Using Fibonacci/Measured Moves To Understand Price TargetThis video is really an answer to a question from a subscriber.
Can the SPY/QQQ move downward to touch COVID levels (pre-COVID High or COVID Low).
The answer is YES, it could move down far enough to touch the pre-COVID highs or COVID lows, but that would represent a very big BREAKDOWN of Fibonacci/ElliotWave price structure.
In other words, a breakdown of that magnitude would mean the markets have moved into a decidedly BEARISH trend and have broken the opportunity to potentially move substantially higher in 2025-2026 and beyond (at least for a while).
Price structure if very important to understand.
Measured moves happen all the time. They are part of Fibonacci Price Theory, Elliot Wave, and many of my proprietary price patterns.
Think of Measured Moves like waves on a beach. There are bigger waves, middle waves, smaller waves, and minute waves. They are all waves. But their size, magnitude, strength vary.
That is kind of what we are trying to measure using Fibonacci and Measured Move structures.
Watch this video. Tell me if you can see how these Measured Moves work and how to apply Fibonacci structure to them.
This is really the BASICS of price structure.
Get Some.
#trading #research #investing #tradingalgos #tradingsignals #cycles #fibonacci #elliotwave #modelingsystems #stocks #bitcoin #btcusd #cryptos #spy #gold #nq #investing #trading #spytrading #spymarket #tradingmarket #stockmarket #silver
SPX (S&P 500 Index)
Sector Rotation Analysis: A Practical Tutorial Using TradingViewSector Rotation Analysis: A Practical Tutorial Using TradingView
Overview
Sector rotation is an investment strategy that involves reallocating capital among different sectors of the economy to align with their performance during various phases of the economic cycle. While academic studies have shown that sector rotation does not consistently outperform the market after accounting for transaction costs, it remains a popular framework for portfolio management.
This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to analyzing sector rotation and identifying leading and lagging sectors using TradingView .
Understanding Sector Rotation and Economic Cycles
The economy moves through distinct phases, and each phase tends to favor specific sectors:
1. Expansion : Rapid economic growth with rising consumer confidence.
- Leading Sectors: Technology AMEX:XLK , Consumer Discretionary AMEX:XLY , Industrials AMEX:XLI
2. Peak : Growth slows, and inflation may rise.
- Leading Sectors: Energy AMEX:XLE , Materials AMEX:XLB
3. Contraction : Economic activity declines, and unemployment rises.
- Leading Sectors: Utilities AMEX:XLU , Healthcare AMEX:XLV , Consumer Staples AMEX:XLP
4. Trough : The economy begins recovering from a recession.
- Leading Sectors: Financials AMEX:XLF , Real Estate AMEX:XLRE
Step 1: Use TradingView to Monitor Economic Indicators
Economic indicators provide context for sector performance:
GDP Growth : Signals expansion or contraction.
Interest Rates : Rising rates favor Financials; falling rates benefit Real Estate.
Inflation : High inflation supports Energy and Materials.
Step 2: Analyze Sector Performance Using Relative Strength
Relative Strength RS compares a sector's performance against a benchmark index like the
SP:SPX This helps identify whether a sector is leading or lagging.
How to Calculate RS in TradingView
Open a chart for a sector TSXV:ETF , such as AMEX:XLK Technology.
Add SP:SPX as a comparison symbol by clicking the Compare ➕ button.
Analyze the RS line:
- If RS trends upward, the sector is outperforming.
- If RS trends downward, the sector is underperforming.
Using Indicators
e.g.: You may add the Sector Relative Strength indicator from TradingView’s public library. This tool ranks multiple sectors by their relative strength against SP:SPX
Additionally, you can use the RS Rating indicator by @Fred6724, which calculates the Relative Strength Rating (1 to 99) of a stock or sector based on its 12-month performance compared to others in a selected index.
Example
In early 2021, during economic recovery, AMEX:XLK 's RS rose above SP:SPX , signaling Technology was leading.
Step 3: Validate Sector Trends with Technical Indicators
Technical indicators can confirm sector momentum and provide entry/exit signals:
Moving Averages
Use 50-day and 200-day Simple Moving Averages SMA.
If a sector TSXV:ETF trades above both SMAs, it indicates bullish momentum.
Relative Strength Index RSI
RSI > 70 suggests overbought conditions; <30 indicates oversold conditions.
MACD Moving Average Convergence Divergence
Look for bullish crossovers where the MACD line crosses above the signal line.
Example
During the inflation surge in 2022, AMEX:XLE Energy traded above its 200-day SMA while RSI hovered near 70, confirming strong momentum in the Energy sector.
Step 4: Compare Multiple Sectors Simultaneously
TradingView allows you to overlay multiple ETFs on one chart for direct comparison:
Open AMEX:SPY as your benchmark chart.
Add ETFs like AMEX:XLK , AMEX:XLY , AMEX:XLU , etc., using the Compare tool.
Observe which sectors are trending higher or lower relative to AMEX:SPY
Example
If AMEX:XLK and AMEX:XLY show upward trends while AMEX:XLU remains flat, this indicates cyclical sectors like Technology and Consumer Discretionary are outperforming during an expansion phase.
Step 5: Implement Sector Rotation in Your Portfolio
Once you’ve identified leading sectors:
Allocate more capital to sectors with strong RS and bullish technical indicators.
Reduce exposure to lagging sectors with weak RS or bearish momentum signals.
Example
During post-pandemic recovery in early 2021:
Leading Sectors: Technology AMEX:XLK and Industrials AMEX:XLI
Lagging Sectors: Utilities AMEX:XLU
Investors who rotated into AMEX:XLK and AMEX:XLI outperformed those who remained in defensive sectors like AMEX:XLU
Real-Life Case Studies of Sector Rotation
Case Study 1: Post-Pandemic Recovery
In early 2021, as economies reopened after COVID-19 lockdowns:
Cyclical sectors like Industrials AMEX:XLI and Financials AMEX:XLF outperformed due to increased economic activity.
Defensive sectors like Utilities AMEX:XLU lagged as investors shifted away from safe havens.
Using TradingView’s heatmap feature , investors could have identified strong gains in AMEX:XLI and AMEX:XLF relative to AMEX:SPY
Case Study 2: Inflation Surge in Late 2022
As inflation surged in late 2022:
Energy AMEX:XLE and Materials AMEX:XLB outperformed due to rising commodity prices.
Technology AMEX:XLK underperformed as higher interest rates hurt growth stocks.
By monitoring RS lines for AMEX:XLE and AMEX:XLB on TradingView charts, investors could have rotated into these sectors ahead of broader market gains.
Limitations of Sector Rotation Strategies
Transaction Costs : Frequent rebalancing can erode returns over time.
Market Timing Challenges : Predicting economic cycles accurately is difficult and prone to errors.
False Signal s: Technical indicators like MACD or RSI can produce false positives during volatile markets.
Historical Bias : Backtested strategies often fail when applied to future market conditions.
Conclusion
Sector rotation is a useful framework for aligning investments with macroeconomic trends but should be approached with caution due to its inherent limitations. By leveraging TradingView ’s tools, such as relative strength analysis, heatmaps, and technical indicators, investors can systematically analyze sector performance and make informed decisions about portfolio allocation.
While academic research shows that sector rotation strategies do not consistently outperform simpler approaches like market timing or buy-and-hold strategies, they remain valuable for diversification and risk management when used judiciously.
Head & Shoulders reversal pattern: AAPL chartBeautiful symmetric reversal Head & Shoulders pattern is in the making.
We have three peaks with the highest in between called Head.
Left and right peaks are "shoulders".
The line between valleys of the Head is called Neckline.
This pattern reverses the price course at the climax.
Trading technique:
Sell entry is triggered on the breakdown of the Neckline
Stop loss is at the invalidation point - breakup of the Right Shoulder (red dashed line)
Take profit is set at the height of the Head subtracted below Neckline (blue dashed line)
LONG TERM INVESTMENTS FOR BIG COMPANIES !! LONG TERM !TRADING CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE !!
META - APPLE - AMAZON - SPX - SPY - TESLA - NVIDIA - JP MORGAN - RIVIAN - LUCID
AVGO - HOOD - ROCKETLAB - AFFIRM - GOOGLE - SOFI - MICROSOFT - META -TSM - CRM - AMD
QCOM - BAC - AMEX - DISCOVER FOREX EURUSD - GBPUSD - USDJPY BTC
Key Considerations for Trading Forex, BTC, and Stocks
Trading in financial markets, whether it's Forex, Bitcoin (BTC), or stocks, involves a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Here are crucial points to keep in mind before diving into these markets:
For Forex Trading:
Leverage: Forex markets offer high leverage, which can amplify both gains and losses. Understand your risk tolerance and use leverage cautiously.
Market Hours: Forex markets are open 24/5, which means opportunities and risks are constant. Consider when you trade in relation to major market sessions (London, New York, Tokyo).
Volatility: Currency pairs can be highly volatile, especially around economic news releases or geopolitical events. Stay updated with economic calendars.
Interest Rates: Central bank policies can significantly affect currency values. Monitor interest rate decisions and monetary policy statements.
Pair Correlation: Understand how currency pairs correlate with each other to manage your portfolio risk better.
For Bitcoin (BTC) Trading:
High Volatility: Cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin, is known for extreme price movements. Prepare for significant price swings.
Regulatory Environment: Keep an eye on global crypto regulations which can influence market sentiment and price.
Market Sentiment: Bitcoin's price can be heavily influenced by news, tweets from influencers, and market sentiment. Tools like sentiment analysis can be beneficial.
Security: Since BTC is digital, security of your wallet and trading platform is paramount. Use hardware wallets for long-term storage.
Liquidity: Ensure you're trading on platforms with good liquidity to avoid slippage, especially during volatile times.
For Stock Trading:
Company Fundamentals: Unlike Forex or BTC, stocks are tied to company performance. Analyze earnings, financial statements, and growth prospects.
Dividends: Some stocks offer dividends, providing an income stream which can be reinvested or taken as cash.
Market Trends: Stocks are influenced by broader market trends, sector performance, and macroeconomic indicators. Diversification across sectors can mitigate risk.
Brokerage and Fees: Stock trading can involve various fees like transaction fees, management fees, etc. Choose your broker wisely based on cost and services.
Long vs. Short Term: Decide if you're in for long-term investment or short-term trading. Each strategy requires different approaches to analysis and risk management.
General Tips for All Markets:
Education: Continuous learning about markets, new tools, and strategies is essential.
Risk Management: Never risk more than you can afford to lose. Use stop-loss orders, diversify, and only invest money you don't need for living expenses.
Psychology: Trading can be emotionally taxing. Manage stress, fear, and greed to make rational decisions.
Technology: Utilize trading platforms, analysis tools, and keep abreast of technological advancements that can impact your trading, like blockchain for crypto.
Regulation: Understand the regulatory environment of each market you're trading in to avoid legal pitfalls.
Community and Mentorship: Engage with trading communities or find a mentor. Learning from seasoned traders can provide shortcuts and insights.
Remember, every market has its nuances, and what works in one might not work in another. Tailor your strategies to each asset class while maintaining a cohesive risk management framework across all your trading activities. Good luck trading!
Avoid Financial Disaster: Master Portfolio Protection.Safeguarding your portfolio is as critical as the pursuit of growth. While the excitement of asset appreciation draws many into the investing world, the reality is that market fluctuations can pose significant threats to even the most meticulously devised plans. Portfolio protection strategies exist to shield your assets against the inevitable risks inherent in financial markets, allowing you to endure turbulent economic seasons without incurring substantial losses. Whether you're an experienced investor or a newcomer, the significance of effective risk management cannot be overstated.
Markets are known for their volatility, often reflecting shifts in economic conditions, political events, and societal sentiments. A downturn can erase years of gains in a matter of moments if protective measures are lacking. Therefore, constructing a robust portfolio demanding attention to diversification, risk management techniques, and strategic asset allocation is paramount. The aim of these strategies is not the complete avoidance of risk but rather the mitigation of its potential impact, ensuring that your investment trajectory remains stable over time.
