
with,
Who
am
Why am I here?
I?
I
businesses.
Eventually I was working as an analyst for a Fortune 100
company when I started an Internet company that ended up
doing pretty well. It afforded me the ability quit my job and do
that full time. I started getting back into trading. When I got
back into trading, I had my ups and downs. And there were the
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Those are the ups, but as all traders know, we have our
downs too. This is a picture of Forrest Gump. You know, Im
not a smart man, Jenny. Thats how I felt when I proceeded to
blow out my $150,000 over the next 18 months of trading. I
still had a passion for trading, though, and I wanted to learn
more about it. I had all these Internet skills, building an online
business, and thats when I met John, who, obviously, is a
master trader. He was trying to get some of these websites going
and I was interested in the market. He needed somebody to help
him run some of the companies, and I helped John and Henry
launch Simpler Options in 2012, and then John and I cofounded
Simpler Stocks in 2013.
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meal you have, the longer it takes to digest. If you have a full,
large pizza, youre probably going to be sleeping that off for
about 12 hours. If you have a green health shake or something
like that, youve got instant energy. The market is constantly
digesting moves on every timeframe, whether its a five minute
chart, or the weekly chart.
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we just basically chopped around all day, and gained back some
of those losses. You can look at this on a daily chart also, the
market comes down violently, but then it retraces back. Its
digesting that move. It comes down and then it needs time to
digest it.
The same thing happens on the upside.
Markets go up,
and then they take a pause. They come back down a little bit.
They digest the move, and then they keep going. Thats just how
markets work. Theres an ebb and flow to them.
WHO ARE WE TRADING AGAINST?
One thing that is important to be aware of is who makes up
the market.
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These pension funds, are they the big bad guys? Theyre
not. We usually vilify the hedge funds or the high frequency traders
or the major institutions, but its hard to vilify pension funds.
California state teachers, for example is a $139 billion fund; the
California public employees, $214 billion; Texas teachers, $100
billion; New York City retirement, $115 billion. For companies,
General Motors has the largest pension fund in the country,
$102 billion. IBM also has a large pension fund, around $80 billion.
These are funds are for retirees, and they should absolutely
be invested. Teachers, government employees, long term employees
from major companies, should be absolutely taken care of in
their retirement.
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those other pension funds that are $100 billion, $200 billion.
This ones a modest sized, $10 billion. You do your research.
You find a small, fast growing semiconductor company called
SunPower. You decide to put 2% of your funds into the stock,
or $200 million.
The stock is trading at $32 per share. Now, in order to get
your full position, you need to buy over 6 million shares of
stock. Do you just submit a market order, 6 million shares at
$32 a share? Then youre filled, and youre done. Unfortunately,
it is not that simple, because the average daily volume on SPWR
is 3.2 million shares a day, so their position size alone would be
double that. Remember, this is just 2% of their overall portfolio.
How do you buy a large amount of shares without drastically
increasing the price? Its really not that hard. They do it by slow
and steady scaling. What pension fund managers will usually do
is theyll allow for 90 to 120 days for accumulation. Theyll have
a price range in mind, so theyll say, Hey, Im going to buy
some Sunpower between $32 and $32.50 a share. Im a buyer
all day long in that range. Im going to buy small blocks of those
shares because I dont want to alert any suspicion. Im just
going to slowly buy, you know, 10,000 shares, 20,000 shares.
Then if the stocks get too high, well, Ill just stop buying.
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recognize when funds are buyers, because the chart has a staircase
pattern. You can tell that theyre just constantly supporting the
market because theyre becoming such large holders of the supply
that theyre holding up the price. Its hard for the price to really get
whacked too hard if the institutions are not participating in the selling.
LSCC is stock were in right now. Volume looks pretty
good. Up days have a lot more volume than down days. Up day
had 10 million shares, and down days had half that volume.
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SECTOR ROTATION
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area
where
something
safe.
for.
The
bond
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From 2014 until now, there was a kind of a nice, steady uptrend, and this is exactly what were talking about with funds
buying. Theres a huge move, it digests the move then it makes
another big move. The volume on an up day, for example, has
1.8 billion futures contracts trading hands. When you compare
that to the down days, it is roughly almost half the volume.
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STOCKS
The currency and futures markets are much larger than the
stocks and options markets. The other markets are going to
lead the stock market, especially the currencies and the bond
market. What is the Aussie Yen Carry Trade? The Aussie Yen is
what I like to call the hedge fund index. What funds do is theyll
borrow currency from one stable country with the lowest interest
rates possible. Right now in the current macro environment
today, that is Japan. They are a first world country and a stable
country. They have a stable government, but their interest
rates are at 0% and they have been for quite a while.
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Whats the yen doing now on May 7th? Lets get back to the
charts and take a look here.
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This is a one year chart. You can see, when it broke down
below the 50 day, it did it with heavy volume. The volume is
accelerating on the downside. For the first time in a long time it
tested the 200 day. The 200 day is very important because a lot
of institutions use the 200 day moving average as an area of
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support. You can see it bounced up there, fell through it, came
back up above it, and once again broke it with volume and now
it hasnt been able to get back above the 200 day. Now its
using that support as resistance.
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What we can see here is the feds impact on the S&Ps. This
was a Goldman Sachs study. This grey period here is when
there was no policy and you can see it was just down to sideways, action. The fed came in, did another QE, market rallied
again. Fed decided they were going to stop the printing presses
for a few months and the market didnt take too kindly to that.
They started buying bonds, and they were buying close to
$85 billion a month. This was pure quantitative easing, money
printing, and the stock market responded nicely to that. They also
responded and I think its termed operation twist and then
QE4. This chart above goes to January 2013, but obviously we
know what happened in 2013. The stock market had one of its
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best years where it went up 30%. That was after four quantitative
easing sessions.
