Gyroscopic Investing

dualstow wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 09, 2020 7:06 am

Market is set to surge 5% — that’s more than 1400 points for the Dow — on Pfizer’s 90% effective vaccine.

Yeah I was pretty shocked to wake up and see that myself, even though when I went to bed they were already up ~2%. And with volatility continuing to collapse there is still room for much more upside as lower volatility triggers systematic flows into stocks via large hedge fund strategies like risk parity, vol-targeting, and the like.

If you think stocks are exciting today, take a look at small cap value.

Indeed! My value fund has really popped!

This market is getting insane. Cramer is attributing it to younger inexperienced investors who have only seen stock gains for the last decade. To them the party can go on forever. I'm starting to slowly divest. We hitting some pretty lofty numbers here. Id be surprised if we see 4k on the SP before we see 3k or less. Anyone else getting that feeling?

I don’t disagree but certain areas of the market are either still -ve YTD or only slightly positive <+5%.
REITs fall into the first camp and SCV in the latter.

I’ve lightened up on SPY and kept investing in SC, SCV and REITs.

Not at all, see my thread in the VP section for the long version of my thoughts. All leading economic and technical indicators are still up and to the right. We are now getting rotation into small caps and value which is really confirmation more than anything else that this rally is for real. It's no longer just 5 stocks at the top dragging the market up, the rally has broadened out. That being said, a pullback to 3k like you mention would be a healthy thing. I would buy that dip. I have no worries at the moment of a secular bear market. That could change any day with emerging info, but for the moment Cramer is looking dead wrong (but what is new there???). Not to mention Santa is coming to town, and we know how strong the market tends to perform from late December though about Feb.

doodle wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 16, 2020 7:02 pm

This market is getting insane. Cramer is attributing it to younger inexperienced investors who have only seen stock gains for the last decade. To them the party can go on forever. I'm starting to slowly divest. We hitting some pretty lofty numbers here. Id be surprised if we see 4k on the SP before we see 3k or less. Anyone else getting that feeling?

Plenty of pundits and prognosticators on both sides. I heard Cramer say that and was concerned, but he could be right about young naive investors and we could still see sustained gains for a variety of reasons. I’m at about 55% in stocks (vp + pp). I’m not really adding shares, but I don’t want to go lower than 50%. If it crashes, it crashes. I’ll maintain my allocation.

We all have to keep in mind that fundamentals, price, value, etc really only matter about once or twice a generation. Since we went through two major episodes where those things mattered in just the 00's alone, what makes today the time when these things need to suddenly matter again? If you look back at history, odds are we got another 5-10 years to go at least before the next secular bear market. Now, there will be some short lived cyclical bear phases in between (like this year for example). The odds are MUCH greater that the bull has much further left to run vs the bull being winded and ready to keel over. Obsessing over fundamentals/price/value is a good way to be on the wrong side of the trade 90% of the time. But hey, I guess a broken clock is still right twice a day, right?

pmward wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 17, 2020 11:00 am

Obsessing over fundamentals/price/value is a good way to be on the wrong side of the trade 90% of the time.

Can I have the first 20 years of my investing career as a do over because of this stupid notion I had!

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/24/cramer ... een.html

I don't know when the bear is going to wake up, but when it does it's going to be brutal.

It makes me nervous when 'braaahs' I used to work dead end jobs with are texting me with stock market stories.

Sure, it’s a meaningless metric but hooray Dow 30,000

I think the most important thing I learned from HB was the difficulty of predicting...this lesson is so well ingrained now that all I really look for is some indication that what I'm holding is not performing according to historical data. If the data says whatever I'm holding should be getting trashed for the given conditions we are in...don't really care anymore. I actually get more "weirded out" when something is performing well that shouldn't be...my radar warning receiver is on high when this happens.

For me the "inability to predict thing" sinking in and its ramifications has changed everything including my bottom line in a big way.

Kbg wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 24, 2020 5:29 pm

I think the most important thing I learned from HB was the difficulty of predicting...this lesson is so well ingrained now that all I really look for is some indication that what I'm holding is not performing according to historical data. If the data says whatever I'm holding should be getting trashed for the given conditions we are in...don't really care anymore. I actually get more "weirded out" when something is performing well that shouldn't be...my radar warning receiver is on high when this happens.

For me the "inability to predict thing" sinking in and its ramifications has changed everything including my bottom line in a big way.

I well learned that lesson from reading Bernstein's book in the early 2000's, which led me to index funds and choosing an asset allocation and sticking with it NO TIMING!

Therefore when I learned of Harry Browne and Permanent Portfolio last year, it was a reinforcement with being more specific on the asset allocation.

Vinny

Kbg wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 24, 2020 5:29 pm

I think the most important thing I learned from HB was the difficulty of predicting...this lesson is so well ingrained now that all I really look for is some indication that what I'm holding is not performing according to historical data. If the data says whatever I'm holding should be getting trashed for the given conditions we are in...don't really care anymore. I actually get more "weirded out" when something is performing well that shouldn't be...my radar warning receiver is on high when this happens.

For me the "inability to predict thing" sinking in and its ramifications has changed everything including my bottom line in a big way.

Yeah, I love intermarket analysis. It's not fool-proof by any means, but there's a lot of info that can be gleaned from comparing what different asset classes, factors, locales, etc are doing relative to each other.

pmward wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 25, 2020 10:56 am

Yeah, I love intermarket analysis. It's not fool-proof by any means, but there's a lot of info

I can recall you making a lot of such comparisons in your analysis. Oddly enough, I can see that it's not extremely popular approach on market reading. Just handful (of the hundreds) of books are putting some significance on relative strength and sector strength - one of those being the 'ancient' (published sometime in 1980-ties) Stein Weinstein's "Secrets for Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets". Beside the obvious reason for stock/sector selection and possibly hedging positions for what else do you use this - for your quant strategy ?

Vil wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:28 am

pmward wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 25, 2020 10:56 am

Yeah, I love intermarket analysis. It's not fool-proof by any means, but there's a lot of info

I can recall you making a lot of such comparisons in your analysis. Oddly enough, I can see that it's not extremely popular approach on market reading. Just handful (of the hundreds) of books are putting some significance on relative strength and sector strength - one of those being the 'ancient' (published sometime in 1980-ties) Stein Weinstein's "Secrets for Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets". Beside the obvious reason for stock/sector selection and possibly hedging positions for what else do you use this - for your quant strategy ?

It's not cheap by any means, but this textbook by John Murphy is basically the bible of intermarket analysis https://www.amazon.com/Intermarket-Anal ... 8&qid=&sr=

Yeah I use intermarket analysis a lot to understand what is going on in the markets. Most people try to start with a "why" and then look to the markets to see if the markets are behaving as they should based on that why. Intermarket analysis is not about starting with a "why", it's about looking at what is actually happening relatively speaking between the different markets, and then asking "why" based on this evidence. Intermarket analysis never looks at the market as being wrong. It always looks at the market as being right. And since "right" or "wrong" in the markets is only decided by if you're making money or not, it makes sense to start with the data instead of starting with some made up theory.

And yes, in my quant strategy it does use intermarket relationships in a few ways, you can read my giant post from a couple days ago in the VP section. I'm comparing different VIX futures contracts, comparing economic data, and actually comparing relative intermarket performance in the "relative momentum layer". It's all intermarket analysis in some form. Of course I do a lot of intermarket analysis even when I'm not trading it, just to keep abreast of the current themes playing out in the market. There's just so much meaning hidden in plain sight if you take the time to do the comparisons.