The Importance of Portfolio Protection for Lasting Success
In today’s fast-paced investment landscape, prioritizing long-term protection strategies is crucial for sustained financial success. While opportunities abound, they often come hand-in-hand with unexpected downturns, economic turmoil, or global crises that could significantly hinder wealth accumulation. During distressing market conditions, stock prices may experience extreme volatility, leading to potentially disastrous outcomes for investors who lack robust protective measures.
The consequences of failing to implement adequate protection can be catastrophic. Severe market corrections can rapidly erase gains, forcing investors to either sell at a loss or make hasty, emotional decisions. This knee-jerk reaction can create a cycle of mismanagement, further amplifying losses and jeopardizing long-term financial objectives. In stark contrast, those who incorporate strategies designed to protect against market downturns can maintain composure during turmoil, effectively safeguarding their investments while positioning themselves for recovery as conditions improve.
Preserving capital during unpredictable phases is not merely about avoiding losses; it is about fostering resilience. By minimizing risk exposure, investors enhance their ability to bounce back from setbacks and continue on their path toward growth. Techniques such as diversification, strategic asset allocation, and hedging help create a safety net during tumultuous times. For example, a diversified portfolio that encompasses bonds, commodities, and international assets offers a buffer against losses when one sector falters.
Key Strategies for Portfolio Protection
For an investment portfolio to withstand the inevitable ups and downs of the market, implementing a suite of protection strategies is essential. Here are several methods that can help minimize risks and optimize long-term growth potential:
1. Diversification Across Asset Classes
At its core, diversification is a fundamental strategy for risk management. By allocating investments across various asset classes—such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and commodities—investors can mitigate overall risk. The rationale behind this approach is straightforward: when one asset class struggles, others may thrive, balancing the portfolio's performance.
For instance, in a bearish equity market, bonds or real estate may exhibit stability or even appreciate, cushioning the blow from declining stocks. A well-crafted diversification strategy not only fortifies against losses but also creates opportunities for steady returns. An effectively diversified portfolio reduces vulnerability by distributing risk across a spectrum of investments, a critical aspect of portfolio protection.
2. Hedging with Derivatives
Hedging is a powerful technique that allows investors to guard against financial market volatility using derivatives like options and futures. For example, purchasing put options on a stock provides a safety net, giving investors the right to sell at a specified price and limiting potential losses.
While hedging does not obliterate risk, it functions as insurance, softening the impact of adverse market movements. This strategic approach requires a deep understanding of financial instruments, but when applied correctly, it can significantly bolster portfolio resilience.
3. Incorporating Defensive Investments
During economic instability and market downturns, defensive investments or safe-haven assets come into play. These assets typically retain their value, providing stability in the face of broader market declines. Sectors such as healthcare, utilities, and consumer staples represent defensive stocks that generate consistent revenue regardless of economic conditions.
Furthermore, assets like gold and government bonds are renowned for their stability during turbulent times. Gold often appreciates as stock markets decline, serving as a hedge against inflation and currency depreciation. Government bonds offer a reliable income stream, making them low-risk investments during periods of uncertainty. Incorporating these defensive strategies enhances an investor's ability to manage risk effectively.
4. Regular Portfolio Review and Rebalancing
Maintaining an optimal risk level requires regular portfolio assessments and adjustments aligned with financial goals. As market dynamics evolve, certain assets may outperform or underperform, disrupting the initial asset allocation and potentially amplifying risk.
To counter this, investors should conduct routine rebalancing—selling portions of outperforming assets and reallocating proceeds into underperforming or lower-risk investments. This process helps restore the intended asset mix and ensures adherence to overall financial objectives, promoting stability within the portfolio.
Advanced Portfolio Protection Techniques
For seasoned investors, advanced protection tactics can provide deeper layers of security against market fluctuations. These strategies extend beyond conventional diversification, utilizing sophisticated financial instruments and techniques tailored for effective risk management.
1 - Portfolio Insurance
This technique merges equities with protective puts to limit potential losses. By holding onto stocks while acquiring put options, investors cap their downside risk while still allowing for participation in market gains.
2 - Volatility-Based Strategies
Adjusting exposure based on market volatility indicators can also serve as a proactive approach to risk management. For instance, heightened volatility might necessitate reducing equity exposure in favor of low-volatility assets, thereby maintaining manageable risk levels.
3 - Utilizing Swaps and Collars
Swaps can facilitate the exchange of investment risks, providing flexibility for managing exposure to market fluctuations. A collar strategy, conversely, combines purchasing a put with selling a call option, creating a protective range that limits both potential losses and profit. These advanced tactics suit investors seeking tailored risk solutions.
Common Pitfalls in Portfolio Protection
Despite the necessity of safety strategies, several missteps can undermine their efficacy. Recognizing these errors is crucial for maintaining a resilient portfolio.
1 - Over-Diversification
While diversification is vital, over-diversifying can dilute returns and complicate portfolio management. An unmanageable number of small investments may also escalate fees and expenses unnecessarily.
2 - Neglecting Market Conditions
Failing to adjust portfolios in response to fluctuating economic or geopolitical climates can expose investors to heightened risks. Consistent reevaluation is essential to keep portfolios aligned with prevailing market trends and personal objectives.
3 - Overtraditional Reliance on One Strategy
Dependence on a singular protective measure—be it Stop Loss orders or a single hedge—can be detrimental. Instead, employing a multifaceted approach that integrates various strategies enhances systemic resilience to market volatility.
4 - Ignoring Changes in Risk Tolerance
Personal circumstances and market conditions can shift your risk profile, especially as significant life milestones approach. Neglecting to recalibrate asset allocation in light of these extrinsic factors can lead to increased vulnerability during downturns.
Being aware of these common pitfalls will enhance your ability to protect your investments and pursue long-term financial goals with confidence.
Conclusion
Establishing a resilient portfolio necessitates a strategic approach to safeguarding your investments. In a world filled with uncertainties, deploying effective portfolio protection strategies remains essential for navigating market volatility. Techniques from diversification to hedging to the utilization of advanced instruments serve to fortify your investments against sudden declines while ensuring the potential for sustainable growth.
The journey toward financial success thrives on a commitment to ongoing investment monitoring and a willingness to adapt as conditions change. By implementing a blend of protective strategies—regular rebalancing, investment in safe havens, and employing sophisticated tools—you can cultivate a durable portfolio equipped to weather economic fluctuations. Remember, protecting your investment portfolio is not simply a reactive task, but an evolving commitment aligned with your financial aspirations and the inherent uncertainties of the marketplace.
Replace a 100 000 USD salary with income from trading🔸 Develop a Strong Foundation in Forex Trading
Before considering Forex as a full-time source of income, it’s essential to build a solid foundation in trading.
▪️Learn the Basics: Understand Forex fundamentals such as how currency pairs work, how to read charts, how the market operates, and how global economic events affect price movements.
▪️Master Technical and Fundamental Analysis: Study technical analysis (price action, indicators, chart patterns) and fundamental analysis (macroeconomic data, interest rates, geopolitical events). This allows you to make informed trading decisions.
▪️Study Risk Management: Managing risk is crucial to avoid catastrophic losses. Learn how to calculate position sizes, set stop-losses, and limit leverage. Most professional traders risk no more than 1-2% of their capital per trade.
▪️Backtest and Paper Trade: Test your trading strategies on historical data and in demo accounts to ensure they are profitable over time. This will help you refine your approach without risking real money.
🔸 Create and Test a Trading Strategy
A successful trading career requires a well-defined trading strategy. This is critical for consistency and profitability.
▪️Define Your Trading Style: Determine whether you are a day trader, swing trader, or position trader, based on your risk tolerance, time availability, and financial goals.
▪️Build a Strategy Based on Time Frames and Setups: Whether you focus on scalping, trend trading, or breakout strategies, you need a strategy that works for your trading style. Be sure to incorporate indicators (moving averages, Fibonacci retracement, RSI) and a risk-reward ratio.
▪️Test the Strategy: Test your strategy on demo accounts or paper trade until you have confidence in its profitability over the long run. A good strategy should consistently deliver positive results over several months and market conditions.
🔸 Accumulate Enough Capital
Forex trading requires sufficient capital to replace a salary and generate consistent income.
▪️Set Realistic Capital Requirements: The amount of capital you need will depend on how much monthly income you need and how much risk you are willing to take. Generally, to replace a full-time salary with Forex income, you will need significant capital (likely in the range of $50,000–$100,000 or more). This amount allows you to generate enough returns without taking excessive risks.
▪️Calculate Your Required Return on Investment (ROI): Let’s say you need $3,000 per month to replace your salary. If you have a $100,000 account, you would need a 3% return per month. If your account is smaller (e.g., $10,000), you would need a much higher (and riskier) 30% return, which is unrealistic in the long run.
▪️Use Leverage Cautiously: Leverage can magnify both profits and losses. While Forex brokers often offer high leverage (e.g., 50:1, 100:1), it’s essential to use leverage cautiously, as it can lead to significant losses if a trade goes against you.
Types of traders 101Overview of types of traders
SCALPER
🔸Scalpers buy and sell securities quickly, usually within seconds, with the aim of achieving profits from minuscule price changes from large trade volumes.
🔸Scalper also refers to someone who buys up in-demand merchandise or event tickets to resell at a higher price.
🔸Scalpers buy and sell securities many times in a day with the objective of making consistent net profits from the aggregate of all these transactions.
🔸Scalpers must be highly disciplined, combative by nature, and astute decision makers in order to succeed.
EATRADER / Algo Trader
🔸Algorithmic trader will use process- and rules-based computational formulas for executing trades.
🔸 Algorithmic trader is performing statistical analysis on stocks, funds, or currencies and then writing algorithms and programs using computer languages like C# or Python or PineScript.
🔸While it provides advantages, such as faster execution time and reduced costs, algorithmic trading can also exacerbate the market's negative tendencies by causing flash crashes and immediate loss of liquidity.
Technical Trader
🔸Generally, a technician uses historical patterns of trading data to predict what might happen to market in the future.
🔸A technical trader prefers to study price patterns over time periods ranging from a few minutes to a month. This is usually done using a variety of tools, such as indicators, to understand which way price is moving in any given market.
Swing Trader
🔸Swing trading refers to a trading style that attempts to exploit short- to medium-term price movements in a security using favorable risk/reward metrics.
🔸 Swing traders primarily rely on technical analysis to determine suitable entry and exit points, but they may also use fundamental analysis as an added filter
Fundumental Trader
🔸Fundumental trader focuses on company-specific events to determine which stock to buy and when to buy it. Trading on fundamentals is more closely associated with a buy-and-hold strategy rather than short-term trading.
🔸Furthermore, fundumental traders must understand technical analysis to identify trends and price patterns supporting their fundamental analysis.
Money Manager
🔸A money manager is a person or financial firm that manages the securities portfolio of individual or institutional investors.
🔸 Professional money managers do not receive commissions on transactions; rather, they are paid based on a percentage of assets under management.
🎁Please hit the like button and
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RISK DISCLAIMER:
Trading Futures , Forex, CFDs and Stocks involves a risk of loss.
Please consider carefully if such trading is appropriate for you.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Always limit your leverage and use tight stop loss.
Build Confidence with Heikin-Ashi Candle Patternow to Trade Using Heikin Ashi Candles on the NDX Chart
Heikin Ashi candles are a powerful tool for filtering out market noise and identifying trends more clearly than traditional candlesticks. By smoothing out price action, they allow traders to focus on the overall direction of the market, helping you make more informed trading decisions. Here’s a breakdown of how to use Heikin Ashi candles effectively, specifically on the NDX chart.
1. How to Read Heikin Ashi Candles
The primary difference between Heikin Ashi and traditional candlesticks is in how they are calculated. Heikin Ashi uses a modified formula that incorporates the open, close, high, and low prices of the previous candle, which results in a smoother appearance. This smoothing effect allows traders to more easily spot trends:
Bullish Trends: A series of green candles with no lower wicks typically indicates a strong uptrend. These are the times to consider long trades.
