Greetings from the land of victory, the land of brawn and industry and freedom, greetings from the United States!
Hopefully you are enjoying buckets of Miller Low Life with friends and family, so much so that these words appear a bit fuzzy. Remember, the good scientists in Palo Alto built Uber for you, so no need to go barrelling down the interstate in your Buick. There are plenty of strangers who will happily transport you to-and-fro.
The markets are open for a few hours Monday, which is fantastic because there are stocks to purchase. Which ones? We are not entirely sure yet.
But stay tuned, we are about to go live on iBankCoin YouTube to build Phase II of the systematic equity portfolio that is taking the financial world by storm.
A quick note on IndexModel. It is neutral for a second week. All machines are calibrated, and all info parsed to ensure accurate readings. It is our duty to keep a watchful eye on the financial markets, no matter who is celebrating holiday. It is this discipline that affords the kind scientists at iBankCoin the freedom promised to us by our Founding Fathers and Elon Musk (all Praise and Glory to The Leader).
If even one sound bite, video clip, blog entry, tweet, insta, email, between us gets you one step closer to real freedom, then we have done our job. You have no fucking idea how much I appreciate you guys for finding my content worth your time. Thank you.
Mon Jun 19, 2017 5:36pm ESTComments Off on Robots Ignored: RAUL Overrides The System
Salutations from the trading floors at iBankCoin laboratory!
Despite the latest readings inside Exodus Strategy Session indicating bearish conditions for the current week, the work horse of our operation, RAUL, improvised early Monday morning. He determined that, given the strong gap and drive higher, the best course of action was to delay any short selling, selling of current holdings, or hedging.
Until sellers present themselves no selling of any kind will occur.
* * *
Sometimes a quantitative formula cannot see what the human can. Think about your GPS, for example. It may think the best route home is the highway. The GPS may know a ho chi minh trail exists that offers a similar ETA, but it defers to the major roadways. What it has not accounted for is the pop-up thunderstorm that came through 20 minutes before rush hour, and how soon its maps will be filled with volume delays. Google maps cannot see these nuances.
Nuances are how humans continue to confidently lord over the robots.
In trading it’s called context. And context is the difference between a competent trader and someone who thrives.
When more experienced market practitioners used to talk about context back when I was a fucking n00b it used to irritate me very much. They sucked at describing it to me. They could not present context in a way where I could mimic them. In hindsight, and slowly, it is starting to make sense to me why they struggled to make context into a consumable lesson.
I did my best to codify context into something actionable. It is called switchboard. It is nothing more than an excel spreadsheet that has several switches for the various ‘contexts’ I’ve come to value over the years. It looks like this:
It would be a lie if I told you all key context is contained in switchboard. Context also comes in the form of news flow, geopolitics, seasonality, sentiment, and other intangibles.
* * *
The kind scientists at iBC labs are not thrilled to see our trading element ignore our weekly findings, but RAUL has presented us enough information to enact a manual override. It is our duty to ensure he maintains protocol during his improvisational performance. Should the mother algo inside Exodus generate a Hybrid Chg % reading of greater absolute value than Monday, a short bias must be reengaged by any means necessary. Historically, we have been forced to use draconian measures to contain the spirit animal inside RAUL.
Until further notice, the bearish bias issued Sunday afternoon is not live. We repeat, not live. We are in a no-go-short zone.
Greetings from the boiling hot surface of planet earth!
The kind scientists at iBankCoin labs have been toiling away inside the machine that is Exodus, checking and re-checking the learning computer’s readings, ensuring the readings are in fact accurate. They are. And all signs point to bearish action in the upcoming week.
If you recall, a short bias was issued heading into the first week in June. This was a bad call. However, and let it be known across the fin-dork interwebs, that we take our signals. All of them.
Americans are barrelling towards solstice drunk on sun exposure, exhausted from one-too-many graduation ceremonies, and wholly unprepared for the furious impeachment measures being enacted by the deep state to unseat our authoritarian leader.
