Earnings season has been kind to the stock market thus far.  The only companies that matter are big tech, and big tech is stronger than ever.  Can you believe it’s the year 2019 and people are still investing in oil?  Investing in a commodity is not intelligent.  Especially a commodity that is losing its natural demand to cleaner alternatives.

If you must invest in a commodity or its ancillary businesses, let it be cannabis.  Be aware that commodity businesses are still a patriarchal stronghold, and that the same families who’ve ridden other commodity booms are shifting their fortunes over to cannabis.  They know commodity-based businesses require large capital investments, that the growth is slow but incremental, and they’re dealing in basic materials.  And the only reason cannabis is even remotely interesting to invest in is because the industry was artificially stifled by policy.  Had hemp and weed been legal all along, it would already be another blown out commodity industry with huge, stodgy, leaders cemented in place.  Boring.  We’d be back to investing in oil.

That said, I have zero interest in cannabis stocks.  Go talk about investing into that degenerate industry with your Uber driver.

Have you ever played Monopoly?  There’s only one winner, that’s the whole point of the game.  I only invest in companies that have a chance  to win the proverbial ‘Monopoly’ table of our current simulation.  Names that could win Monopoly: Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, GOOGLE.

I am aware that several, smaller Monopoly matches are taking place, and some 0f these themes are worth investing in.  There is a big one that will always satiate the desires of the hyper-wealthy: immortality. The philosophers stone.  If a company is promising to keep humans from dying, that’s investable a space I want to invest in.  Conversely, I wouldn’t touch drug makers.  Drugs are fucking trash.  People are finally realizing that they can medicate themselves 2-3 times per day with food.  This trend is not going away.  The trend in medicating problems away has matured and all that new age fluffy guff the flower generation latched onto is now mainstream, hallelujah.  But using viriuses to alter DNA, or building synthetic babies, that is something I will invest in.  Cyborg/regenerative stuff is investable.

AI and robotics must be invested into.  Robots will liberate the human spirit from its current miserable state of factory labor and driving and being accountants.  Mankind will be freed to focus on what truly matters: wisdom, self-control, justice, and courage—the art of living.

These are facts.  The arrow of progress is cutting through the air and there’s not much we can do to change its trajectory.  Humans don’t want to die.  Robots are growing in intelligence.  Capitalism is the chosen ethos and in the end of every capitalist simulation there’s only one winner.

Accepting these facts, and forming an investment approach around them requires holding positions for a very long time.  These changes happen slowely, then all at once!   The approach is strongly inspired by the book Sapiens and if you’re an investor that book is required reading.

Now I warmly welcome bear markets and corrections.  I don’t churn my fucking portfolio to bits chasing momentum or go to cash at the lows.  I just keep buying companies I think will win given the facts of life.

Listen, I know most of you want to go around flipping stocks for quick gains like some kind of nuance speculator, going back to cash as you wish.  I’ve found that behavior to decay both the body and mind. Why not just make highly concentrated bets on long-term winners, with a plan to dollar-cost-average for years-and-years, and patience? That’s the formula for wealth.

That’s all I have to say on this final Sunday in April.  Now I am off to chop some wood before attending an elaborate vegan dinner.

Exodus members, the 232nd edition of Strategy Session is live.  Check out the notes regarding the NASDAQ transportation index.

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I just filed the Exodus (Sunday) strategy session about 36 hours later than normal, which means it’s a day late and maybe a dollar short we don’t know—but being able to sit down at my terminal and rip through a handful of screens has me feeling prepared for what has all the markings of an eventful week.

TSLA, MSFT, FB, AMZN, and INTC are set to report earnings.  These are our benevolent tech overlords.  How the report will tell the story.  The NASDAQ is out in front, taking its shot at sustaining all-time highs.  The right blend of good earnings could keep the tech-heavy NASDAQ on its upward trajectory.  The most bullish behavior would be, of course, if all these tech companies report below expectations and forecast weak yet we still rally.  Recall the reaction grid:

negative data, positive reaction – strong bullish

neutral data, positive reaction – medium bullish

positive data, positive reaction – bullish

negative data, negative reaction – bearish

neutral data, negative reaction – medium bearish

positive data, negative reaction – strong bearish

Trading is not rocket science.  It is a few simple tactics executed well.  Balance and discovery. Statistical probabilities. Risk management.  Over and over again.

