Author: Lee Adler

Short term cycles turned up on schedule, triggering the overdue upturn in the 6 month cycle. The 13 week cycle up phase got its expected second wind. All cycles from 4 weeks to 6 months are now in gear to the upside. The 4 week cycle currently projects to 3560. The 13 week cycle points higher–a lot higher.

Chart pick performance was strong last week. The average gain grew from +2.5% to +5.0% while the average holding period fell from 14 calendar days to just 8, or barely over a week. Our shorts got stopped out early, protecting a small net gain on those, on balance. Meanwhile the long picks were able to take advantage of the market surge.

I am adding 6 picks to the list as of Monday including 3 new longs and 3 new shorts. I am closing out one pick. With these changes, that will leave 10 open picks, 7 longs and 3 shorts.

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Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to generate a 5% gain every 8 days? Obviously, that’s not going to happen. But the plus signs are nice. Of course, we’d like to beat buy and hold, too.

A long/short trading strategy won’t do that in a broad, sharp rally like last week’s. That’s because we always have at least a few shorts. That costs us when we have a straight up week in the market. If we consider the last 8 calendar days as a basis for comparing performance, we were about 1 percentage point below a buy and hold SPY strategy.

But always having a few shorts means that we should outperform rangebound and down markets. My technical stock screens will generate lots of shorts when the market is trending down, and hopefully my eyes will recognize the best ones from that group. The goal is that when the market trends down (someday), the chart pick list should not just massively outperform a buy and hold market strategy, not just by losing less. It should be positive on balance.

Another goal I have for these weekly chart picks is for it to be easy to follow. Once a week entries obviously aren’t optimal from a market performance standpoint. But for busy people, it’s a good alternative. We generally have a few picks each weekend that we can enter on Monday morning. Then, setting trailing stops frees us from the trading screen. We can go about having a life!

But I don’t like automatic stops. What about the use of mental stops? I usually put stop levels on the chart pick table. I set an alert to be sent to my phone and computer screen at the stop level. When I’m actively trading my own account, I use a chart trendline or moving average representing my trailing stop line. When I get that alert, I get on that chart quickly. I wait that 2-3 minutes, and if there’s no reversal, I trigger the trade and move on.

Again, this is just my way. I’m sharing it with you for informational purposes. You have to do it your way. I just try to give you useful, actionable, and hopefully profitable, information for you to use as you see fit. If you are not an experienced trader, consult a professional investment advisor for guidance. That’s not what this is.

Past performance doesn’t indicate future results. There’s always risk of loss. Chart picks are theoretical for informational purposes only.

The bears took control last week, crushing all the uptrend lines I had drawn on this chart. Now we have a well-defined downtrend. The market has also edged below several old long term and intermediate trendline extensions. If these aren’t immediately recrossed, the downside becomes wide open.

Chart pick performance slipped last week, with the average gain falling from +3.8% to +2.5%.  The average holding period rose from 13 calendar days to 14, just two weeks as recent longs got whipsawed.

12 longs were stopped out last week. That was, in fact, all of them. I am adding 5 picks to the list as of Monday, including 4 longs and 1 short. That will leave 8 open picks – 4 longs and 4 shorts.

I read somewhere that past performance doesn’t suggest future results. I’ll say! Of course, considering how the market got clobbered last week, I don’t think that a long-only, buy and hold strategy did too well.

Now I want to do a little “what-if” exercise. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake and there’s something that I’ve been noticing for… oh… the past 25 years or so. That something is the evidence that the traditional 4 year cycle died decades ago.

By simply tweaking indicators around that traditional time frame, I have been trying to make a square peg fit a round hole. But they never seem to fit the action. Something has not been right. It has been staring us in the face the whole time.

What if… what if…, skewed by aggressive monetary policy, the dominant cycle since 1994 has been 7-8 years, as it appears to be. And what if that’s still the case? I have superimposed 7-8 year cycle indicators on the monthly chart. And wow! Is that revealing! It’s a completely different message than the one we’ve been trying to make sense of.

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Past performance doesn’t indicate future results. There’s always risk of loss. Chart picks are theoretical for informational purposes only. These reports are intended for professional investors and experienced individual traders. Do your own due diligence before trading.

We have a selloff in the pre market, but the TA says, don’t trust it yet. Or maybe, “Trust, but verify,” for those of you of a certain age, like me.

Meanwhile, as for chart picks, I didn’t see much that I liked in this week’s screens. I didn’t add any longs. We’re already loaded to the gills there. I added two shorts, and one is conditional on a limit price entry.

4 picks were stopped out last week. With the the 2 new picks, that will leave 16 open picks, including 12 longs, and 4 shorts.

List performance improved last week, with the average gain increasing from +2.9% to +3.8%. The average holding period rose from 12 calendar days to 13, which is still less than the usual 16-20 days because I added a slew of new picks the previous week.

Chart picks are theoretical, assume 100% cash stock trades, no margin, no options, no futures.

I once read somewhere that past performance doesn’t indicate future results, or something. Is that true? Hopefully it is, considering some of my past performances.

Technical Trader subscribers, click here to download the report.

Not a subscriber? Try Lee Adler’s Technical Trader risk free for 90 days!  

Past performance doesn’t indicate future results. There’s always risk of loss. Chart picks are theoretical for informational purposes only. These reports are intended for professional investors and experienced individual traders. Do your own due diligence before trading.