Enjoy your celebrations today, dads. For next week we will do battle with the most evil force in nature: sellers.
Distinguished Exodus members, the 136th Edition of Strategy Session is live. Go see all the other reasons why we are bearish heading into summer solstice.
Being bearish heading into June was the first significant misstep generated by the IndexModel in a year. All other short biases have demonstrated utility. Last Sunday’s did not.
Excellent news friends! The model is bullish again. Nothing crazy. It is simply calling for a calm, summer-breeze drift, perhaps with a slight upward bias.
There was another terrorist attack in London. The poor town is being haunted by religious fanatics of the Muslim variety. The sad events triggered the freaked-out Christians who open their social media accounts and spew hatred.
Then it was my turn to be an idiot. One of my worst vices was activated, which is a mistake always, to turn on the anti-Christian rhetoric. Sadly, it is a favorite Sunday pastime.
Dumb.
Most of you are Christians. Which is fine. So far Christianity is the leading brain-virus in the world. It outpaces Islam, liberalism, even capitalism. Do any of these intangible systems care about their host, or do they only strive to exist as long as possible?
How can you be certain Christianity is winning? Look at a calendar. Ask a Chinese person what today’s date is. How do they tell you what year it is in India? Time begins for all when the Christian god was born on earth as Jesus.
Capitalism is in second place. They sold me on capitalism. I pray to Janet Yellen at least 4x/month and have built temples upon their indulgence slips aka the US dollar.
Maybe in 3rd or 4th is Muslims. I happen to live a few minutes from the largest Muslim population in the United States. I work with them regularly and have never encountered someone unsavory. They are faithful, and kind, and damn fine merchants. They love to haggle, and so do I. We find common ground in capitalism and building palaces.
MY FRIEND, THIS IS BEST PRICE. FOR YOU ONLY.
Last week, when our authoritarian leader ditched the Paris climate accord, I was sitting at my parent’s house feeling morose. Mom took a phone call. It was her aunt who was making her first call to share the bad news. Uncle Jim was dead.
My mom dove headfirst into Christian folklore, “he’s in a better place now,” emphatically she continued, “now Jimmy is in heaven with Steve and John and…” she listed a solid eight people.
“An angel took him by the hand and they flew up into the sky.”
When I heard this I had give a side-eye over to my old man to see his reaction. Being considerate of the moment, he only gave a small chuckle while rolling his eyes.
Listen, I get it. Especially for older people, these are comforting beliefs. And I am all about having a ceremony at death to help loved ones cope with the trauma. But death has never bothered me. It is as normal as birth or breathing or leafs falling off a tree in October.
From my perch, death is the trump card Christian charlatans use to hook you into their churches and get your money. Adam Ruins Everything threw the entire death industry under the bus one time:
If you believe Christians will remain in charge, go long $SCI and never sell. You can use the gains to fund your funeral.
As for yours truly, my will is already written. It upset my parents when I had it drafted before the tender age of thirty, but I had to make sure nobody wasted money. Ideally, they would just throw by body in a dumpster, but NO! I had to settle for a natural burial.
Natural burials have the added bonus of, if I somehow come back to life, giving me a fighting chance at digging myself out of the ground.
All this being said, I do see God all the time. Just last week I saw him in the breathtaking waters of Bruce Peninsula. During the winter I usually see him way up in the Rocky Mountains. But I will never step foot in a church unless it is out of respect for some other living human.
As for the markets, they proved my quant model wrong last week, but fortunately it is not a stubborn ideology—model flipped back to bullish on Sunday. Technically, had I paid better attention to Exodus, the model flipped on the close last Thursday.
Exodus members of all faiths and political belief, the 134th Edition of Strategy Session is live. May it serve you well.
You did everything right—designed a trade in advance, executed it live just like you planned—and still ended up losing. Taking a loss in trading is as normal as breathing. No method of trading will ever work 100% of the time. But sometimes being wrong sucks more than average, not because you ignored your risk and took a devastating loss. That is an entirely different error. But let’s say, for instance, your trade resulted in missing a huge opportunity in the opposite direction, and at the same time you feel depleted from too much techno music over Memorial Weekend PLUS your great-uncle dies.