Bearish Trends: A series of red candles with no upper wicks signals a strong downtrend. These are great opportunities for short positions.
Consolidation: Mixed green and red candles with wicks on both ends often indicate consolidation or indecision in the market.
The Heikin Ashi chart reduces the noise from minor price fluctuations, allowing you to focus on the trend itself rather than the short-term volatility.
2. Entry and Exit Points
The beauty of Heikin Ashi candles lies in their ability to simplify entries and exits. Here’s how to use them:
Entry Points: You want to enter a trade when a new trend is confirmed. For a long position, wait for the first few green Heikin Ashi candles after a period of red ones, signaling a reversal to the upside. For a short position, look for a sequence of red candles after a bullish period has ended.
Exit Points: Exit your trade when you start seeing signs of reversal. For long trades, this would be the appearance of the first red Heikin Ashi candle after a series of green ones. For short trades, exit when the first green candle appears after a bearish sequence.
Waiting for these clear signals helps avoid premature exits and ensures that you’re riding the trend for as long as possible.
3. Key Support and Resistance Levels
Heikin Ashi works even better when combined with key support and resistance levels. On the NDX chart, identifying these levels provides context for your trades:
Support Levels: If the price is approaching a key support level, and you start to see bullish Heikin Ashi candles, it’s a potential buy signal.
Resistance Levels: If the price is approaching resistance and bearish Heikin Ashi candles begin forming, that could signal a good time to sell or short.
Using Heikin Ashi in conjunction with these levels increases the probability of success by ensuring you are trading within important zones where price action tends to react.
By mastering the use of Heikin Ashi candles and combining them with support and resistance, you can significantly improve your ability to spot and act on high-probability trading opportunities, especially on volatile instruments like NDX.
Stock feedback loopStock market is a adaptive system or a stock, with feedback loops (for inflow, outflow function). Where nobody knows the outcome or future, but feedbacks (corrections or resistance) gives tells (makes inflows or outflows). Without a common leader.
Economists think in models (price is the result of supply-demand, or inflow-outflow) that helps to explain system behavior (short term moves), but models are just ideas to explain complex world (models work until they dont). System thinkers study the stock not aggregate behavior .
Looking at markets trough perspective of "eco system" helps better understand the drivers or moving forces?
Occam's RazorEverything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
That is a famous quote, sometimes written under "inspirational photos" of influencers on social media. It is attributed to Albert Einstein, he however expressed something more rough than that.
Einstein quoted: It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
Even though he was not a philosopher, he adopted what William of Ockham proposed hundreds of years ago. He believed that an explanation must come from the simplest set of elements. Occam's Razor is what defeats "Last Thursdayism" aka "the Omphalos hypothesis". Simplicity is stronger than complexity.
But enough of history and philosophy, I hear you say. This is an investment platform after all, we are tired of reading about theories.
The thing is, if you don't think before you buy, you end up in a loophole.
In an investment strategy that has no way in, and no way out.
From my mere two years of stock market analysis, I have one rough quote for your social media pics:
Clear your mind. Choose wisely your favorite ship, and pick your favorite destination.
Now sit back and relax. The time will come when the wind blows fair to your ways.
It is not exactly doric, but it will do for now.
So basically, there are two things you must decide and believe in. The type and the timing of investment. Contrary to what some may say to you, you actually need both.
If you aren't selective of your investment, then you better hope to break-even to inflation.
If you don't let the times ripe, then you don't do anything more, or less than a hodler. (or similarly an inflation mitigator)
The point I am trying to make is simple.
That investing must be simple...
...and charting must be simple. Hence Renko charts!
Some time ago, I discovered the interesting properties of these charts.
They "normalize" growth, from violent spikes to perfect pyramid fractals.
To an untrained investor, this chart is an oversimplification.
How on earth Minecraft is better than reality?
Answer: Legibility and Indicators
Legibility: The violent nature of stocks is tamed from this chart type. This was the original intention of the Japanese inventors.
Indicators: The unknown charisma of these charts is their magic behavior with indicators. They give powerful new ways to analyze prices.
So how and why do Renko charts surpass candlestick charts?
In classic (timed) charts like candle, the baseline is time. Rapid price breakouts and deadly black swans may come incredibly quick. Since most indicators depend on some amount of lookback (the length of a Moving Average for example), they under-weigh rapid events like black swans, and over-weigh slow, and perhaps, insignificant price movements.
In timeless charts like Renko, no detail is hidden. The appropriate amount of importance is shown to each point of price history.
With candles, momentum is time-based. With cubes, momentum is price-based.
Renko charts, even though are a big simplification, provide an entirely new visualization of charts, and all of that without exotic coding. Your indicators still work.
DXY shows subtle but important differences in bull-market analysis. More advanced indicators show this even clearer.
As a theoretical experiment, a trader waited for two candles of confirmation after KST broke down.
NVDA paired with Renko reveals its true face. Divergences hidden in plain sight.
And all of that with the most rudimentary of tools, MACD.
The point Renko tries to make is simple. A stable growth is a decisive growth. Renko punishes stocks that begin to exhibit backtests / retreats in price. By simplifying technical analysis and price data, the deep ocean becomes a child's pool. Accessible by everyone.
The point Grigori try to make is simple. That trading should not be considered to be astrophysics, because it clearly is not astrophysics. We are not Einsteins (some may be), but the majority are not (including me). We, as humans, need clear and simple arguments and data in order to make robust conclusions.
Final thought: The investor's mind must keep clear of chaotic charts and concentrate on picking the right ship, at the right time. Select beforehand your ultimate target. The earth is round. If you keep sailing without stopping, the time will certainly come, when you will reach ground-zero.
Tread lightly, for this is simple ground.
Father Grigori.
P.S. I will keep this idea updated with any interesting Renko vs Candle charts I discover.
SPY/QQQ Plan Your Trade 7-20 - PineScript Project FeedbackI've been playing with this little project for about 7 hours now (off and on). Pinescript is fun once you get the hang of the syntax and how it expects objects/booleans for most of the conditionals.
Overall, I think this project is moving along nicely, but I wanted some feedback on the visuals.
I'm trying to create something that will help daytraders see and understand broad trends arising from shorter-term price swings.
I get a lot of questions related to how/when to identify key market price reversals - so I'm trying to develop a way to help traders understand and see where opportunities exist for better trades.
Watch this video and let me know if you see anything I can do to improve the visuals or color controls.
I want this to SHINE so people fall in love with it.
Thank you.
#trading #research #investing #tradingalgos #tradingsignals #cycles #fibonacci #elliotwave #modelingsystems #stocks #bitcoin #btcusd #cryptos #spy #es #nq #gold
Cancellation of “Head-and-Shoulders” Pattern. Bears trapThe "Head-and-Shoulders" (H&S) pattern is considered a powerful trend reversal indicator. However, it can also become very costly for new traders. Yesterday, the S&P provided a great example of H&S cancellation. Traders who entered short on the break-out of the shoulders line (and Monday's low) incurred losses after the price returned to the previous day's range and rallied all the way up. Such scenarios happen more often than you might think.
To avoid being caught in such traps, it is important to consider two things:
1. Higher Level Context : In this example, the H&S pattern formed on the hourly time frame. But if we zoom out, we'll see that on the weekly chart, the price is in a strong uptrend, currently making new historical highs. This is a very bullish context, with buyers having full control over the price.
2. Price Behavior on the Break-out : Upon confirmation of a reversal pattern, you should expect sellers to jump in and drive the price down as fast as possible. It is "abnormal" to see the price returning to the previous range and gaining acceptance. This is a trigger that something is not right.
Some people will add volume analysis on the break-out, but I’m personally not a fan of it, especially for SPY.
New Volume Footprint option on TradingViewHi all,
This is the first (stream replacement) educational video with a very quick overview of volume. Tradingview just released the new Footprint Beta tool. It's something I asked them for a long time ago, so I am glad it's finally here!
In this video I cover the time-price-opportunity tool as well as visible and fixed range. Leading into footprint.
This is not a deep dive, it's more an intro to and how these things come together. If there is enough interest in this idea I will create a sequence based on trading volume in depth.
Thanks for watching! See you on the next stream/idea.
👀 Three Black Crows. Bear Market Candlestick PatternThree Black Crows is a term used to describe a bearish candlestick pattern that can predict a reversal in an uptrend.
Classic candlestick charts show "Open", "High", "Low" and "Close" prices of a bar for a particular security. For markets moving up, the candlestick is usually white, green or blue. When moving lower they are black or red.
The Three Black Crows pattern consists of three consecutive long-body candles that opened with a gap above or inside the real body of the previous candle, but ultimately closed lower than the previous candle. Often traders use this indicator in combination with other technical indicators or chart patterns to confirm a reversal.
Key points
👉 Three Black Crows is a Bearish candlestick pattern used to predict a reversal to a current uptrend, used along with other technical indicators such as the Relative Strength Index (RSI).
👉 The size of the Three black crow candles, timeframe they appeared on, the gaps when they opened, the downward progression sequence, as well as their shadows can be used to judge whether there is a risk of a pullback on a reversal.
👉 The “Three Black Crows” pattern should be considered finally formed after the sequential closure of all three elements included in it.
👉 The opposite pattern of three black crows is three white soldiers, which indicates a reversal of the downward trend. But maybe more about that another time.
Explanation of the Three Black Crows pattern
Three Black Crows is a visual pattern, which means there is no need to worry about any special calculations when identifying this indicator. The Three Black Crows pattern occurs when the bears outperform the bulls over three consecutive trading bars. The pattern appears on price charts as three bearish long candles with or without short shadows or wicks.
In a typical Three Black Crows appearance, bulls start the time frame with the opening price or gap up, that is, even slightly higher than the previous close, but throughout the time frame the price declines to eventually close below the previous time frame's close.
This trading action will result in a very short or no shadow. Traders often interpret this downward pressure, which lasted across three time frames, as the start of a bearish downtrend.
Example of using Three black crows
As a visual pattern, it is best to use the Three Black Crows as a sign to seek confirmation from other technical indicators. The Three Black Crows pattern and the confidence a trader can put into it depends largely on how well the pattern is formed.
Three Black Crows should ideally be relatively long bearish candles that close at or near the lowest price for the period. In other words, candles should have long real bodies and short or non-existent shadows. If the shadows are stretching, it may simply indicate a slight change in momentum between bulls and bears before the uptrend reasserts itself.
Using trading volume data can make the drawing of the Three Black Crows pattern more accurate. The volume of the last bar during an uptrend leading to the pattern is relatively lower in typical conditions, while the Three Black Crows pattern has relatively high volume in each element of the group.
In this scenario, as in our case, the uptrend was established by a small group of bulls and then reversed by a larger group of bears.
Of course, this could also mean that a large number of small bullish trades collide with an equal or smaller group of high volume bearish trades. However, the actual number of market participants and trades is less important than the final volume that was ultimately recorded during the time frame.
Restrictions on the use of three black crows
If the "Three Black Crows" pattern has already shown significant downward movement, it makes sense to be wary of oversold conditions that could lead to consolidation or a pullback before further downward movement. The best way to assess whether a stock or other asset is oversold is to look at other technical indicators, such as relative strength index (RSI), moving averages, trend lines, or horizontal support and resistance levels.
Many traders typically look to other independent chart patterns or technical indicators to confirm a breakout rather than relying solely on the Three Black Crows pattern.
Overall, it is open to some free interpretation by traders. For example, when assessing the prospects of building a pattern into a longer continuous series consisting of “black crows” or the prospects of a possible rollback.
In addition, other indicators reflect the true pattern of the three black crows. For example, a Three Black Crows pattern may involve a breakout of key support levels, which can independently predict the start of a medium-term downtrend. Using additional patterns and indicators increases the likelihood of a successful trading or exit strategy.