Anyways this is becoming a fatigued ramble.  Here is the Exodus Strategy Session in it’s entirely, enjoy.

Exodus members, I am having difficulty uploading the 231st edition of Strategy Session into Exodus.  Hopefully I will have the issue resolved by next week.  In the meantime, if you would like to read the Strategy Session, it is published below in entirety.  Thank you.

Exodus Strategy Session: 04/22/19 – 04/26/19

I. Executive Summary

Raul’s bias score 3.38, medium bull*.  Calm drift until Wednesday evening, then watching for big tech earnings MSFT, FB, and TSLA to put a direction to the tape into the second half of the week.  Watch for Thursday afternoon earnings from AMZN and INTC to either affirm or conflict the direction established Wednesday evening-thru-Thursday.

*extreme Rose Colored Sunglasses [e(RCS)] bullish bias signal triggered, see Section IV

II. RECAP OF THE ACTION

NADSAQ leads a charge higher, Russell lags.  Dow and S&P not taking out their respective all-time highs alongside the NASDAQ.

The performance of each major index is shown below:

Rotational Report:

Odd mixed bag with Healthcare taking a hard hit.  Staples leading the way.

neutral

For the week, the performance of each sector can be seen below:

Concentrated Money Flows:

Exodus [PPT 2.0] streamlines how we can research the individual behavior of each industry and how it pertains to overall market sentiment.

Using the Industries screen, we can filter for the Median Return [1 week] of each industry.  I have established an arbitrary -/+ 3% cutoff for qualifying industries of interest.

Looking closer we see the broad weakness in Healthcare, along with precious metals.

bearish

Here are this week’s results:

III. Exodus ACADEMY

Catching up using Exodus

Being able to log into Exodus a day later than the Strategy Session is normally published and having the ability to work back a day into the data is a huge factor in my feeling confident in my ability to interpret the new information we’re set to receive.

Note: The next two sections are auction theory.

What is The Market Trying To Do?

Week ended searching for sellers.

IV. THE WEEK AHEAD

What is The Market Likely To Do from Here?

Bias Book:

The following biases were formed using basic price action and volume profile analysis. By objectively observing these actual attributes of the market we gain a sense of the overall market context. To quantify the effectiveness of this approach, each of the 4 equity indexes (/ES, /NQ, /YM, and /TF) has been assigned a fixed long/short target using a standard 14-period ATR. Each week there will be an outcome of win, loss, or timed stop on all four indexes. The first bracket level hit is deemed the winner in the event that both sides are tagged. This will be tracked and included in the Exodus Strategy Session.

Here are the bias trades and price levels for this week:

[Note: All levels are as quoted on the front month future contract (currently June 2019) by the IQFeed Data Servers. Prices may differ slightly from your data provider. If you do not have a platform which provides real-time futures quotes, please click here for a free (but limited) alternative.]

Here are last week’s bias trade results:

Bias Book Performance [11/17/2014-Present]:

Compression Watch: Semis really matter now

Markets fluctuate between two states—balance and discovery.  Discovery is an explosive directional move and can last for months.  In theory, the longer the compression leading up to a break, the more order flow energy to push the discovery phase.

We are monitoring two instruments, the Nasdaq Transportation Index and the PHLX Semiconductor Index.

Transports found the upper bracket.  Likely next move is back down through value.  The longer we linger near bracket high, the more likely it becomes that we enter a fresh leg of discovery up.

See below:

The semiconductor index came into some measured move targets (Fib extensions) and found sellers at the logical level.  However, one day of selling does not negate the clear discovery mode this index is in.

See below:

V. INDEX MODEL

Bias Model: extreme Rose Colored Sunglasses

Bias model bullish for a fourth consecutive week after being neutral four weeks back week and bullish the three week’s prior.

Here is the current spread:

VI. QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more that is poor.”  – Seneca

Trade simple, with purpose

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Yesterday I went to the funeral of a skate park in Detroit that was loved by kids in the neighborhood.  The basketball courts and skate ramps will be cleared to make way for another high-end condominium development.  I enjoy seeing the final flickers of my anarchic city sparkle away, especially when the youths start lighting things on fire.  A bittersweet finale to a different era.  Urban centers nationwide are undergoing a major transition.  If we love our neighborhoods then we need find a way to take back the land before another capricious development claims another corner.