So you’re a bit rattled. Life knocked you off your feet, and it is either get back up or lie on the rocks until flies start helping nature decompose your carcass.
Traders are some of the most durable business people ever. A few were kind enough to let me share their routines.
“After a tough and rough week or when I need to fully clear my mind…I like to hit Ancient Aire, [a] Russian bathhouse kind of place. Go by myself and vibe,” the certifiable wiseguy also added, “Same with hot yoga. While I hit the gym 5-6 times a week, the hot yoga is a completely different release.”
My routine is to clean. Not a normal cleaning, but cleaning ‘like I killed a guy’ which means eliminating all traces of bad ju-ju that could be lingering. Sometimes it means empty out the kitchen cabinets and reorganize them. Other times it is the garage, or a filing cabinet. It is a deep-dive clean, opening the proverbial can-of-worms, and returning the chosen area to a more sustainable baseline. A cleaning routine may be backed by neuroscience. Part of the book UCLA neuroscience researcher Alex Korb, PhD wrote back in 2015 called The Upward Spiral is regularly published as one of these ‘4 rituals that will make you…’ type-lists on the internet. One of the rituals revolves around asking, “What am I grateful for?”
What am I grateful for?
Yeah, gratitude is awesome… but does it really affect your brain at the biological level? Yup.
You know what the antidepressant Wellbutrin does? Boosts the neurotransmitter dopamine. So does gratitude.
Via The Upward Spiral:
The benefits of gratitude start with the dopamine system, because feeling grateful activates the brain stem region that produces dopamine. Additionally, gratitude toward others increases activity in social dopamine circuits, which makes social interactions more enjoyable…
Know what Prozac does? Boosts the neurotransmitter serotonin. So does gratitude.
Via The Upward Spiral:
One powerful effect of gratitude is that it can boost serotonin. Trying to think of things you are grateful for forces you to focus on the positive aspects of your life. This simple act increases serotonin production in the anterior cingulate cortex.
I know, sometimes life lands a really mean punch in the gut and it feels like there’s nothing to be grateful for. Guess what?
Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to find anything. It’s the searching that counts.
Via The Upward Spiral:
It’s not finding gratitude that matters most; it’s remembering to look in the first place. Remembering to be grateful is a form of emotional intelligence. One study found that it actually affected neuron density in both the ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex. These density changes suggest that as emotional intelligence increases, the neurons in these areas become more efficient. With higher emotional intelligence, it simply takes less effort to be grateful.
Doing a deep clean forces you to take inventory of everything you have. If you only possess items you truly love, then an organization routine is likely to result in you being grateful for what you have. By the time you put everything in place, gratitude is likely.
When it was clear the NASDAQ was trending higher Friday, I was feeling morose. Not upset, not sad or annoyed. I was 100% morose. Like if the guy in front of me did not let his foot off the brakes 2 seconds after the light turned green then I was on the horn and ramming my fist into radio. When you regularly take to the pen, to write, you are driven to find specific words to describe a scene or action or feeling. It turns out clearly defining your mental state is good neuroscience!
Label Negative Feelings
You feel awful. Okay, give that awfulness a name. Sad? Anxious? Angry?
Boom. It’s that simple. Sound stupid? Your noggin disagrees.
…in one fMRI study, appropriately titled “Putting Feelings into Words” participants viewed pictures of people with emotional facial expressions. Predictably, each participant’s amygdala activated to the emotions in the picture. But when they were asked to name the emotion, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activated and reduced the emotional amygdala reactivity. In other words, consciously recognizing the emotions reduced their impact.
Suppressing emotions doesn’t work and can backfire on you.
Ultimately, your job is to get back to work. When you do, it might make sense to start out with a smaller position size than you would normally trade. It is sort of like putting the training wheels back on while you rebuild your emotional confidence. You need to get back up to size as soon as possible, however, else you risk falling into a lazy state of staying in one place in life.