Real example of Three black crows
Since there are a little more than one day left before the closing of the third candle in the combination, the candlestick combination (given in the idea) is a still forming pattern, where (i) each of the three black candles opened above the closing price of the previous one, that is, with a small upward gap, (ii ) further - by the end of the time frame the price decreases below the price at close of the previous time frame, (iii) volumes are increased relative to the last bullish time frame that preceded the appearance of the first of the “three crows”, (iv) the upper and lower wicks of all “black crows” are relatively short and comparable with the main body of the candle.
Historical examples of the Three Black Crows pattern
In unfavorable macroeconomic conditions, the Three Black Crows pattern is generally quite common.
The weekly chart of the S&P500 Index (SPX) below, in particular, shows the occurrence of the pattern in the period starting in January 2022 and in the next 15 months until April 2023 (all crows combinations counted at least from 1-Month High).
As it easy to notice, in each of these cases (marked on the graph below) after the candlestick pattern appeared, the price (after possible consolidations and rollbacks) tended to lower levels, or in any case, sellers sought to repeat the closing price of the last bar in series of the Three Black Crows candlestick pattern.
Bottom Line
👉 As well as in usage of all other technical analysis indicators, it is important to confirm or refute its results using other indicators and analysis of general market conditions.
👉 Does History repeat itself? - Partially, yes.. it does. This is all because financial markets (as well as life) is not an Endless Rainbow, and after lovely sunny days, earlier or later, dark clouds may appear again, and again.
Making your first million is the hardestAfter that, it's leverage.
The issue for me as a long-time trader, is people these days don't seem to have time, patience or the ability to absorb information.
They read an article or watch a few seconds of a stream and assume they know!
I am not just talking crypto, I mean in general. The attention span of a fish.
I read a pretty decent article by this guy @holeyprofit
He talked about Bitcoin Mania with a lot of truth, most people won't want to hear.
Article here
The issue is the whole market right now are currently hinging on or near their all-time highs, Gold, Bitcoin, SPX (S&P500) stocks such as Meta, NVIDIA and loads of others.
Instead of shouting for even greater highs, the question should be "what is sustaining the rally?"
For the majority of retail traders, they assume it's different this time. Gamestop was up until it was not.
The issue is that they never learn. They have no concept of time factors and the assumption that markets only ever go up is the very reason the majority of traders stay broke.
Crypto is a really interesting space, when I first got involved in 2011, it was a punt. I got lucky, but buying cheap and selling high is what most people strive for. Yet, reading posts and social media content - nobody sells, they all buy low, stacking sats when the price drops. So where is the profit? Well paper gains I assume.
Game stop...
Not to focus on Crypto; the markets as a whole can be profitable and just like Kenny Rogers said - "if you're going to play the game boy, you got to learn to play it right. know when to hold, know when to fold, know when to walk away and know when to run"
Every hand's a winner - every hand's a loser.
Key message there!!!
Trading vs investments - if you are looking to make it big on one deal, that's different than profiting from the market every week, every month and every year.
Risk management is key, scaling your account, cutting losers quickly and adding to winners. Many won't understand this concept. Markets go up and everyone is a genius in a bull market.
Once you start scaling an account, the trade percentages in terms of rewards you seek don't matter the same. You don't need 10x returns on your thousand dollars.
A 3% win on your million-dollar account is a different game.
Back in 2021; I wrote this educational post about the psychology of the markets. I used the Simpsons as a way to get the message over.
Markets breathe and the rise and fall, rise and fall.
Once you realise you can take from the market consistently, you will see the stress disappear, and the care of price up or down matters less. Your investment criteria changes and the scope gets wider. This is how you scale from that first million, into the second and third. Not having all eggs in one basket and hope it goes up forever.
What if gold drops 10% and you are long? can you afford a 5 year spell on the investment you have? These are the kinds of questions you need to be asking yourself.
What if Bitcoin's halving is a buy the rumour, sell the news and we take another 3 years to get back to a new ATH?
"ah it's different this time" - yeah I heard all that in 2021 when certain influencers were calling for $135,000 worse case within a month. We are 2024 and still roughly half of the way to 135k??
I know for you guys who want to learn and progress you would have read this far; for those who "already know" they have stopped reading about 4 lines in and seeing a picture or 2. They leave a comment due to their keyboard warrior mindset and fish-like capacity for thinking.
The point is to ensure you deploy proper risk management, especially here near the tops of a lot of these markets, trail your stop losses, and don't forget to cash out your profits. Paper gains can quickly become paper losses. If you're serious about money making, be prepared to diversify, be prepared to sit on your hands, keep cash in your pocket as well as be prepared to take calculated risks.
Disclaimer
This idea does not constitute as financial advice. It is for educational purposes only, our principle trader has over 20 years’ experience in stocks, ETF’s, and Forex. Hence each trade setup might have different hold times, entry or exit conditions, and will vary from the post/idea shared here. You can use the information from this post to make your own trading plan for the instrument discussed. Trading carries a risk; a high percentage of retail traders lose money. Please keep this in mind when entering any trade. Stay safe.
Beating the S&P500 (SPX) Buy&Hold strategy by 16 timesS&P500 (SPX) strategy using Stochastic RSI Min-Max, normalized Volatility and Trailing Stop signals, beats the Buy&Hold strategy by 16 times
Embarking on the quest to time the market accurately, the 'Holy Grail' of strategies, led me to create a script to approach this goal. Unlike other strategies that I tested, this one not only surpasses the long-term S&P500 Buy&Hold approach but does so by a remarkable 16.38 times!
Initially, I employed an A.I. program based on an LSTM Neural Network using TensorFlow. Despite achieving a 55% next-day prediction accuracy for short/long positions, I sought improvement using a heuristic pine-scripting approach, incorporating stochastic RSI oscillators, moving averages, and volatility signals.
With default parameters, this strategy, freely available as "XPloRR S&P500 Stock Market Crash Detection Strategy v2" delivered a staggering 2,663,001% profit since February 1871. In the same period, the Buy&Hold strategy "only" generated 162,599% profit. Picture this: a $1,000 investment in 1871 would now be worth $26,630,014 by February 2024. Check it out for yourself loading this strategy.
The script operates as a Stochastic RSI Min-Max script, automatically generating buy and sell alerts on the S&P500 SPX. What sets it apart? The strategy detects "corrections," minimizes losses using Trailing Stop and Moving Average parameters, and strategically re-enters the market after detecting bottoms using tuned Stochastic RSI signals and normalized Volatility thresholds.
Tailor its parameters to your preference, use it for strategic exits and entries, or stick to the Buy&Hold strategy and start new buy trades at regular intervals using buy signals only. In the pursuit of minimizing losses, the script has learned the effectiveness of a 9% trailing stop on trades. As you can clearly see on the upper graph (revolving around 100), the average overall green surfaces (profits) of all trades are much bigger than the average red surfaces (losses). This follows Warren Buffets first rule of trading to "Never lose money" and thus minimizing losses.
Update: Advanced S&P500 Stochastic RSI Min-Max Buy/Sell Alert Generator
I have also created an Alerter script based on the same engine as this script, which auto-generates buy and sell alert signals (via e-mail, in-app push-notifications, pop-ups etc.).
The script is currently fine-tuned for the S&P500 SPX tracker, but parameters can be fine-tuned upon request for other trackers or stocks.
If you are interested in this alerter-version script or fine-tuning other trackers, please drop me a message or mail xplorr at live dot com.
How to use this Strategy?
Select the SPX (S&P500) graph and set the value to "Day" values (top) and set "Auto Fit Data To Screen" (bottom-right).
Select in the Indicators the "XPloRR S&P500 Stock Market Crash Detection Strategy v2" script and set "Auto Fit Data To Screen" (bottom-right)
Look in the strategy tester overview to optimize the values "Percent Profitable" and "Net Profit" (using the strategy settings icon, you can increase/decrease the parameters).
How to interpret the graphical information?
In the SPX graph, you will see the Buy(Blue) and Sell(Purple) labels created by the strategy.
The green/red graph below shows the accumulated profit/loss in % of to the initial buy value of the trade (it revolves around 100%, 110 means 10% profit, 95 means 5% loss)
The small purple blocks indicate out-of-trade periods
The green graph below the zero line is the stochastic RSI buy signal. You can set a threshold (green horizontal line). The vertical green lines show minima below that threshold and indicate possible buy signals.
The blue graph above the zero line is the normalized volatility signal. You can set a threshold (blue horizontal line) affecting buy signals.
The red graph above the zero line is the slower stochastic RSI sell signal. You can set a threshold (red horizontal line). The red areas indicate values above that threshold.
However real exits are triggered if close values are crossing below the trailing stop value or optionally when the fast moving average crosses under the slow one. The red areas above the threshold are rather indicative to show that the SPX is expensive and not ideal to enter. Please note that in bullish periods the red line and areas can stay at a permanent high value, so it is not ideal to use as a strict sell signal. However, when it drops below zero and the green vertical lines appear, these are strong buy signals together with a high volatility.
These Parameters can be changed
Buy Stochastic Lookback
Buy Stochastic Smoother
Buy Threshold
Buy Only After Fall
Minimum % Fall
Sell Stochastic Lookback
Sell Stochastic Smoother
Sell Threshold
Sell Only With Profit
Minimum % Profit
Use Sell MA
Fast MA Sell
Slow MA Sell
MA Sell Threshold
Use Buy Volatility
Volatility Smoother
Volatility Threshold
Use Trailing Stop
Use ATR (iso of a fixed percentage for the trailing stop)
ATR Lookback
Trailing Stop Factor(or fixed percentage if "use ATR" is false)
Trailing Stop Smoother
Important : optimizing and using these parameters is no guarantee for future winning trades!
🐱🐉 The Magnificent, One and Only Million Million OpportunityAs we approach the end of 2023, we are just a short time away from the 1st anniversary of the AI research company ChatGPT's chatbot being launched on November 30, 2022.
This publication, although dedicated to a single company - Microsoft Corporation - is educational in nature, and is a representation of a letter to shareholders - 2023 by Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corporation NASDAQ:MSFT - the second company in the world after Apple in terms of market capitalization.
I hope that each of you will be able to master it, look back, and realize what a rapidly changing world we all live in now.
Enjoy!
October 16, 2023
Dear shareholders, colleagues, customers, and partners:
We are living through a time of historic challenge and opportunity. As I write this, the world faces ongoing economic, social, and geopolitical volatility. At the same time, we have entered a new age of AI that will fundamentally transform productivity for every individual, organization, and industry on earth, and help us address some of our most pressing challenges.
This next generation of AI will reshape every software category and every business, including our own. Forty-eight years after its founding, Microsoft remains a consequential company because time and time again—from PC/Server, to Web/Internet, to Cloud/Mobile—we have adapted to technological paradigm shifts. Today, we are doing so once again, as we lead this new era.
Amid this transformation, our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more remains constant. As a company, we believe we can be the democratizing force for this new generation of technology and the opportunity it will help unlock for every country, community, and individual, while mitigating its risks.
Here are just a few examples of how we are already doing this:
• Leading electronic health records vendor Epic is addressing some of the biggest challenges facing the healthcare industry today—including physician burnout—by deploying a wide range of copilot solutions built on Azure OpenAI Service and Dragon Ambient eXperience Copilot.
• Mercado Libre is reducing the time its developers spend writing code by more than 50 percent with GitHub Copilot, as the company works to democratize e-commerce across Latin America.
•Mercedes-Benz is making its in-car voice assistant more intuitive for hundreds of thousands of drivers using ChatGPT via the Azure OpenAI Service.
• Lumen Technologies is helping its employees be more productive, enabling them to focus on higher value-added activities, by deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Nonprofit The Contingent is matching foster families with children in need using Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Azure, with an eye on using AI to amplify its work across the US.
• And, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has built an online platform to help elementary and high school students learn English using Azure AI.
To build on this progress, we remain convicted on three things: First, we will maintain our lead as the top commercial cloud while innovating in consumer categories, from gaming to professional social networks. Second, because we know that maximum enterprise value gets created during platform shifts like this one, we will invest to accelerate our lead in AI by infusing this technology across every layer of the tech stack. And, finally, we will continue to drive operating leverage, aligning our cost structure with our revenue growth.