Not much else for us to discuss heading into week three (option expiration) of the second quarter.  Earnings season is heating up; keep an eye on the futures Tuesday afternoon when both IBM and Netflix report.  In case you missed it, the new Our Planet on Netflix is beautiful, they even put David Attenborough on the track.  Basically Netflix produced a Planet Earth which is ballin’.

What else? What else…ah yes the models.  The models are bullish again lads.  Real bullish.  There are undercurrents of selling which have me cautious, but then there’s the semiconductor index back up at all-time highs.  The semiconductor index has lead the broad indices for the last few years.  So if semis are bullish, and the model is bullish, then I have to shelf those bearish undercurrents and keep pressing my longs.

Transitions, nature documentaries, bullish five day forecasts.  What do all these things have in common?

Nothing, and that’s fine, I just needed to unload what few thoughts were left in my otherwise pretty clear mind.

Thanks.

Exodus members, the 230th edition of strategy session is live, go check it out!

https://youtu.be/8IDmv0MoxR8

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What popped out during my Sunday research was how most of last week’s selling pressure was focused on industry groups that are sensitive to interest rates—industries that would, in traditional finance theory, stand to turn more profits if interest rates went up.  The below graph displays last week’s returns from the best and worst performing industries:

When you take into consideration the unexpectedly dovish statement from the Federal Reserve last Wednesday, which suggested they have no intention of lifting interest rates for the rest of 2019, the selling pressure seen above appears logical.  The money is flowing away from potential loser industries, but is it completely leaving the equity markets?

I doubt it.

All the real hitters know that the rally we’ve enjoyed since 2016 has been driven by big tech.  Big tech is all that matters and listen.

Soon there will be no regional banks.  What?  Did you think the tech invasion would just stop at the gates of finance?  Bankers lack the means to build a mote sophisticated enough to keep out all the AI goblins crawling out of Silicon Valley.  Those coastal elites have their minds set on bankrupting your local spendthrift with some gamified phone app that lives in a cloud. And that’s okay.

All I want is to be helpful to folks who want to draw money out of the stock market via investments and trades.  When you speculate, there are only a few important actualities you need to accept about the present.

First, this is Jeff Bezos’s world we’re just living in it.  The man literally reneged on a promise to the capitalists of New York (the capital of capitalism) to distract everyone away from some unsavory penis pictures The National Enquirer managed to get their hands on.

Next, nothing is sacred in the battle to control the way we think as a society.  Projects like bitcoin reveal how national governments are losing a grip and they don’t like it.

The Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service are the first and second most powerful government agencies in the world.

And finally, ‘we were here first’ is an irrelevant argument made by old generations desperately clinging to an expectation for order in a completely random and indifferent universe.

If you’re reading this blog you have, all of you have one reason to continue coming back to read me hammer the same few principles week after week, and that is for the explicit intent of watching how a hardened speculator prepares to extract fiat US Federal Reserve notes from the global financial markets.  Ruthlessly.  Impersonally, like a robot.  This isn’t some knitting circle where we gossip about the latest news bit bullshit.  Believe me, if a news thingy happens that really truly matters, someone in real life will tell you.

I show up 2-5 hours every Sunday and do research.  I write super boring trading reports that most of you will never bother to understand.  Then I plug my brain into the machines and fight like a ravenous dog for US Federal Reserve notes.  If along the way we can interact for the sake of improving our craft let’s do it.

The models lads, which are built on the foundation stones of raw market data, they’re neutral.  This is the last week of Q1.  If you have managed to harvest gains over these last three months, I saute you.  For those of you who didn’t, maybe now is a good time to meditate on what has real value in this world.  Then get some more of that.  I am in no rush to declare a strong directional forecast for the next five days.  Therefore I will be taking it real easy and only scalping the highest probability setups, like the manna regularly offered by the stock market gods in the form of an open gap in range.

All very logical you see?

ciao ciao kiss kiss

RAUL SANTOS, March 24th 2019

Exodus members, the 227th edition of Strategy Session is live.  You need to see the notes on semiconductors and transports, be sure to check out Section IV.