Static, bad. Growth, GOOD!
Having a routine ready for when you face defeat can keep you from making matters worse. The more times you reinforce the habit, the more likely it will become second nature. Even if you start your routine by ‘going through the motions’ it is likely to eventually appease the mind. Less time is spent being destructive.
As important as it is to have routines in place for big setbacks, the real challenge is having a routine you follow after a major victory. For the same, ego-driven issues we might experience in loss can sabotage us in moments of victory. Sometimes even worse.
Do you have a habit or routine that has served you well? Share it in the comments below and hit the tweet button below to share this breezy Saturday content with your people!
The weekend had already begun by the time US markets opened. Americans, fat off economic gains in housing and retirement accounts (lolz), took out their chipped cards and headed out of the office.
A long weekend for the overworked masses. The best of times, right at the advent of summer. Mating season in full swing, the mind wanders.
While all seems well on the surface, when you peel back one golden layer from this vidalia onion of a market you see rot. BEHOLD, sector performance last week:
dog excrement
If this data were our only basis for being short, then it may be a bit overzelous. But there is more. The infrequent but highly potent Rose Colored Sunglasses signal triggered in the often overlooked Exodus Strategy Session, a report so vital to iBC laboratory security that it is produced every single Sunday by any means necessary.
We will be selling in May.
Right at the end of it, after participating in the bountiful gains it provided.
For summer is upon us and investors are distracted by their summer homes and primal instincts. The good scientists constantly return to their foundation stone—cold, dead, lifeless logic. The kind of information that allows for objective decision making.
With any luck, when USA stock markets open Tuesday, they do so in a strong manner. A gap up. An early rally.
Or they begin plunging right off the rip.
Either way, and without a moment of doubt, cash will be raised and NASDAQ futures will be shorted at every official opportunity. We only take official trades, no gun slinging. This is science.
The results often resemble a Van Gogh painting, and some call our output art. Which is fine. We know what it is.
Long term accounts, the stocks beautifully chosen by Exodus robots at the end of each quarter, will remain in place.
Everything else is subject to liquidation.
Nobody remembers the Great Recession, the pangs of austerity. They hardly remember last June’s BREXIT vote. We are collectively flying too close to the sun. The Fed knows it, our data shows it, and now your good scientists have wrote it. Do with this information what you see fit.
If I were you, thank goodness I am not, I would create my own quant model to empower my decisions.
Stay sharp out there and remember—the market is not rigged to get you. It does not care how you are positioned or whatever else is happening in your microcosm. It it simply a numeric representation of the net interactions of humans around the world. NATURE.
Exodus Members, the 133rd Edition of Strategy Session is live. See all the details of the short bias, and what would confirm the idea even more. ENJOY!
Sun May 14, 2017 11:17am ESTComments Off on Still Bullish Heading into May Option Expiration
Greetings and happy Mother’s Day from the hard working scientists at iBankCoin laboratory!
Despite being a subject matter that many find uninteresting, and perhaps because it is presented every.single.Sunday (131 weeks running) in a lighthearted manner, another overlooked Exodus Strategy Session has been prepared. At the core of it is a live quantitative trading model which serves our team quite well when it comes time to trade.
The preparations are done Sunday, with a best possible effort, in order to A. ensure we have the proper information in place to make objective decisions and B. instill the type of confidence that comes from creating your own working trading model.
This week is no different in that we have humbly prepared another Sunday report. The only difference is we have a live signal going into next week. It is the same signal that triggered last Sunday which called for a calm, sideways drift. A marking of time.
While the world was going bananas over our authoritarian leader, the model called the market right again. No mayhem, no May punishment for investors. Smooth sailing last week was, unless you were heavily positioned in bank stocks.
Therein lies the beauty of a quantitative and objective approach to financial markets. They do not care about your latest freakout, and if your emotional conduct is being factored into how you engage the market, you are setting yourself up for bitter failure.