As we make progress on these priorities, we delivered strong results in fiscal year 2023, including a record $211 billion in revenue and over $88 billion in operating income.
A NEW ERA OF AI
There are two breakthroughs coming together to define this new era of AI.
• The first is the most universal interface: natural language. The long arc of computing has, in many ways, been shaped by the pursuit of increasingly intuitive human-computer interfaces—keyboards, mice, touch screens. We believe we have now arrived at the next big step forward—natural language—and will quickly go beyond, to see, hear, interpret, and make sense of our intent and the world around us.
• The second is the emergence of a powerful new reasoning engine. For years, we’ve digitized daily life, places, and things and organized them into databases. But in a world rich with data, what has been most scarce is our ability to reason over it. This generation of AI helps us interact with data in powerful new ways—from completing or summarizing text, to detecting anomalies and recognizing images—to help us identify patterns and surface insights faster than ever.
Together, these two breakthroughs will unlock massive new opportunity. And, in fact, just last month we announced our vision for Copilot, an everyday AI companion. We are building Copilot into all our most used products and experiences and allowing people to summon its power as a standalone app as well. Just like you boot up an OS to access applications or use a browser to visit websites today, our belief is that you will invoke a Copilot to do all those activities and more: to shop, to code, to analyze, to learn, to create.
As a company, any time we approach a transition like this, we do so responsibly. We believe AI should be as empowering across communities as it is powerful, and we’re committed to ensuring it is responsibly built and designed, with safety in mind from the outset.
OUR OPPORTUNITY
Every customer solution area and every layer of our tech stack will be reimagined for the AI era. And that’s exactly what we’ve already begun to do:
Infrastructure
Four years ago, we first invested in our AI supercomputer, with a goal of building the best cloud for training and inference. Today, it’s being used by our partner OpenAI to power its best-in-class foundation models and services, including one of the fastest-growing consumer apps ever—ChatGPT. NVIDIA, as well as leading AI startups like Adept and Inflection, is also using our infrastructure to build its own breakthrough models.
More broadly, organizations continue to choose our ubiquitous computing fabric—from cloud to edge—to run their mission-critical applications. We continued to see more cloud migrations to Azure this past fiscal year, as it remains early when it comes to the long-term cloud opportunity. And we also continue to lead in hybrid computing with Azure Arc, which now has 18,000 customers.
Data and AI
Every AI app starts with data, and having a comprehensive data and analytics platform is more important than ever. Our Intelligent Data Platform brings together operational databases, analytics, and governance so organizations can spend more time creating value and less time integrating their data estate. We also introduced Microsoft Fabric this year, which unifies compute, storage, and governance with a disruptive business model.
With Azure AI, we are making foundation models available as platforms to our customers. We offer the best selection of industry-leading frontier and open models. In January, we made the Azure OpenAI Service broadly available, bringing together advanced models, including ChatGPT and GPT-4, with the enterprise capabilities of Azure. More than 11,000 organizations across industries are already using it for advanced scenarios like content and code generation. Meta chose us this summer as its preferred cloud to commercialize its Llama family of models. And, with Azure AI Studio, we provide a full lifecycle toolchain customers can use to ground these models on their own data, create prompt workflows, and help ensure they are deployed and used safely.
Digital and app innovation
GitHub Copilot is fundamentally transforming developer productivity, helping developers complete coding tasks 55 percent faster. More than 27,000 organizations have chosen GitHub Copilot for Business, and to date more than 1 million people have used GitHub Copilot to code faster. We also announced our vision for the future of software development with GitHub Copilot X, which will bring the power of AI throughout the entire software development lifecycle. All up, GitHub surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue for the first time this fiscal year.
We’re also applying AI across our low-code/no-code toolchain to help domain experts across an organization automate workflows, create apps and webpages, build virtual agents, or analyze data, using just natural language with copilots in Power Platform. More than 63,000 organizations have used AI-powered capabilities in Power Platform to date.
Business applications
We are bringing the next generation of AI to employees across every job function and every line of business with Dynamics 365 Copilot, which works across CRM and ERP systems to reduce burdensome tasks like manual data entry, content generation, and notetaking. In fact, our own support agents are using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to resolve more cases faster and without having to call on peers to help. With our Supply Chain Platform, we’re helping customers apply AI to predict and mitigate disruptions. And, with our new Microsoft Sales Copilot, sellers can infuse their customer interactions with data from CRM systems—including both Salesforce and Dynamics—to close more deals.
All up, Dynamics surpassed $5 billion in revenue over the past fiscal year, with our customer experience, service, and finance and supply chain businesses each surpassing $1 billion in annual sales.
Industry
Across industries, we are rapidly becoming the partner of choice for any organization looking to generate real value from AI. In healthcare, for example, we introduced the world’s first fully automated clinical documentation application, DAX Copilot. The application helps physicians reduce documentation time by half, freeing them to spend more time face to face with patients. And Epic will integrate it directly into its electronic health records system.
And, in retail, we introduced new tools to help companies manage their day-to-day operations and digitize their physical stores.
Modern work
We are rapidly evolving Microsoft 365 into an AI-first platform that enables every individual to amplify their creativity and productivity, with both our established applications like Office and Teams, as well as new apps like Designer, Stream, and Loop. Microsoft 365 is designed for today’s digitally connected, distributed workforce.
This year, we also introduced a new pillar of customer value with Microsoft 365 Copilot, which combines next-generation AI with business data in the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 applications to help people be more productive and unleash their creativity at work. Just last month, I was excited to announce that we will make Microsoft 365 Copilot generally available to our commercial customers later this year.
We continue to build momentum in Microsoft Teams across collaboration, chat, meetings, and calls. We introduced a new version of Teams that delivers up to two times faster performance, while using 50 percent less memory. We also introduced Teams Premium to meet enterprise demand for AI-powered features like intelligent meeting recaps. All up, Teams usage surpassed 300 million monthly active users this year.
With Microsoft Viva, we have created a new category for employee experience. Copilot in Viva offers leaders a new way to build high-performance teams by prioritizing both productivity and employee engagement. This year, Viva surpassed 35 million monthly active users.
Security
As the rate and pace of cyberthreats continue to accelerate, security is a top priority for every organization. Our comprehensive, AI-powered solutions give defenders the advantage. With Security Copilot, we’re combining large language models with a domain-specific model informed by our threat intelligence and 65 trillion daily security signals, to transform every aspect of security operations center productivity.
All up, more than 1 million organizations now count on our comprehensive, AI-powered solutions to protect their digital estates, and our security business surpassed $20 billion in annual revenue, as we help protect customers across clouds and endpoint platforms.
Search, advertising, and news
We are reshaping daily search and web habits with our new Bing and Microsoft Edge browser, which brings together search, browsing, chat, and AI into one unified experience to deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience, and the ability to generate content. We think of these tools as an AI copilot for the web.
We are also bringing these breakthrough capabilities to businesses, with Bing Chat Enterprise, which offers commercial data protection, providing an easy on-ramp for any organization looking to get the benefit of next-generation AI today.
Although it’s early in our journey, Bing users engaged in more than 1 billion chats and created more than 750 million images over the past year as they apply these new tools to get things done. And Edge has taken share for nine consecutive quarters.
More broadly, we continue to expand our opportunity in advertising. This year, Netflix chose us as its exclusive technology and sales partner for its first ad-supported subscription offering, a validation of the differentiated value we provide to any publisher looking for a flexible partner to build and innovate with them.
LinkedIn
The excitement around AI is creating new opportunities across every function—from marketing, sales, service, and finance, to software development and security. And LinkedIn is increasingly where people are going to learn, discuss, and uplevel their skills. We are using AI to help our members and customers connect to opportunities and tap into the experiences of experts on the platform. In fact, our AI-powered articles are already the fastest-growing traffic driver to the network.
All up, LinkedIn’s revenue surpassed $15 billion for the first time this fiscal year, a testament to how mission critical the platform has become to help more than 950 million members connect, learn, sell, and get hired.
Gaming
In gaming, we are rapidly executing on our ambition to be the first choice for people to play great games whenever, wherever, and however they want. With Xbox Game Pass, we are redefining how games are distributed, played, and viewed. Content is the flywheel behind the service’s growth, and our pipeline has never been stronger. It was especially energizing to release Starfield this fall to broad acclaim, with more than 10 million players in the first month post-launch alone.
Earlier this month, we were thrilled to close our acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and we look forward to sharing more in the coming months about how, together , we will bring the joy of gaming to more people around the world.
Devices and creativity
Finally, we’re turning Windows into a powerful new AI canvas with Copilot, which rolled out as part of a Windows 11 update last month. It uniquely incorporates the context and intelligence of the web, your work data, and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance, while keeping your privacy and security at the forefront. Overall, the number of devices running Windows 11 more than doubled in the past year. And we are also transforming how Windows is experienced and managed with Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365, which together surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time.
OUR RESPONSIBILITY
As we pursue our opportunity, we are also working to ensure technology helps us solve problems—not create new ones. To do this, we focus on four enduring commitments that are central to our mission and that take on even greater importance in this new era. For us, these commitments are more than just words. They’re a guide to help us make decisions across everything we do—as we design and develop products, shape business processes and policies, help our customers thrive, build partnerships, and more —always asking ourselves critical questions to ensure our actions are aligned with them.
How can we expand opportunity?
First, we believe access to economic growth and opportunity should reach every person, organization, community, and country. And although AI can serve as a catalyst for opportunity and growth, we must first ensure everyone has access to the technologies, data, and skills they need to benefit.
To achieve this, we are focused on getting technology into the hands of nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and other civil society organizations to help them digitally transform, so they can help address some of society’s biggest challenges. This year, we provided nonprofits with over $3.8 billion in discounted and donated technology. Nearly 325,000 nonprofits used our cloud. And to help them tap the potential of AI, we’re building new AI capabilities for fundraising, marketing, and program delivery.
AI will displace some jobs, but it will also create new ones. That’s why we aim to train and certify 10 million people by 2025 with the skills for jobs and livelihoods in an increasingly digital economy. Since July 2020, we’ve helped 8.5 million people, including 2.7 million this year. We’ve also focused on skilling women and underrepresented communities in cybersecurity, working across 28 countries and with nearly 400 US community colleges to scale our efforts.
Finally, to help people learn more about AI, we launched the first online Professional Certificate on Generative AI in partnership with LinkedIn Learning, created AI tools for educators, and held our first AI Community Learning event in the US. These events will be replicated around the world and localized in 10 languages over the next year. We also partnered to launch a Generative AI Skills Grant Challenge to explore how nonprofit, social enterprise, and research or academic institutions can empower the workforce to use this new generation of AI.
How can we earn trust?
To create positive impact with technology, people need to be able to trust the technologies they use and the companies behind them. For us, earning trust spans the responsible use of AI, protecting privacy, and advancing digital safety and cybersecurity.
Our commitment to responsible AI is not new. Since 2017, we’ve worked to develop our responsible AI practice, recognizing that trust is never given but earned through action.
We have translated our AI principles into a core set of implementation processes, as well as tools, training, and practices to support compliance. But internal programs aren’t enough. We also enable our customers and partners to develop and deploy AI safely, including through our AI customer commitments and services like Azure AI Studio, with its content safety tooling and access to our Responsible AI dashboard.
Building AI responsibly requires that we work with other industry leaders, civil society, and governments to advocate for AI regulations and governance globally. This year, we released our Governing AI Blueprint, which outlines concrete legal and policy recommendations for AI guardrails. We are signatories to the eight voluntary commitments developed with the US White House, and proud of the six additional commitments we’ve made to further strengthen and operationalize the principles of safety, security, and trust.
The era of AI heightens the importance of cybersecurity, and we deepened our work across the private and public sectors to improve cyber-resilience. We’ve continued to support Ukraine in defending critical infrastructure, detecting and disrupting cyberattacks and cyberinfluence operations, and providing intelligence related to these attacks. Our Microsoft Threat Analysis Center team produced more than 500 intelligence reports to help keep customers and the public informed. And we published our third annual Microsoft Digital Defense Report, sharing our learnings and security recommendations.