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You ever try describing how to properly use credit to someone who has never worked a day in their life?  The topic is hardly complicated—good debt vs bad debt.  Regular payments improve your credit worthiness.  Avoid extending credit for goods/services that will not produce income or some other form of security.

These are not abstract concepts to someone who has ever had to use credit to build a business, or a family.  But when you’ve spent your entire life in a rent-seeking position, like as a politician, it can all sound like garbled nonsense.

Jay Powell has to make the ongoing business of the Federal Reserve something a special needs fourth grader can understand.  Add a layer of skepticism because muh The Great Recession.  Jay Powell holds the highest position in capitalism, therefore he is the most important person in the world.

He’s no Janet Yellen, I can say that definitively.  That goddess could go into the Capitol and field questions for fifteen hours straight without ever actually answering any inquiry.  She could spin a smooth tale as long as time, eating up the clock better than than Bill Belichick with a two point lead.

Jay Powell stammers, he panders, he concedes to the passionate tone talk politicians are trained to spew.  At least that was his performance the last time congressmen hissed at him.  Let’s hope he can maintain a cool and smooth presence both Tuesday and Wednesday, allowing the stock market to behave on its own accord.

Because the market is the market and it looks strong.  There isn’t one systematic reason to bet against the auction right now.  Ego and emotion might want to open your trading platform and bet against the market, or hedge, but according to the institutional-grade tools inside Exodus, there is zero justification for taking bearish bets.

So why take them?

Listen I have eyes.  I see the areas we are coming into on several major indices.  I saw Utilities and Materials lead the rally last week.  I see the caution signs flashing yellow yellow.  That’s fine. I’ll be less aggressive with my longs.  But going short?  Or hedging?  Those would be flagrant fouls.  Rule breaking.  Errors.

No thank you.

Models are still bullish lads.  Friday is a new month.

Behave accordingly and may the gods of high finance grant Jay Powell courage and patience during his walk through the snake pits of America.

ciao, kiss

Exodus members, the 223rd edition of Strategy Session is live, be sure to read Section III with hammers home a very important aspect of properly utilizing Exodus.

RAUL SANTOS, February 24th, 2019

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Some of you know that I commit the majority of February to living life out on the fringe of society—taking most of my food cold and sleeping out in nature—my only goal being to find the softest and deepest snow powder on the steepest and deepest mountains in North America.  This year I am starting out just a few clicks south of the Canadian border up at Mount Baker and then working north from there, likely spending time in Banff and Revelstoke and places like that where western civilization hasn’t made the living luxurious and lazy.  It’s nice have a core purpose, if only for one month, beyond fighting like a ravenous dog for scraps of green paper.

But while I am gone, I want it to be perfectly clear where my investments lie and how I expect the economy to behave while I am away.  There is no bear market.  There never was a bear market.  Anyone who tells/told you we are in a bear market is a god damned fucking lair and not to be trusted.

That’s nasty language.  When I was sitting in the dentist’s chair just now, having my teeth picked clean like a shark between meals, altering my mental state with a blend of oxygen and nitrous oxide, I realized two things.  The first is people tend to believe that people never change.  For the most part that’s true.  The next thing I realized is the language we use matters.  How we choose to address something beyond our control, like the behavior of others, matters because it is quite possible that it could change the way someone else’s mind reacts to an external stimuli.  So I shouldn’t use such nasty language.

Anyone who tells/told you we are in a bear market may be a victim of group think, taking too many cues from the media outlets and wall street analysts.  In general, these are not happy people. Additionally, the amount of little green pieces of paper they earn is highly contingent on them keeping your attention, and I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed, but humans can’t help but gawk at disasters.  It’s a real sick society.  Are you feeling me?

I spend too much time delving into topics like these which is why you never see any of the other fin-twit [people of finance who use twitter and run in a tight clique] share my work.  Even if they read it, they wouldn’t possibly promote it.  It doesn’t fit in a nice safe package for their podcast radio shows.  So I blog alongside the other misfits, here on our bloody lovely island IBANKCOIN.