Which is fine. Maybe you need to fail, not that it is something the good folks at iBC labs with for you. We create tools that can empower you to take control of your investment decisions in an objective way. And while the toolkit may seem esoteric, we will do everything we can to make it more accessible for you, including live one-on-one support.
Yes, you heard right, you could have a personal discussion with yours truly about the software. And if you have already had a phone demo, and you are still struggling to properly deploy an investing/trading approach that works for you, let’s circle back around at see if we can make it fit your workflow.
In summary, the the sell in May axiom has been a misguided story passed down by old men so far, according to 2017 performance. However, the idea is not to sell before May, or after May, but in May. So conditions could change during/after option expiration’s week. Do you have the models in place to make that important assertion?
Get at me.
And again, Happy Mother’s Day. If there is one day of the entire year your belligerent ass could project stability it is today. Women tend to worry way to much. Ease their burden. Barbecue some local poultry, hopefully birds that lived a good life, in nature. Or at the least, were allowed to roam open pastures.
Thursday morning shares of Sangamo Therapeutics, a company that tinkers with DNA in pursuit of immortality [ticker: $SGMO] opened up more than +50% after announcing a strategic collaboration with Pfizer.
Let me put this into hip-hop terms so you social media types can understand it. Pfizer has all that pharmaceutical money—$19.45 billion dollars in cash, according to Exodus.
Pfizer generated $14.08 billion in cash flow over the last 12 months. They are the third biggest cash generator in the drug dealing game.
Pfizer is the Dr. Dre of selling drugs to the masses, if compared to the 2017 Forbes hip-hop top earning artists:
Forbes List Of World's Highest earning Rappers for 2017
1. Diddy, $820M 2. Jay Z, $810M 3. Dr. Dre, $740M 4. Birdman, $110M 5. Drake, $90M pic.twitter.com/Tn1bCtiqxW
— Culture For Us By Us (@CultureFUBU) May 11, 2017
If you were to say, take a lesser know hip-hop artist, like a scrappy white dude from Detroit, and put him on a track with a hip-hop legend, instantly the outsider is legitimized.
The scenario described above is what has fueled a two-day rally in $SGMO that spiked shares up by more than +85%. On Friday other CRISPR names, which were discussed in these hallowed halls earlier this year, began popping alongside Sangamo.
Full Disclosure: The writer currently owns $SGMO and other CRISPR plays
CRISPR is an acronym that stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats which basically means they can chop up and rebind living DNA. By doing so they might be able to cure major diseases—CURE—not treat.
Cures are worth way more than treatments. This is the extent of my understanding of the biotechnology. It was presented to me by my top scientist and since then the science has been affirmed, without provocation, by the most intelligent medical professional I know. It was also discussed by the one the the Exodus greats, JungleeGirl.
There was a major battle between UC Berkeley and MIT over who owns patents on the use of CRISPR. As of today, the east coast thugs at MIT own the patented rights. Seeing two well-known institutions caught up in a feverish dispute really makes it seem like there is a fire somewhere, behind all the smoke.
Then I began applying some analogous techniques passed down by the Option Addict, and noticed the entire space looked aligned with discouragement. If that assumption holds true, then the moves happening this second week of the fifth month under our new authoritarian regime could be just the beginning.
This is my top theme trade of 2017. Everything else I own falls into five categories:
CRISPR stocks are catching a bid across the board as investors voted ‘yes’ for an immortality elixir, the biggest attempt yet to alter what many consider to be fate.
Sun Apr 30, 2017 5:21pm ESTComments Off on Here’s A Quick Look at The Laziest Investment Approach Ever
At the end of the first quarter, a top-down sector analysis was performed, and the best performing sectors were screened using Exodus to narrow the list of potential investment candidates down to something manageable. There’s a video describing the entire process. It is a half hour long and very boring, I suggest you skip it.
Anyhow, not that it really matters (this portfolio is a 1-year hold, so 1-month performance is irrelevant) but here is the first month’s performance:
There is something to be said about starting on the right foot, not having to play from behind MAYBE, whatever. It hit the ground running. The portfolio turned out 1.8% MOAR returns than the S&P 500. In the industry, they call that alpha.