We also remain committed to creating safe experiences online and protecting customers from illegal and harmful content and conduct, while respecting human rights. We supported the Christchurch Call Initiative on Algorithmic Outcomes to address terrorist and violent and extremist content online. And through the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety, we co-led the development of new global principles for digital safety.
Protecting customers’ privacy and giving them control of their data is more important than ever. We’ve begun our phased rollout of the EU Data Boundary, supporting our commercial and public sector customers’ need for data sovereignty. And each month, more than 3 million people exercise their data protection rights through our privacy dashboard, making meaningful choices about how their data is used.
How can we protect fundamental rights?
In an increasingly digital world, we have a responsibility to promote and protect people’s fundamental rights and address the challenges technology creates. For us, this means upholding responsible business practices, expanding connectivity and accessibility, advancing fair and inclusive societies, and empowering communities.
In 2023, we worked diligently to anticipate harmful uses of our technology and put guardrails on the use of technologies that are consequential to people’s lives or legal status, create risk of harm, or threaten human rights. We will continue to assess the impact of our technologies, engage our stakeholders, and model and adopt responsible practices and respect for human rights—including across our global supply chain.
Today, our lives are more connected than ever. Access to education, employment, healthcare, and other critical services is increasingly dependent on technology. That’s why we’ve expanded our commitment to bring access to affordable high-speed internet to a quarter of a billion people around the world, including 100 million people in Africa, by the end of 2025. Since 2017, we’ve helped bring internet access to 63 million people, a key first step to ensuring communities will have access to AI and other digital technologies.
This year, we also continued working toward our five-year commitment to bridge the disability divide with a focus on helping close the accessibility knowledge gap. Seven hundred and fifty-thousand learners enriched their understanding of disability and accessibility in partnership with LinkedIn Learning, Teach Access, and the Microsoft disability community.
In addition, we’re stepping up efforts to combat online disinformation through new media content provenance technologies—enabling users to verify if an image or video was generated by AI. We continued our efforts to promote racial equity across Microsoft, our ecosystem, and our communities, including our work to advance justice reform through data-driven insights. And we provided support in response to eight humanitarian disasters, including committing $540 million of support to those who have been impacted by the War in Ukraine.
Finally, recognizing AI’s potential to advance human rights and humanitarian action, we worked on several AI for Humanitarian Action projects. Together with our partners, we’re building the capabilities to identify at-risk communities, estimate seasonal hunger, predict malnutrition, and assist in disease identification.
How can we advance sustainability?
Climate change is the defining issue of our generation, and addressing it requires swift, collective action and technological innovation. We are committed to meeting our own goals while enabling others to do the same. That means taking responsibility for our operational footprint and accelerating progress through technology.
We continue to see extreme weather impacting communities globally. To meet the urgent need, this must be a decade of innovation and decisive action—for Microsoft, our customers, and the world.
In our latest Environmental Sustainability Report, we shared our progress toward our 2030 sustainability targets across carbon, water, waste, and ecosystems. In 2022, our overall carbon emissions declined by 0.5 percent while our business grew. Addressing scope 3 emissions, which account for the vast majority of our emissions, is arguably our ultimate challenge—one we’ll continue to tackle through our supply chain, policy advances, and industry-wide knowledge-sharing.
We’ve provided just under 1 million people with access to clean water and sanitation, one of five pillars on our path to becoming water positive. And in our pursuit to be zero waste, we achieved a reuse and recycle rate of 82 percent for all our cloud hardware and diverted over 12,000 metric tons of solid operational waste from landfills and incinerators.
We also continue to take responsibility for the impacts of our direct operations on Earth’s ecosystems. We’ve contracted to protect 17,268 acres of land, over 50 percent more than the land we use to operate. Of that, 12,270 acres—the equivalent of approximately 7,000 soccer fields—were designated as permanently protected.
Technology is a powerful lever to help us avoid the most severe impacts of climate change. That’s why we’re accelerating our investment in more efficient datacenters, clean energy, enhancements to the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and Planetary Computer, and green software practices. To date, through our Climate Innovation Fund, we’ve allocated more than $700 million to a global portfolio of 50+ investments spanning sustainable solutions in energy, industrial, and natural systems.
Finally, we believe AI can be a powerful accelerant in addressing the climate crisis. We expanded our AI for Good Lab in Egypt and Kenya to improve climate resilience for the continent. And, together with our partners, we launched Global Renewables Watch, a first-of-its-kind living atlas that aims to map and measure utility-scale solar and wind installations, allowing users to evaluate progress toward a clean energy transition.
Although this new era promises great opportunity, it demands even greater responsibility from companies like ours. As we pursue our four commitments, we focus on transparency—providing clear reporting on how we run our business and how we work with customers and partners. Our annual Impact Summary shares more about our progress and learnings this year, and our Reports Hub provides detailed reports on our environmental data, political activities, workforce demographics, human rights work, and more.
OUR CULTURE
There’s never been a more important time to live our culture. The way we work and the speed at which we work are changing.
In an economy where yesterday’s exceptional is today’s expected, all of us at Microsoft will need to embrace a growth mindset and, more importantly, confront our fixed mindsets as our culture evolves. It will take everyday courage to reformulate what innovation, business models, and sales motions look like in this new era. As a high-performance organization, we aspire to help our employees maximize their economic opportunity, while simultaneously helping them learn and grow professionally and connect their own passion and purpose with their everyday work and the company’s mission.
To be successful, we need to be grounded in what our customers and the world need. We need to innovate and collaborate as One Microsoft. And we need to actively seek diversity and embrace inclusion to best serve our customers and create a culture where everyone can do their best work. To empower the world, we need to represent the world. To that end, we remain focused on increasing representation and strengthening our culture of inclusion. Even as we navigated challenges this year, our company continued to be the most globally diverse it’s ever been.
Giving also remains core to our culture. This year, more than 105,000 employees gave $242 million (including company match) to over 35,000 nonprofits in 116 countries. And our employees volunteered over 930,000 hours to causes they care about.
I am deeply grateful to our employees for their commitment to the company and their communities, and how they are living our mission and culture every day in a changing company and world.
**
In closing, this is Microsoft’s moment.
We have an incredible opportunity to use this new era of AI to deliver meaningful benefits for every person and every organization on the planet.
On New Year’s Day, I saw a tweet from Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former director of AI who now works at OpenAI, about how GitHub Copilot was writing about 80 percent of his code, with 80 percent accuracy. Two days later, I saw a stunning example of work we’ve done with the government of India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT, which is applying an AI model so farmers in rural areas can interact with government resources in their native languages.
Think about that: A foundation model that was developed on the West Coast of the United States is already transforming the lives of both elite developers and rural farmers on the other side of the globe. We’ve not seen this speed of diffusion and breadth of impact in the tech industry before.
As a company, this is our moment to show up and responsibly build solutions that drive economic growth and benefit every community, country, industry, and person. If we do it well, the world will do well, and Microsoft will do well too. I’ve never been more confident that we will deliver on this promise together in the days, months, and years to come.
Satya Nadella
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks for reading. I hope the publication was useful and interesting for you.
@Pandorra 😎
HOW-TO Discover and Harness the Potential of the Dividend MarketDividend Market as well as Dividend futures trading shines bright, in accordance with CME Group @CME_Group Q3'23 Equity Insights Report. Dividend futures combined Q3 ADV reached 5.1K contracts, and OI averaged 284K contracts (+5% vs. Q2 2023).
Over 77K contracts have traded since the launch of Annual Dividend Index futures on Nasdaq-100 NASDAQ:NDX and Russell 2000 TVC:RUT , which allow market participants increased options to manage U.S. dividend risk, especially as year end approaches.
Understanding Dividends and Dividend Market
👉 A dividend is the distribution of corporate earnings to eligible shareholders.
👉 Dividend payments and amounts are determined by a company's board of directors. Dividends must be approved by the shareholders by voting rights. Although cash dividends are common, dividends can also be issued as shares of stock.
👉 The dividend yield is the dividend per share, and expressed as a percentage of a company's share price.
👉 Many companies - constituents of S&P500 Index DO NOT PAY dividends and instead retain earnings to be invested back into the company.
👉 The S&P500 Dividend Points Index (Annual) tracks the total dividends from the constituents of the S&P 500 Index. The index provides investors the opportunity to hedge or take a view on dividends for U.S. stocks, independent of price movement. The index resets to zero on an annual basis.
👉 Using the S&P500 Dividend Point Index (Annual) as the underlying in financial products, investors can hedge or gain exposure to the dividend performance of the S&P500 Index.
Representation of S&P500 Dividend Points Index (Annual) over the past 5 years.
Dividends points are to be collected through the calendar year, and reset to Zero on an annual basis
Understanding S&P500 Annual Dividend Index Futures
👉 The S&P500 Annual Dividend Index futures CME:SDA1! calculates the accumulation of all ordinary gross dividends paid on the S&P500 index constituent stocks that have gone ex-dividend over a 12-month period. The amounts are expressed as dividend index points.
👉 The underlying index for S&P500 Annual Dividend Index futures is the S&P500 Dividend Index. The methodology for the index can be found here at S&P Global website.
👉 Dividend index points specifically refer to the level of index points that are directly attributable to the dividends of index constituents. They typically only capture regular dividends and calculate this on the ex-date of the respective constituents within each index.
👉 In general, “special” or “extraordinary” dividends are not included as dividend points in the respective annual dividend indices.
👉 Futures contract Unit is $ 250 x S&P 500 Annual Dividends Index.
The Universe of S&P500 Annual Dividend Index futures with expirations dates over the next several years
Understanding the Difference between 'Today' and 'Tomorrow' using S&P500 Annual Dividend Index Futures, or what is CME:SDA1! and CME:SDA2! Futures contracts
👉 CME:SDA1! is a Front S&P500 Annual Dividend Index futures contracts, that calculates expected dividend index points for current (in this time - 2023) calendar year.
👉 CME:SDA2! is a Next one S&P500 Annual Dividend Index futures contracts, that calculates expected dividend index points for the next one (in this time - 2024) calendar year.
👉 The difference (futures spread) between front and next one can give an expression to traders and investors.
👉 Macro conditions are good, and U.S. economy is doing well, so futures spread values are below Zero (expected dividend points for next year are bigger rather current).
👉 Macro conditions are bad and U.S. economy is getting worst, so futures spread values are above Zero (expected dividend points for next year are lower rather current).
🤝 Happy Dividend Market Trading to Everyone! Enjoy!
Market Algo or pain tradesI was reading another trading book today and much like watching the dumb money movie the other day, it prompted me to write another post.
So, you may have heard the expression "the market is an Algorithm" whilst this is somewhat true, it's actually more a sequence, Ralph Elliott, Richard Wyckoff and Edward Jones knew this.
In simple terms, the larger operators or what's known as sophisticated money - chase liquidity pools that are often areas Dumb Money have taken entries or placed stops. Now if it was as simple as this, you could simply write an indicator or be on the winning side 100% of the time. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to it!
When I say the smart kids are taking the dinner money of the dumb kids, you need to appreciate the fact that winning whilst playing against retail traders is like putting the Patriots against your local under 12's side. Or like having the New Zealand All Blacks play against an old people's home in Pakistan. (I am not sure if Pakistan even have a 1st team in rugby).
To gain some understanding, you need to appreciate there's such a thing as "pain trading".
A "pain trade" refers to a situation in financial markets where a significant number of investors or traders find themselves on the wrong side of the market, leading to losses or discomfort. In other words, it describes a scenario in which the market moves in a way that causes the most amount of pain or financial losses to the largest number of participants.
For example, if a majority of traders are positioned for a market to go up, a pain trade would be a sharp and unexpected decline in prices, catching those traders off guard and causing them losses. The term reflects the idea that markets often move in ways that inflict the most damage on the greatest number of participants.
Understanding pain trades is important for investors and traders, as it highlights the potential risks of crowded trades and the importance of risk management strategies to mitigate unexpected market movements. Investors and traders often use various indicators, market sentiment analysis, and risk management techniques to try to avoid being caught on the wrong side of a pain trade.
