Leonidas, Southern Greece

Leonidas, my friend:


How are things going in your neck of the woods?


A

Greece was the first area in Europe where advanced early civilizations emerged, beginning with the Cycladic civilization of the Aegean Sea, the Minoan civilization in Crete and then the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland. Later, city-states emerged across the Greek peninsula and spread to the shores of the Black Sea, South Italy and Asia Minor, reaching great levels of prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science and philosophy, and nurtured in Athens under a democratic environment.

 

Allan on the Air

I will be on the radio today, Saturday June 25th on "A Call to Rights" between noon-2:00pm PDT  (probably the second hour).

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Two AllanTrends media events are planned for the coming month.  First, I will be interviewed by Steve Kates, a local radio show personality, on Saturday, June 25th between noon and 2:00pm (probably the second hour) on KFNX (AM-1100).   You can listen live in Phoenix or on the Internet at the above KFNX link;

On Saturday, July 23rd at 10:00 am, I will be giving a live presentation of the AllanTrends methodology, including a detailed look under the hood of Trend Following and why it is so effective in generating positive, profitable growth in investment accounts.  The event will be covered by a local TV production company and parts of it will  be available on the new, expanded web site (coming soon). The presentation will last about 60-90 minutes and will beheld at 10:00am in Scottsdale, across from the Scottsdale Post Office at 8130 N Via De Negocio (Off of 101 at Via de Ventura Exit.)

8130 N Via Negocio #100 Scottsdale, AZ 85258

Want to bet?

If all hell breaks loose in the world financial markets this summer, who are you going to turn to?  Ghostbusters?  Cramer?  Kramer? Abby Joseph Cohen?

This is where I am looking for protection:

My VXX Daily Trend Model is currently on a BUY SIGNAL which is underwater for the moment. Everyone says this is a "flawed' instrument and cannot be trusted.  That's the kind of consensus that I like to bet against.  (Although I say Cramer is a flawed instrument and cannot be trusted.......but that's just me, his ratings suggest a lot of people watch and listen to him.)

Having VXX or longer term VXX calls in your portfolio may or may not pay off this summer, but if they do pay off, it could be in a huge way.  Life of contract high (split adjusted) for VXX was $480 in February of 2009.  "They" say it can't happen again.

Oh, yea......want to bet?

A

MId-week Update

SIlver, Trends & Trading

Spending Sunday afternoon flipping through some charts, I ran across this AGQ, a Double Silver Leveraged ETF.  What I am finding out at AllanTrends is that there are some stocks and ETF's that trend so well, it is almost too good to be true. See for yourself:

Another Father's Day

How many are there left?   I can't remember the last one I spent with my father.  Some day, my daughters won't remember the last one they spent with me. A card, a phone call, an "I love you," seems so routine, but in the grand scheme of life and death, they are my treasure.

There is so much I would change if I could go back in time, back when I was all they knew and every step they took into the their new world was followed closely by the steps of their Dad.  I can hear them calling up the stairs, I can see them riding their bikes up the driveway, I can still feel their tears, their fears, their joys, their wins and their losses up that ladder of growth and discovery.  I was there.

Now it has come to distances and those cards, phone calls and, "I love you, Dad."  We take what we can get in this world.  I suppose there are some kids and Dads that don't or can't even get that.

Still, that one frozen moment in time, that one Fathers Day when we were living at the beach in South Carolina and the four of us, our family, took Dad out for dinner and bought him a blue T-shirt with a bike on the front; it was the best day of my life.

D

A Rare Opportunity

This is the closing paragraph from Robert Precther's latest Elliott Wave Theorist, just out last night:

A Rare Opportunity

These are exciting times. We seem to be entering our second big payoff period. The decline of 2007-2009 was very profitable for well positioned bears, but the 2011-2016 period should prove to be an even bigger boon. To get an opportunity like this is exceedingly fortunate. It happens to only one generation in ten.

Robert Prechter hasn't always been right, but he nailed the 2007-2009 decline and then turned around and nailed the 2009-2010 rally.  He turned bearish again in 2010, a little early, but says the market is now on track for a protracted decline of epic proportions. We don't have to believe, nor do we have to scoff at his prediction.  Our trend models will keep us on the right side of any protracted move in the market, whether it be up or down. If he is right, we are staring at a life-changing opportunity.

I have no doubt that within a year, maybe even within a few months, we will all look back and be very glad we were here.

DJIA Daily Trend Model & EW Analysis

Sometimes, life just sucks

If you embrace this concept, that sometimes life just sucks, it ironically helps you through the sucky part. Whether it be in business, money, relationships, the Red Wings, other drivers, Jim Cramer, the weather, Jim Cramer driving, the government, (did I say relationships?), children, siblings, ex-spouses, lawyers, oh, excuse me "attorneys" (I just sent $119 to the Georgia bar to be "inactive, retired, fed-up", or whatever they call their annual fee that I cower in fear of not paying for God knows what they might do)  relationships, banks, spam, oh the spam, insurance of all kinds, shoes, (yes, shoes, you have a problem with that?) relationships, one-hundred and five degrees in June and cutesy run-on sentences.  Yes, sometimes, life just sucks.

But we plow on, because sometimes, life doesn't suck.  Tequila, sex after tequila, the stock market, being held in the middle of the night, Italian food and the Red Wings.

There is a lot of stuff in-between, that doesn't exactly suck, but doesn't exactly not suck either. Woody Allen, iPhones, a sunset at the beach that we will never see again and one of those songs that so often grace these pages, poignant and full of memories of another time, another place, another life.

A

Zen and the Art of Trading Stocks

It is hard to use the word Chautauqua in a sentence.  OK, not so hard.  There was a famous book of the mid-1970's titled, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from which I have been inspired to speak to the yin and yang of trading.  The concept is simple, that there are opposing forces always at work in the market.  These opposites only exist in relation to each other and it is their interaction that a greater whole forms and becomes its own dynamic system.