This is not a sales pitch for our Exodus software, or even a campaign to promote my stock basket. None of that matters. I am sharing this investment approach because of the objectivity it is founded upon. Cold and dead logic—solid foundations for building. Sure, Exodus offers a powerful tool kit for making objective decisions, but there are other ways. You could collect a large data set onto Excel, for example, and run some statistics to isolate quality investments.
When the money goes into these accounts, it is with confidence in the process, liberating you from the distracting/bipolar nature of individual stocks. Sure, you could buy an index ETF and balance it with a bond ETF and a gold ETF and a REIT ETF and bunch of other fee-sucking ETFs.
Or hire a fee-based firm, Mr. Big Bucks.
Or, or…embrace some of the latest disruptive tools like Motif (no affiliation) to take control of your investing. We are entering a period of economic prosperity gentlemen. Are you positioning yourself today for how you want your life to be in the roaring ’20s?
My top-down index compliments the GARP portfolio, Fly’s semiannually adjusted portfolio, quite nicely. GARP is also out performing the S&P. Here is the performance since its June adjustment:
Note: GARP portfolio is members only
Outsourcing my stock picking to The Fly and his time machine allows me to live the fat man’s lifestyle—sashaying around the house in a robe eating hoagies—the best of times.
So far the latest top-down basket is doing well. Will it outperform the S&P 500 for the duration of its holding period?
Greetings and welcome to the iBankCoin Laboratory Review!
In this weekly publication, the diligent scientists and engineers operating inside Exodus Market Intelligence present to you, in a rather colorful manner, their methodical test results.
Our process is continually audited to ensure it is prepared in the most objective means possible, with minimal human interference, allowing the thousands of censors we have placed throughout the financial markets to operate autonomously. The information is pooled into Exodus where it is interpreted by algorithms.
To add some day trader spice, the very pure and objective tenants of auction theory are also married to the data to produce what can only be described as a raw forecast of the future.
People do not like forecasts. They do not like reading them, offering them, or even knowing they exist. It is because many a forecaster are charlatans who practice biased means of prediction–reading the tea leaves of geopolitics, rubbing elbows with establishment cock suckers and cuckolds, practicing dark arts–and it leaves a bad taste in the collective mouths of consumers.
Those methods are old milk. The findings we put forth are unbiased. There are rigorous fundamental requirements for a stock to become an eligible candidate. Predictions of overall market rallies extend two weeks max, for much further and the lenses become blurred.
Data, my boy, pure and raw, parsed and measured, creates a simple forecast.
This week’s Strategy Session comes after the completion of our first quarter under a new authoritarian presidential regime. Which means a top-down analysis of the entire stock universe was performed. The result? 14 investable ticker symbols. They are simply letters affixed to numbers, but they are truly impressive, nonetheless. The makings of a potent Motif, perhaps.
The 125th Edition of Exodus Strategy Session is live now. It was quite fun to prepare, even the quote from Marcus Aurelius at the end seems well timed. It is with humility and honor that the good folks at iBC labs prepared the report and we hope you read it.
As for the rest of you, freeloaders of the interwebs, I am debating doing the aforementioned top-down analysis live on our YouTube channel and Facebook, if enough interest is expressed. Please leave a comment below if you would watch a 20 minute review of Q1. Exodus members, it would behoove you as well to learn this method of analysis. Afterall, your good pal RAUL lives a ride-or-die lifestyle deep in the urban centers of America and may not be around much longer to spoon feed you.
We are bullish through mid-week. Once the FOMC minutes are released, the plan is to improvise. You can always check the morning reports to stay abreast, follow me on Twitter @indexmodel for more up-to-minute coverage, or if you prefer visual media just follow me on snapchat where I am the only person consistently dropping live trades, close ups of my beautiful face, hustle motivation, and other debauchery. vCali. All questions asked in the DMs will be answered in the order they are received.
Stay sharp out there, for a dull mind is certain to be corrected.