(Thanks ChatGPT for the summary).
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So take a company like Carvana for example...
This type of move happens over and over again - creating cycles (But not always the same).
In this image above you can see it's likely to have swept long stop losses and then rallied hard.
You probably know about the Gamestop Saga.
I wrote a post on that film recently.
I talked about being on the wrong side - I can't get over how someone could be up $500,000 and still go broke? But it's all in the mindset. Liquidity is the name of the game.
How do these things fit together?
Well, Bitcoin is a prime example - retail mindset is "HODL, Buy the Dip, Diamond hands & Lambo" - whilst as a professional trader, it's enjoying your profits and buying/selling at the expense of the dumb money. These moves are shown as the last post, buy momentum.
Here is the summary image from that post.
Since we had a move up - retail seem to think it's up only, they seem to put all the eggs in the hope Blackrock and a halving will make them rich...
I have read articles like this recently.
After watching the Dumb Money film - you know where following the crowd goes.
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Why is this an important lesson?
It's all to do with pain, where is the maximum pain? Retail sentiment would suggest pain comes in the form of little movement, grinding prices in up moves and fast aggressive drops.
Some context from Blackrock themselves: What is Blackrocks Biggest ETF?
So again, let's add a little logic. Where is liquidity sitting?
If and it's a big if - Blackrock get an ETF approved and it's half the size of their biggest ETF to date, let's then assume Retail flood in and match it dollar for dollar. That market cap would still put us roughly at the current ATH, given coins in circulation.
This again just amplifies, why we are simply - NOT READY, YET!!!
The move I didn't want in 2022, looks to be the biggest liquidity grab we are likely to see in the Bitcoin chart.
We are very, very likely still in an A-B move up for the slow pain of coming back to build sustainable momentum.
Have a Happy New Year all!
Stay safe and see you in 2024!
Disclaimer
This idea does not constitute as financial advice. It is for educational purposes only, our principle trader has over 20 years’ experience in stocks, ETF’s, and Forex. Hence each trade setup might have different hold times, entry or exit conditions, and will vary from the post/idea shared here. You can use the information from this post to make your own trading plan for the instrument discussed. Trading carries a risk; a high percentage of retail traders lose money. Please keep this in mind when entering any trade. Stay safe.
High Returns, Low Risk: Unveiling a Winning Investment StrategyI am pleased to introduce a robust long-term strategy that seamlessly combines performance with an enticing risk profile.
This strategy involves strategically investing in ETFs indexed on the S&P 500 and ETFs backed by physical gold. Let's delve into the rationale behind selecting these two assets:
S&P 500:
1. Automatic Diversification: Instant exposure to a diverse array of companies, mitigating the risk associated with the individual performance of a single stock.
2. Low Costs: ETF management fees are typically low, facilitating cost-effective diversification.
3. Liquidity: Traded on the stock exchange, S&P 500 ETFs offer high liquidity, enabling seamless buying or selling of shares.
4. Historical Performance: The S&P 500 has demonstrated consistent long-term growth, making it an appealing indicator for investors seeking sustained growth.
5. Ease of Access: Accessible to all investors, even those with modest investment amounts, requiring only a brokerage account.
6. Simple Tracking: The S&P 500 index simplifies market tracking, eliminating the need to monitor numerous stocks individually.
7. Dividends: Companies included often pay dividends, providing an additional income stream.
8. Long-Term Strategy: Ideal for investors pursuing a long-term approach, S&P 500 ETFs are pivotal for gradual wealth building.
9. Geographical Diversification: Investing in an S&P 500 ETF offers not just sectoral but also geographical diversification. Despite the U.S. base, many included companies have a global presence, contributing to international portfolio diversification.
Moreover, Warren Buffett's 2008 bet, where he wagered $1 million on the passive S&P 500 index fund outperforming active fund managers over a decade, underscores the difficulty even seasoned financial experts face in surpassing the market's long-term return. This further strengthens the notion that choosing an S&P 500-linked ETF can be a prudent and effective investment strategy.
Investment in Physical Gold ETFs:
1. Exposure to Physical Gold: Designed to reflect the price of physically held gold, providing direct exposure without the need for physical acquisition, storage, or insurance.
2. Liquidity: Traded on the stock exchange, physical gold ETFs offer high liquidity, allowing investors to buy or sell shares at prevailing market prices.
3. Diversification: Gold's unique reaction to market dynamics makes it a valuable diversification asset, potentially reducing overall portfolio risk.
4. Lower Costs: Compared to physically buying gold, investing in physical gold ETFs proves more cost-effective in terms of transaction costs, storage, and insurance. ETF management fees are also relatively low.
5. Transparency: Managers regularly publish reports detailing the gold quantity held, ensuring transparency about underlying assets.
6. Accessibility: Physical gold ETFs offer easy market access without the need for physical possession, appealing to investors avoiding gold storage and security management.
7. Gold-backed ETFs: These ETFs physically hold gold as the underlying asset, with investors often having the option to convert their shares into physical gold.
After extensive research and backtesting across diverse ETFs covering various asset classes, including bonds, real estate, commodities, and stocks of financially stable companies, my findings notably highlight a standout option during times of crisis: physical gold ETFs.
The strategy hinges on leading indicators, powerful economic tools.
Leading Indicators:
Leading indicators, or forward indicators, are crucial tools in economics and finance for anticipating future trends. In contrast to lagging indicators, which confirm existing trends, leading indicators provide early signals, aiding informed decision-making based on anticipated economic developments.
Key characteristics include:
Trend Anticipation: Early insight into upcoming changes in economic activity, facilitating preparedness for market developments.
Responsiveness: Quick reactions to economic changes, sometimes preceding other indicators.
Correlation with the Economy: Association with specific aspects of the economy, such as industrial production, consumer spending, or investments.
Examples include:
• Housing Starts: Providing early indications of the real estate market and construction investments.
• Net New Orders for Durable Goods: Indicating business investment intentions and insights into the manufacturing sector's health.
• US Stock Prices: Considered a leading indicator reflecting investor expectations.
• Consumer Confidence: Measuring consumer perceptions and influencing consumer spending.
• Purchasing Managers' Confidence and Factory Directors: Offering insights into production plans and future economic trends.
• Interest Rate Spread: Indicating economic expectations and influencing borrowing and investment decisions.
Returning to the strategy, I leverage entry points calculated by a meticulously developed strategy incorporating leading indicators applied to the SPY chart. The achieved performance of 3496% since 1993, with 15 closed trades, significantly surpasses a buy-and-hold position yielding 1654% in performance. Notably, the maximum drawdown is 5.44%, a stark contrast to the over 50% drawdown seen in an investment in the S&P 500.
Upon the indicators signaling the end of the long position, I close my SPY positions and transition to positions in physical gold ETFs.
In our example, choosing the GLD ETF yields a performance of 173%, adding to our total performance.
While the maximum drawdown, considering the addition of the investment in physical gold ETFs, is 17.65%, slightly higher than the drawdown on the strategy applied to the SPY, it remains impressive for such a prolonged period.
Now, if we conduct the backtest since 2007:
SPY : performance of 751 %, max drawdown of 4.02 %
GLD : Performance of 153 %
Since 2015:
SPY : performance of 131 %
GLD : Performance of 37 %
Disclaimer:
The information shared is for educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Investing involves risks, and past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. The author is not liable for any financial losses incurred.
People want to earn but not learnThe issue is everyone wants to make money (well, maybe not everyone) but nobody wants to take the time to learn how to do it properly. This is NOT a sales pitch by the way! it's FACT!!
People often ask why I bash influencers so much, it's mainly for this reason. Majority of noobs, come into trading expecting to make a fortune. If only it was that easy, every man and his dog would be a professional trader.
Over the years, I have talked about things like Bots and AI that are programmed to make you money - think logically, if again it is this easy wouldn't the founders go to the bank, loan $10million based on their results and just not bother selling and shilling to customers and retail. NOBODY wants to provide customer service, especially to the world's population.
Unfortunately, regardless of the market. Trust me if you stick around long enough you get to see this behaviour in Forex, Commodities, Stocks and more recently crypto with a splash of A.I.
The story goes pretty much the same way. "man (or woman) hears about an opportunity to make money through a thing called trading, they do their research which leads to the old You of Tube and that leads to "Lamborghini promises from kids with fake watches, drawing random trendlines on 3 minute charts" There's often a "sign-up" bonus if you click their shill link.
So let's get this straight, they make money on watch time and those links you click.
The reason I chose fish in the image above, is that most people have memories that last about 2 seconds. Mark Cuban said "everyone is a genius in a bull market" Algorithms work and influencers claim to be experts with 3 months of experience. Easy to show in a market only going one way.
Trading is hard enough, let alone having the ability to lose money from scams.
If a trading algorithms promises a 90% win rate - run and don't buy it.
==============================================================
There are fundamental things to do and you can deploy to get you off on the right track. Firstly think of the obvious. 90% of new traders lose 90% of their money in only 90 days. Hence a 50% sign-up bonus whereby you think you gained "free cash" often has small print that you can't access it until you lost your original investment.
Affiliates tend to get 25% or more of the deposit - the exchanges know full well, your about to lose your money.
Second thing I try to emphasis for newer traders, is that you need to treat trading as a profession. You wouldn't watch a video and expect to be a doctor, you also wouldn't buy an algorithm or Artificial Intelligence software and expect to become New York's latest Hot Shot Lawyer You see where this is going?
There is no secret sauce, no silver bullet and no short cuts.
If you want to trade and make money trading, you need the basics. You need to keep doing the basics well and evolve your mindset more than a strategy. Areas that will really help you include proper risk management. If your willing to be sat in negative 20, 30 or even 50% equity positions. This won't take you long to lose your entire trading pot.
Instead risking 1-2% with a risk strategy of 2 -1 or greater. it's a slower game, but it keeps you playing the game. If you take a 3 or even a 4 reward trade with only 1 risk. For every time you are right, it's giving you 4 times as much as when you are wrong.
Imagine winning 20% of your trading days and still being at breakeven... simple 1:4 ratio.
This is only one small aspect to keep in mind.
As I mentioned above, if strategies or software is pitched with high percentage win rates - run. You need to understand the market acts differently and past results do not indicate future performance. Everyone is a genius in a bull market, remember.
You do not need to go looking for the silver bullet. These strategies do not exist, instead spend the time working on strategies that can be consistent in various market conditions. This is no small task, your strategy might identify entries in a counter trend differently than it would in say a ranging market.
The answer to resolve this, is BACKTESTING Don't just run your strategy on replay mode, although @TradingView has a great little tool for this.
Spend the time to look at things such as "repainting" this means that when your strategy triggers an entry, does it disappear and reappear. If so, do some manual back testing. Then Dig deeper and analyse the type of market condition it was more profitable or less profitable. This could be things like "I lose more on a Monday, compared to other days" or when the market goes sideways, It triggers too many trades.
I've written several articles here on pure education. Here's a few examples.
In this post (worth clicking on) it has a whole bunch of lessons inside.
Think of trading like you would a university course, there's plenty to learn but you can have some fun along the way!
Stay safe!
Disclaimer
This idea does not constitute as financial advice. It is for educational purposes only, our principle trader has over 20 years’ experience in stocks, ETF’s, and Forex. Hence each trade setup might have different hold times, entry or exit conditions, and will vary from the post/idea shared here. You can use the information from this post to make your own trading plan for the instrument discussed. Trading carries a risk; a high percentage of retail traders lose money. Please keep this in mind when entering any trade. Stay safe.
Cost-Benefit Analysis of Looking outside the Scope of TrendA Cost-Benefit Analysis of Looking outside the Scope of Trend:
To Peek or Not to Peek
“The trend is your friend until the end when it bends.” - Ed Seykota
Trend analysis lies at the core of technical analysis. Modern technical analysis derived from Dow Theory. In turn, Dow Theory emphasized the nature and importance of trends and their constituent parts and degrees. Many may recall Dow’s analogy of different trend degrees: the tide (primary trend), waves (secondary trend), and ripples on the waves (minor / short-term trend).