That is why a fellow like Jim Cramer is such an idiot. For an hour a day he does a slight of hand where he paces a pea inside a walnut shell and while distracting you with his clowns hat and a whistle, rearranges the shells and then has you pull out your wallet and pick the shell that houses the pea.  You are betting with the town jester for the right to be the town fool.

In other words, Cramer espouses buy a stock and hope it will go up.  Romantic, but silly.  You may as well hope for world peace, or diamonds on the soles of her shoes.

On the other side is what we espouse at AllanTrends and is best understood within the context of the yin and yang of the marketplace.  It is the recognition of force applied to an object that determines the outcome.  If a greater force pushes, the object goes one way.  If a greater force pulls, the object goes the other way.  Ah, but the wild card here, the key to market success, is to identify the greater force, the one that has the staying power to create a trend.  One solution: look at which way the object is moving, there is the greater force.

After decades of technical trading, from moving average crossovers, to Elliott Waves, to neural nets, to channels to pattern recognition to astronomy to astrology, I was finally ready to see and understand the holy grail of trading. No, it's not a subscription to my AllanTrends.  It is the concept of being one with the market.  This was the essence of my two-second trading system from back in 1998, where I held up a chart to a group of traders at a seminar and asked them, after looking at the chart for only 2 seconds, "Do you wish you already owned this stock?." If the answer is, "Yes," the stock is a Buy, if the answer is, "No," the stock is a Sell, if the answer is, "I need more time," or, "I can't decide," then go on to the next stock.

No one can trade like that, it is too trite, too corny, to simplistic, too much a game, not serious investing, not credible, not Cramer.

As for credibility, it is at once secured by clothing the grail in math:  The AllanTrends Algorithm. An equation when applied to a set of data derived from the immediate past measures the probable direction for the immediate future.  It is an application of rational thought, in lieu of Cramer's bells and whistles, that uncovers, or at least approaches the Zen-like truth of the marketplace, "Being in the moment." My two-second test, reduced to its most basic, rational, objective, self;  The holy grail of trading.

"You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. "

— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

A

NHL Playoffs and the DOW

'
Onto the NHL Playoffs.  Vancouver and Boston are in the midst of a tight series to see which team plays the Detroit Red Wings for the Stanley Cup.  One of the Bruin players, Nathan Horton was knocked out the playoffs by a pretty vicious late hit by Canuck Aaron Rome.  You can see the hit here.  Rome was suspended for the four games, essentially putting him out of the series.

A couple of Allan points:

(1) During the regular season, the hit may or may not have resulted in a suspension, worse ones during the season did not, or if so, the suspension would be one game, two at the most;

(2) My suggestion for years has been if any player commits an infraction that results in injury to another player so as to cause the injured player to miss any games, then the player causing the injury must also miss a like number of games.  Yes, that means  if an illegal hit ends the career of one player, it ends the career of both.

So it looks like I agree with the suspension of Rome?  No, I don't.  He received extra punishment because it was the Stanley Cup playoffs.  That's not in the rulebook.  That's not right.  Change the rule (a la my idea) or apply the existing ones.  Don't shape the punishment to the importance of the player, or to the importance of the game.

How about that DJIA chart?

A

Charts & Trends

AllanTrends

Weekend Update

I just now sent out my Weekend Update to subscribers.  Here is how it begins:

I banged the drum loudly a few months ago when I introduced the new DJIA trading algorithm, one of the best trading indicators that has come across my screen in decades. It’s first real time signal was a SELL on May 5th @ 12584  generating about a 400 point gain (so far) in less then a month,  for about a 3.2% win. The leveraged equivalent of being short the DJIA is DXD and as would be expected, it rose 6% during the same time period.  For option players, a 3% move in one month on the DJIA was easily a 100% move in puts.

In summary, our first DJIA trade has generated returns of +3%; +6%; +100%………

IF YOU ACTED ON THE SIGNAL

If you scroll through the attached Trend Tables you will see a bevy a similarly situated trades.  Successful directional signals for indices, commodities (hey, how about the Sell signal on SLV, a gain of 16% unleveraged in a month!) stocks and gold shares.  The signals are there, the algorithm is doing his/her/its job. We found something that works, but its you who has to trade it.

This week there is one new signal.........

......and this where the free preview must end, its only fair to those who are paying for the service.  You can become of them @ AllanTrends.

Turning Down

Every once in awhile I post my subscribers update here, just to show how smart I am.  Well, at least how well my trading system works....let's not get carried away, Allan.

A
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Turning Down

No new Daily signals today, but we didn’t need any.  Virtually the entire portfolio of Indices, Commodities, ETF’s and Stocks were profitable and in sync with their Daily Trends.  Remember what a big deal I made about the new Dow Jones Industrial Average Trend Model?  It’s early warning SELL SIGNAL is looking pretty good here and what’s more, it is closing in on a Weekly Sell.

Five of the seven Commodity trades are in positive territory, with Silver leading the way with a 15.36% gain since its recent SELL SIGNAL.  Both USO (OIL) and TLT (Bonds) have gained about 5% each.  Watch out for Gold, it just barely missed going LONG today.

Fourteen of the fifteen stocks in our stock portfolio are profitable, with GOOG and GS SELL SIGNALS leading the way down with 14% and 18% gains, respectively.  The only lagging group are the gold stocks, but even there, a mixed picture, 50/50 profitable.

Are we on the verge of a major selloff?  The DJIA Weekly and VXX Daily Models will confirm one first, so let’s keep an eye on those two trend models.

TREND MODELS

Indices & Commodities

Stocks & Golds