IBC is a place where people gather for the explicit intent of extracting money from the global financial complex.  Said money can then be converted into little green pieces of paper that can be traded for any number of things.  I suggest trading your moneys for farmable land as far north and at as high an altitude as your constitution will allow.  This land will preserve you and your next two generations despite the fact that people never change and humans are rapidly destroying our planet.  You will have a land buffer between you and the massive herds of people migrating away from the equator in desperate search of drinking water.  You and your plants will have clean air to breathe.  Does anything else really matter?

In my opinion, which you may be realizing is clear is logical, there is a simple way to extract money from the financial markets right now.  We are entering a period of economic prosperity the likes of which no living human has ever seen.  A rewind of the roaring ’20s, complete with gilded ceilings and decadent wealth.  The gap between the haves and have nots will inevitably widen even if the AOC’s of the world manage to turn us into a socialist state.  Because policy cannot stop the forces that have been created by the internet and semiconductors. We are in a new paradigm folks.  You either try to resist it and perish, or you go with the flow and enjoy your brief mortal existence—a wisp of spirit inside a sack of mammal bits.

The simplest way to align yourself with the oncoming explosion of wealth creation is to buy-and-hold the best names in tech: TSLA, MSFT, GOOGL, FB, MTCH, ADBE, CRM, AMZN.  A more dedicated way is to create a rule-based method of short term trading.  Don’t flutter between instruments like some capricious dope.   Pick one instrument and form an intimate, visceral understanding of its behavior.  Then come to the market every.single.day and trade that instrument.  Review your trades.  Score your trades on whether or not you followed your rule-based method.  Do this again and again for years until you have a consistent means of extracting money.

Intermediate term my main expectation is for the PHLX semiconductor index to check back to its October breakdown.  Then I expect some push back from the sellers before we go up and explore the other side of that gigantic consolidation aka a continuation of the long-term trend higher.  In essence, a much larger and slower version of the overplay for the underlay.  I link back to my old blogs because people never change and that means you might be reading my blog for the first time.  I do my best to bring you all up to speed.  I refuse to apologize for redundancy.  If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t be writing about it.  Anyways look, here’s the above paragraph in chart form:

I want you all to know that I appreciate you taking time out of your day to stop by and read my thoughts.  The life of a speculator is somewhat isolated, and it helps to share my predictions and solicit your feedback, even if you think I am wrong.  Your comments likely won’t change my mind, but perhaps you can offer some insight that will result in me forking off my current path in a curious way that slowly leads to something new.  I do think the works of a community can be greater than that of the individual, especially if there is a cohesive flow of thoughts and energy between the members of a group.

I like this island of misfits, even if you fuckers don’t like me.  Thanks for stopping by.

ciao ciao, kiss kiss

RAUL SANTOS, JANUARY 31st, 2019

 

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Did you enjoy the stock market bye week?

One of the things I like to demonstrate from my tiny, generally overlooked blog is how we can interpret the world around us in a meaningful way and then understand what to expect during the upcoming trading week.  Think of these Sunday entries like a five day weather forecast.  Like a meteorologist, I interpret mathematical models and layer in current events to create an objective outlook.

Is it always right?  Goodness, no.  How boring would that be?

All it is is a consistent way of approaching a task that can seem confusing and for most, downright impossible—to trade for a living without losing all you fucking money.

I chose my foundation stones wisely.  I observed my elders, the greats willing to share their hard earned lessons.  I emulated them for years, then I lopped off parts that didn’t suit my style, built tools that did fit my approach, and came to the markets every week with a real effort to be better.

But enough self-aggrandizing.  I am nothing, nobody.  I matter very little.  Even though I’ve navigated these last six weeks with near perfection, the market can stop making sense in an instant.

Next week the stock market snaps back into action.

You need to be ready to hear key information from the real leaders of the known world.  We have earnings coming out of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and the sweetest boy—Tesla.  These earnings and the reactions to them are far more important than the national crisis at our southern border, the rioting french, Roger Stone, or any other geopolitical bullshit.  These are our immortal rulers and they will determine the fate of the NASDAQ 100.

Just as important is the Federal Reserve.  They are the only part of the US Government worth taking seriously.  On Wednesday, they will announce their benchmark borrowing rate.  The gambling halls down in Chicago are currently pricing 98.9% odds that rates will remain unchanged.  However, there is a press conference scheduled afterwards and we will here from Jay Powell.  This is likely to put some direction onto the tape.  Then, because the month ends in a sloppy mid-week manner, we will have Non-farm payroll data Friday morning.  NFP will put some excitement into the early Friday tape, then I expect everything to fizzle out as participants drop dead from exhaustion and turn their attention to Super Bowl betting, allowing the algorithms to coast market prices into the weekend.