Technical analysis includes many other concepts within its scope. But within technical analysis broadly, the primary focus remains the trend structure. Before considering trends, it may help to discuss the distinction broadly between technical analysis and fundamental analysis.
A. Technical Analysis versus Fundamental Analysis
Top traders and market experts have taken each side in the debate over whether technical or fundamental analysis has the greatest efficacy. Some have straddled the line, preferring a combination of the two.
Some consider technical analysis to be not only superior but also relatively straightforward and efficient compared to other types of analysis, such as fundamental analysis or positioning analysis.FN1 Positioning analysis is beyond the scope of this post and is briefly explained in the first footnote.
Jim Rogers, a famous investor who managed a reportedly very successful fund with George Soros in the 1970s, and who had had many accurate forecasts, expressed strong disdain for technical analysis—he once told Jack Schwager, “I haven’t met a rich technician.” But some of the greatest traders and market experts stand on the other side of this debate. For example, Ed Seykota is a trader of great renown included in Schwager’s 1993 Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders. Seykota chose the technical-analysis camp, giving the most weight to trends, chart patterns and good entries and exits. He once described markets in a way that evokes Charles Dow’s wave analogy:
If you want to know everything about the market, go to the beach. Push and pull your hands with the waves. Some are bigger waves, some are smaller. But if you try to push the wave out when its coming in, it’ll never happen. The market is always right.
A former portfolio manager for Fidelity Management who founded several other research and investment firms, David Lundgren, described how he came to follow the principles of technical analysis even though he still expressed great value for fundamental analysis. From an interview included in a 2021 Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities magazine, Lundgren shared some of his experiences and insights on this topic. In his view, fundamentals can matter significantly over the long term especially as to stocks.
But Lundgren’s most outstanding remarks in this interview distinguished between these two conceptual approaches to financial markets. He aptly characterized fundamental analysis as being based on the view that the “market is wrong.” In other words, the valuations drawn from a publicly traded company’s financial statements (e.g., P/E ratio, enterprise value, book value) assume the market is “overestimating or underestimating value” and that the price should be above / below the current market price.
By contrast, he said technical analysis assumes the contrary view that the market is actually right in its current price and price trend. The critical distinction between technical analysis and fundamental analysis boils down to ego, according to Lundgren, because pure technical analysis “accepts the verdict of the market” whereas pure fundamental analysis “involves hundreds of hours developing an opinion of what is attractive and often with the verdict of the market.”
Much ink has and will be spilled on whether price discounts everything, and if so, how fast and efficiently (Charles Dow Theory). In any case, fundamental, technical and positioning modes of analysis are not mutually exclusive.
B. Whether to Consider Data outside the Confines of Trend
Since last year’s October 2022 lows in the S&P 500 (SPX) and other major US indices, the current equity market uptrend has been challenging and bewildering to many investors, traders and analysts. It has been especially difficult to comprehend for those who are keenly aware of the broader financial and macroeconomic environment, which includes purportedly tight monetary policy and quantitative tightening (reducing Treasury securities off the Fed’s balance sheet) as well as stubborn core inflation. Such an environment broadly speaking remains unfavorable to equities for the most part.FN2
But trends do not always move in the most sensible direction, and they do not always align consistently with the macroeconomic evidence. Sentiment or even positioning, discussed briefly in the first footnote, can affect the trend even when it may run counter to the macroeconomic evidence.
And trends can stretch into an overbought or oversold condition longer than anyone expects, a principle captured by the old aphorism, attributed to John Maynard Keynes, that “markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Exhaustion doesn’t require a 180-degree turn but often appears more like a process, especially at market tops given the long-only nature of most equity capital.
Pure trend followers, who supposedly consider only the technical trend-based evidence, may not care whether the trend makes sense. Indeed, they place their stops and align their trades / investments in accordance with one of many trend-based strategies. And this narrowed focus may be very helpful and exceedingly profitable at times. A recent example is the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ), or even some large or mega-cap tech names like AAPL, MSFT, META, and NVDA. These indices and securities could have rewarded narrowly focused trend-followers quite well on daily and weekly time frames over the past eight months, especially if discipline was used to enter positions at major uptrend supports with stops moved to breakeven or higher along the way. Such trend traders and investors may be busily counting their profits rather than being distracted with inverted yield curves and FOMC policy statements.
The question becomes whether one may look outside the trend (or technical analysis generally). This issue likely generates pages of academic argument and hours of financial media debates between experts. And it may be something for all traders to ponder for a bit.
Given how much of an influence positioning has developed on equity markets over time, as well as central-bank quantitative tightening or quantitative easing, it seems important to consider data from such sources. Such data may also include trend information that affects trends in everything else. For example, trends in the price of commodities may tell us about inflation and likelihood of tighter monetary policy / interest rate hikes by a central bank. And trends in the money supply may strengthen or weaken the case for a current trend in equities.
C. Cost-Benefit Analysis of Looking beyond the Trend
In this author’s view, it is not necessarily foolish or improper to sneak a peek or a long thoughtful gaze, outside a rigid trend-based framework. As with everything in life and trading, costs and benefits must be weighed.
The biggest drawback to going outside the confines of trend is the tendency of many traders to try to consider far too much. Our brains are only capable of processing so much at a given time. Focusing on too much data can cause dilute confidence, weaken resolve, and obfuscate trends. In addition, by the time a trader considers a macroeconomic data point, computerized systems likely have informed all the largest institutional players, or even algorithmic or high-frequency traders, who acted on it before you even had a chance to review its implications. And the market’s reaction to non-technical data points is not always intuitive.
But if one can manage understanding additional data outside the trend/price framework, one might find benefit in learning and following data on yield curves, bond-market dynamics, Fed Funds rates, macroeconomic data, inflationary measures, and volatility gauges can inform one’s outlook in useful ways. The key here is to avoid repeatedly (and blindly) fighting the trend in price—even if one fights that trend with some of the most rational, reasonable and persuasive arguments based on overwhelming macroeconomic, volatility, sentiment, positioning, or other such evidence as to why price should be going the opposite way. In short, this is the important general rule for trend-based systems—make the trend your friend until the end when it bends.FN3
D. Practical Application and Hypotheticals
Just because one should make friends with the trend does not warrant chasing extended trends (see FN3), unless the trader or investor has developed particular expertise in momentum trading, and even then, caution is greatly warranted. Every trend has its proper entries for the time frame involved. Uptrends necessarily require countertrend retracements to support whether defined as an anchored VWAP, key moving average, Fibonacci retracement, upward trendline, or standard-deviation based measures such as linear regression or Bollinger Bands. Technically, this is not peeking outside the trend, but rather it merely considers evidence of trend exhaustion and the likelihood of mean reversion.
Further, a trend-based framework should in fact include considering higher time frame trends such as a monthly chart where each price bar represents one month of price data. One of this author’s collaborators, @SPY_Master, has performed some excellent trend-based analysis on timeframes as high as monthly, quarterly (even yearly bars at times).
It is quite common, moreover, for higher-degree trends to move in the opposite direction as lower-degree trends, such as during a monthly or quarterly uptrend experiencing a corrective retracement to trend support that lasts for days or weeks. Or the hourly trend can move against the daily / weekly trend, frequently does so whenever a countertrend retracement to trend support occurs. Can one technically “fight the trend” merely by preferring a higher degree time-frame trend when it conflicts with a shorter one? The answer depends on one’s time frame, risk tolerance, position size, and rationale.
In addition, trends involving a particular stock, index, or other security can be evaluated based on their relative strength, i.e., as a ratio of the subject stock, index or security to another stock, index, security or data series. The S&P 500 can be compared to the Nasdaq 100 or 10-year Treasures. Or BITSTAMP:ETHUSD can be charted as a ratio to another cryptocurrency. This author would argue that such metrics can provide useful trend-based insights even though they incorporate data that is technically beyond the scope of trend. Below are a couple such relative-strength charts that arguably fall within trend-analysis despite relying on data that would normally be considered outside of a price trend's scope:
Example 1 shows this author's relative strength chart of NASDAQ:AAPL to OANDA:XAUUSD (Gold). This is a very long-term chart showing the outperformance trend in AAPL over two decades to the precious medal and commodity Gold.
Example 2 shows @SPY_Master's relative-strength chart of NASDAQ:NVDA , the AI-tech stock into which everyone's distant relatives are now inquiring after its meteoric rise from 2022 bear-market depths. The chart is a relative-strength chart of the ratio of NVDA to the 10-Year Treasury note, which aptly shows how overvalued NVDA is relative to a risk-free asset. It appears far too extended above the risk-free asset in terms of standard deviation on a linear regression-based model shown here. (Note that yields and bonds move inversely, so where an asset outperforms a risk-free bond, it means that the asset is extended given the level of yields produced by that bond.)
Credit: SPY_Master (used with permission)
To conclude, consider the following hypothetical scenarios as a thought experiment. Assume a stock has a monthly or quarterly chart that is extended multiple deviations above the mean (or multiple deviations as a ratio of its price to the money supply). NVDA presents a good case study for these concepts.
Scenario A: A person entered the position at $290 and took profits on this stock at $405, preferring to exercise caution and avoid this stock as a long-term investment.
Scenario B: A hedge fund with a 150-page report of deep research on NVDA and the macroeconomic backdrop has a 10-year time horizon and begins scaling into a short position to anticipate a mean reversion at the higher degrees of trend (monthly, quarterly time frames). The hedge fund will add one quarter at $450, another quarter position at $500, and the final two quarters between $500 and $600 if reached.
Should either scenario be deemed fighting the trend? Is either scenario ill-advised use of capital? Any answers are welcome in the comments provided respectful towards others.
FN1 This footnote helps explain some basics of fundamental and positioning analysis. Beyond this brief explanation, this article will defer to other educational experts for a more thorough explanation of these three modes of financial analysis.
Fundamental analysis for equity indices like SP:SPX or NASDAQ:NDX considers macroeconomic data and metrics that focus on an economy’s growth (e.g., GDP), price-stability / inflation (CPI, PCE, PPI), consumption, real estate, money supply, central-bank rate policies, central-bank QE or QT, trade deficits, and more. Fundamental analysis as to individual stocks involves the use of financial data such as revenue, earnings per share, cost of goods sold, capital expenditures, and other data available from a public company’s certified financial statements, as well as financial ratios relying on such data, e.g., earnings per share (EPS), price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios, price-to-sales ratios (P/S) and liquidity ratios (current ratio). In the US and other major economies, securities rules mandate that companies file full disclosure of their financial health, certified by CEOs and CFOs, in annual reports (10-K and quarterly reports (10-Q) on an ongoing basis.
Positioning analysis looks at a complex array of data that covers institutional market positioning and order flows for stocks, options, indices, commodities and futures. It also looks at increasingly important dealer hedging flows (volume and open interest) in options markets and the effect of implied volatility and time on such flows. It can include such insights as net positioning on each side of a given futures market or index by hedgers and speculators. This is an area where expert commentary is helpful to learn even the basics.
FN2 Yet the central-bank and US Treasury actions behind the scenes may have masked, or even partially or wholly offset, tight Fed interest rate and monetary policy at times during the first half of 2023. For example, many financial publications and analysts discussed the US Treasury’s accounting maneuvers intended to prolong its borrowing authority in light of the debt-ceiling standoff. Commentary also noted that such maneuvering, draining the TGA account (the US Treasury’s “checking account” held at the Federal Reserve), injected money / liquidity into the financial system, which likely muted Fed’s efforts to tighten policy in the short-term while those actions were ongoing.
FN3 But as is often the case with a general rule, the exceptions can dilute the rule somewhat. One prominent exception is mean-reversion analysis / trading systems. In addition, some traders and institutions are trend-reversal traders—a high risk, high reward type approach that requires immaculate risk management, timing, precision and patience, often scaling into and out of massive positions that cannot be acquired or unloaded in a period of days.