Proprietary Trading Systems for Stocks, Futures, Currencies, ETFs, LEAPS & Commodities Trading Insights that Government, Media and Wall Street Don't Want You to Know
Seriously, buy and hold in a secular bear market like we are in is a losing strategy. On an inflation-adjusted basis, you are down if your holding period has been 30 years! Most of us would think that 30 years is the long run! On a nominal basis, you are about where you were ten years ago, if you are in a broad index. Even if you are a value investor, you have gotten creamed in this market. (Some great value investors are down 60%. Their experience of buying and holding solid companies, which had worked so well for so long, needs to be married with some risk discipline.) You need a sell discipline. Barry’s [Ritholtz] system, or others like it, can at least get you thinking about selling rather than riding a stock all the way to the bottom and hoping it comes back. Hope is not a viable investment strategy. I don’t know much personally about trading. My stomach won’t allow me to trade, although I have watched and met with the best. But I do know this. The best traders and managers have risk controls and sell disciplines and they stick to them. Period. They don’t fall in love with a stock or a commodity position.
The S&P 500 is down -8.57 percent this month adding to last year’s -38 percent plunge… There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like buy and hold, there’s no place like buy and hold…
The Justice Department says it foiled a plot by a fired Fannie Mae contract worker in Maryland to destroy all the data on the mortgage giant’s 4,000 computer servers nationwide…[the suspect] programmed a computer with a malicious code that was set to spread throughout the Fannie Mae network and destroy all data this Saturday.
The government, the same one that left Fannie Mae one mouse click away from implosion, is in charge of fixing everything? Of course they are!
If any Wall Streeter received a bonus, while at the same time they or their firm were receiving tax dollars to stay afloat, that bonus money is due back. I agree with Obama here.
One of the interviewees in my film saw my comment above and emailed me tonight:
I am not 100% convinced, but for arguments sake, does that mean:
1.) Autoworkers should return wages paid since the time the Auto companies took tax dollars to stay afloat?
2.) Farmers should return all income during years in which any crops were subsidized?
3.) Federal employees, along with Congressmen and Senators, should return wages paid since the budget went into permanent deficit in 1970?
Don’t ask me how both of my books have new editions from different publishers coming at roughly the exact same time, but that is the case! The new edition of “The Complete TurtleTrader” is a paperback version with a brand new Afterword. The Afterword gets behind the scenes of what it was like to research and write about the Turtles. While today my Turtle book has been well received by almost everyone attached to the experiment, getting there was not easy. Along the way at least 4 Turtles threatened litigation at one time or the other. Frankly, I wish one of the four would have followed through as nutty suit papers would have made for a great inclusion in this edition of my book! But like I said, now that the book is out it seems to have been universally well received by all of the players involved.
Too many investors have been advised that a policy of buy and hold is the best way to invest for the long run. The advice is typically: ‘Just buy a good stock and hold on as long as you can. The market will take care of you.’ Well, the stock market has not been taking care of investors for quite a few years now. Instead, the market is taking stock investors on a wild stomach-churning ride•and there is no telling where it will end. Investors are getting sick along the way and are unsure that there will be anything left when the ride is over. Buy and hold is failing as an exit strategy because it encourages a wait-and-hope outlook among investors and does nothing to provide badly needed control of gains and losses.