The models are calling for a sideways drift.  The signal I am referring to is code named ‘extreme Rose Colored Sunglasses’ [e(RCS)].  The model is prepared as part of the Exodus Strategy Session.  The signal name is derived from past observations of what the stock market has done when it has triggered.  In most instances of e(RCS) the stock market has drifted sideways, life has been good, everything has taken on a lovely tone as if looking at the world through rose colored lenses.  The caveat is, the model doesn’t know about all the upcoming tech earnings, nor does it know Jay Powell is speaking Wednesday.  I still trust e(RCS) and will be pressing long bets until at least Wednesday afternoon, but if you want to take your cues from something more observable on your own time, then look no further than the PHLX semiconductor index.

I wrote about the ‘overplay for the underlay’ setup this index had two weeks back.  I filed that entry under the ‘spoonfeeding’ category, which I don’t use often.  You guys really have no idea how seriously I take blogging.  Again, doesn’t matter.  WHEN USED PROPERLY, the categories feature of a Word Press blog will show you other entries logged under that category in the ‘RELATED ARTICLES’ section below the current entry.  This stuff matters to me, and when I spoon feed you ingrates a tier-one set-up, I like to link it to the other tier-one setups I’ve spoonfed you in the past.

None.of.this.matters.

What matters is that any one of yous can use any number of free websites or broker plaforms to monitor the PHLX semiconductor index and you should.  It will tell the whole story.  It told the story at the beginning of October’18 when it broke down from a very clearly established consolidation pattern.  It told the story two weeks ago with the overplay for the underlay, and it will tell the story next week.  What do I expect?  I made this handy chart so even my special needs readers know where I stand:

Between trading the opening bell and loathing the pity party for unpaid government employees, I will be keeping a close eye on this index.  At some point it will tip its hand and everything else will follow.

Through all the big earnings, the SOX.X will tell the story.  Through all the US Government bullshit, the SOX.X will tell the story.  Through the coldest bite of jack frost, the SOX.X will tell the story.  Say it with me, the SOX.X will tell the story.  You can literally ignore every other happening in the whole world and have a good sense of how to make money in the stock market.  In fact, you’ll probably have quite a bit more clarity than your fellow competitors who find themselves neck deep in BULLSHIT.

So don’t take it from me or my bullish e(RCS) model, just watch the semiconductor index.  It has told the story for a very long time.  If you want some extracurricular reading, check out my December 2017 blog entry where I lay out the exactly what I see happening as we enter the roaring ’20s.

ciao ciao, kiss kiss and kind regards

One last thing—Tom Brady is an incredible athlete and Bill Belichick is a rock-solid leader.  Anyone hating on the New England Patriots doesn’t admire dedication and hard work and probably doesn’t hold themselves to a very high standard.  I don’t even watch football.  I just respect a true competitive spirit.

RAUL SANTOS, January 27th, 2019

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Happy Martin Luther King Junior day everyone.  MLK had the crazy notion that people should be kind to each other instead of being mean and miserable, so they killed him.  His bravery and kindness helped us start down a path to equal rights.  The civil rights he stood for are still being challenged today.  His calm and reasonable voice continues to resonate in the hearts and minds of our young nation’s people.

I listened to the Joe Rogan/Mike Tyson podcast this morning and suggest you do the same.  It’s a trip to hear Tyson reflect on his old self.  He is brutally honest about who he was but not able to step back into his competitive mindset at all.  He cannot so much as start jogging because he worries it will reawaken the ego that drove him to some incredibly dark places.  For some people, complete abstinence from an activity or place or drug is the only option for self-preservation.

I’m reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy right now.  It is a wonderful book that leads the reader to contemplate the purpose of living, and while doing so keeps the tone light and playful.

I went to an old, restored movie theater last night in Detroit and watched Easy Rider.  The way Peter Fonda’s character is treated in some areas of the rural south is a disturbing reminder of the mentality still present in many parts of the country—that anyone different looking is bad.  Jack Nicholson’s character explains that Americans will talk about freedom all the time and expound how the policies of the United States allow for it, but the second they see someone who is actually free it scares the shit out of them.  Especially if the ones who are free choose to live differently.