Whats happening now is the fed is trimming back and they
are starting to cut their monthly bond purchases by $10 billion.
Currently, theyre down from $85 billion to $45 billion. The feds
role in the economy is like a big game of Monopoly, and the fed
is the banker. When the fed creates more money for everyone
to play with, the more Park Avenue houses you can buy, and the
more the stock market goes higher, and then the inverse is true
when the fed starts tightening the spigot.
The market is always changing, and the fed is one of the
drivers of that change.
I dont want all this to be doom and gloom. Were not looking
for another big market crash, so its important to keep the big, big
picture in mind, which is that the stock market always goes
through many booms and bust cycles. The stock market has been
trading for a long time, almost 200 years.
Market started with 12 guys under a buttonwood tree in New
York City. We have had charts for the last 100 years. What they have
showed us is that the market goes through all these periods of rising
and then correcting.
Its important to note that the market events of 1929, 87,
and the one in 2008 are all very rare events. Theyve only
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happened three times in the last 100 years. This is not the norm
by any stretch of the imagination. A normal bull market lasts
about three to five years. A bear market lasts nine to 20
months. Typically you see a correction of 10% to 30%, and the
average correction being 20%. Right now on the NASDAQ were
right at about 10%. I think if you do the math on the low of the
NASDAQ from whatever that was, a week or two ago, its about
right at 10%. I mean, Im expecting more of a 20% correction,
which is an average correction. We can take a look at a few
charts about that.
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One thing thats interesting about the year 2000 is its a little
similar to whats going on now, and thats where the NASDAQ kind
of just tanked first. It certainly hasnt been as extreme this go
around as it was in 2000. As you can see, very similar of whats
going on today. This is the SPX back in 2000. As we saw for the
NASDAQ, you saw that just huge, just a big correction around this
March, April timeframe. What was the S&P doing? It was just flat
lining, and it flat lined for a while. You had the highs here in March
of 2000, and it really didnt go anywhere all.
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You can see the NASDAQ here made its high in March of
2000, as well, and as you can see, just right away just got
creamed. This is two months later and the NASDAQ has gone from
4800 to 2800. I mean, like a 30% correction in just two months
while the S&P was just flat lining. It kind of reminds me of that time
period for that reason, and thats kind of what we try to, as stock
analysts, is go back and say, Okay, where in the past have we
seen a market like this and what happened and whats the
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PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT
NUMBER OF STOCKS
We want to trade our portfolios like professionals, and professional
portfolio managers, they dont try to manage dozens of positions.
Trying to keep up with that many stocks is crippling. You rarely
should own more than eight stocks. If you own too many stocks,
it could cause you to miss important opportunities that are setting
up in the market, because all of your capital and all of your
mental energy is focused on the 30 stocks that you have and
that youre trying to manage.
DIVERSIFICATION
Diversification is a story and its sold to the public to make them
feel better about putting their money in to the stock market.
Professional portfolio managers do not diversify. If they are
investing in stocks, they dont invest in every single sector.
Depending on whats happening in the market, they are very
much concentrated in just certain areas of the market. Theyre
focused on growth and capital preservation.
RISK TOLERANCE
Whether you have been trading stocks for a long time and
youre managing several million dollars, or if youre newer to
stock trading, what you want to do is assess your risk tolerance.
You want to look at the current market outlook. Whats my
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the average range that the stock moves in a given day or week,
depending on what timeframe youre looking at. What we want
to do is we want to be just outside of that, so we dont want to
get caught up in the average daily move of the stock, and get
taken out just by a normal move that the stock will do.
Depending on these lower price stocks, these young
stocks, growth stocks, speculative stocks, theres increased risk
there. The average range for those stocks is going to be greater,
because those stocks are more volatile. Risk tolerance and position
size comes into play here.
EXAMPLE
Im going to go through an example with you. These are
my rules for the portfolio on Simpler Stocks. They dont have to
be yours. I would even recommend they not be. You want to do
something thats more tailored to you, but this is a guide. My
risk tolerance is: Im willing to lose a max 2% of the overall
portfolio on any one trade. That means, if Im trading a
$100,000 account, I dont want to lose more than $2000. That
means my max position size on this would be 2000 shares. That
would be a calculation that youll want to do with your own
account, depending on your risk tolerance.
Now whats my current market outlook? Is the stock
market in a downtrend? I say, I do want to be very cautious on
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the long side. This means Im not using any margin right now.
Again, this is my account size, separate $100,000 account.
Thats just specifically for growth stocks. The reason why I put
that in there is because I know some of you guys have just one
account where youre just doing everything, and youre doing
options trading, futures trading and stocks trading. Whatever
you allocate to just stocks is what you want to then use, not
your overall account.
You may have $100,000 account, but youre doing income
options trades, options trades, and so forth. If youre only putting $25,000 of the $100,000 into speculative growth stocks,
you want to use $25,000 as your portfolio size for those stocks.
Again, because Im very cautious of the market (at the time of
this writing), my plan is to start with five positions using a max
10% of my account on each position.
I want you to ask yourself what youre willing to risk on
each trade, what your current market outlook is. It doesnt have
to be mine or Johns, but you should have your own perspective
on it. Whats your investing experience?
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Conclusion
This was written on May 7th 2014, but the principles discussed
here are applicable to any market environment. With time
and patience you can learn how the markets work. Trading is
alluring for the great rewards and freedom it provides. If you
always have the risks at the forefront of your mind youll be
ahead of the curve. Trading is a journey not a destination. The
markets are constantly evolving and every trader must stay
current in order to be successful.
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