The future is decidedly feminine. Look at the Pantone color of the year.  Or last years.  Or how the mid-term elections played out.  Our democracy and the perceived freedoms of consumerism have expressed a desire to move away from masculinity.  Not because masculinity is bad, it isn’t, but because for some other reason that, if I’m being honest, I don’t truly understand.

I’ve never assigned too much energy to understanding why something is the way it is.  All I ever concern myself with is being in a position to benefit from the way things are.  I find tools that seem helpful and, I go to work.  I write, poorly, but it helps me gather my thoughts. I teach the fundamentals of investing and trading to anyone in Detroit who will come to my meetups.  It forces me to distill fifty blog entries into 10-15 minutes of talking.  This helps me solidify the most important principles of my approach so they don’t crack under pressure.

Next week is a bye week for the stock market.  OPEX is behind us.  No major tech companies are reporting earnings.  The IndexModel is signalling calm conditions for a second consecutive week.  The government is shut down.  No major economic meetings or releases are taking place.

I’ll be trading, long only.  If we have a gap down inside the prior day’s range, I’ll be working that gap fill.  Other trades I will take include targeting the overnight high or range extension up.  My primary expectation is for a calm drift clean through Friday.

It seems like all the manufactured hostility is sort of frozen.  Perhaps it is because a large part of the country was just blanketed with a fresh coat of snow.  I dunno.  Maybe it’s all the time I’m spending in 110 degree yoga studios.  Again, I dunno.  All I know is all my context points to next week being a bye week for the stock market.

Position accordingly.

Exodus members, the 218th edition of Strategy Session is live, go check it out!

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We’ve been expecting this move in the NASDAQ transportation index for two weeks, an excerpt from last Sunday’s Exodus strategy session:

Now we wait:

Am I showing you this so you can see how awesome my research is and to tell you to shell out the pittance we charge for Exodus?  No.  I am simply demonstrating, in real-time, that there is a method to what many characterize as an erratic and volatile market.  The auction is the auction is the auction.  QED.

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Greetings lads,

The turning of the calendar to 2019 has brought new conditions for us to take advantage of.  Climate change is more apparent than ever with weather volatility climbing to levels deniers and global warming believers alike have never seen.  Progressive leaders in Europe are actively shaping their policy to reflect these facts, as are the United States.  Here in America, our authoritarian leader is desperately trying to build a wall to keep the people attempting to migrate to livable parts of the earth down in their water-less deserts.  Until he does, Americans should consider us in a crisis state.  If  you have not secured land with a fresh water source you are setting your family up to be overrun by horrendous heat and desperate humans seeking asylum from the scorching sun.

Despite this national emergency, and the government shutdown, the systems we rely on to dictate our investment decisions have remained bullish.  Starting December 10th, Exodus flagged oversold.  It was very early and wrong, but just as the signal was drawing to an end on December 24th, another oversold signal was fired out.  This meant we had to hold our bullish positions.  While that secondary signal expired on the 9th, we had a less common but more bullish OVERBOUGHT signal on the 4th.  Therefore we continued pressing our longs throughout last week.  Here is what the entire cycle has looked like so far.  Quite the draw down, but back to UNCH…behold:

Now, heading into the second full week of 2019, the above signals have the added context of an extreme Rose Colored Sunglasses e(RCS) signal from IndexModel.  This signal calls for a calm, sideways drift in the upcoming week.

With the other context we cover in the Exodus strategy session, this all fits very nicely.  Expect to see a pause in price this week.  That would do wonders for easing recent volatility, and pave the way for some individual stocks to rocket higher.  In short, a stock picker’s market.

You may not agree that the human impact on our planet is jeopardizing the ability for spaceship Earth to sustain life, but you cannot deny that taking our cues from the robots has been a better guide these last five weeks than the hair-on-fire government or media.

Choose your inputs wisely.  It’s 2019.  Trust is hard to come by.  Robots expect a continued campaign back towards the highs.

Exodus members, the 217th edition of Strategy Session is live.  Check out the very telling context we discuss in Section III and at the end of Section IV

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