TRUTH IS A LIE....? YES I'M STILL WATCHING the markets deliver for the insiders and corrupt
TRUTH IS A LIE....? YES I'M STILL WATCHING the markets deliver for the insiders and corrupt elite. But if you have or had good charts like STOCKCHARTS.com and the time and smarts to read them and study them....it was no conspiracy.....it's my hobby and I avoided loss by trading. But it's been a strange ride since December 2019.
I'm not selling anything here.....It was because of so called no commissions I jumped in. But I soon found trading in and out is not so easy. The market extracts is pound of flesh from the unlucky, the slow, and uninformed,
The unformed can be any one. Tips floated out on the view of the public are like are often always a trap. That's not a good place to look for success in the market.
Intuition is not golden... facts are and yet rarely shared with the public.
I first got in the market in 1966. A successful friend told me he made over a million in trailer and RV stocks.
I tried it. I was 19 and jumped in and out of Champion Homes, and Mickey D's. I took my money and ran. HOI was my last trade....Houston Oil and Mineral bought at 16 and traded up to about 38.
I may have the exact years wrong. But I remember getting out and bought a book by Joseph Granville
Commentary: Newsletter editor had long and colorful career
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CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — Joe Granville — the famous and infamous newsletter editor of the last half century who died earlier this week at the age of 90 — had a disastrously poor track record.
And yet many of his followers became better investors by following him.
That’s not as contradictory a notion as you might think. Just take Jesse Livermore, the famed stock trader of the 1920s and 1930s, who compiled a huge fortune on four separate occasions, and each time ended up losing it all and declaring bankruptcy.
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Does that mean his career as a trader was a failure? It would if we focused on his long-term record, since he died a poor man.
But more than a few of Wall Street’s top traders consider Livermore a hero. The fictionalized biography of his life, “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator,” is one of the most widely-read investment books ever written.
Lesson 1: The importance of discipline
Granville taught us the importance of discipline by often failing to adhere to it himself.
For example, he was widely regarded as being a top-notch market technician, having either created or popularized several indicators that are in widespread use today — such as On Balance Volume. But he didn’t always pay attention to his own indicators.
Joe Granville
The Granville Letter
In fact, he was often quick to throw in the towel whenever his indicators weren’t working. When his technical indicators seemed problematic, he would with great fanfare announce the revelation that he now realized that he should have been paying more attention to fundamental indicators as well.
Yet when those fundamental indicators subsequently stopped working, he’d announce yet another road-to-Damascus-conversion back to being a pure technician.
Lesson 2: Don’t take yourself too seriously
Whatever else might be said about Granville, there’s no doubt he had a good time.
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Peter Brimelow, in his classic book on the newsletter industry (“The Wall Street Gurus”), recounts how “In Tucson once, Granville began by walking across a swimming pool on a plank hidden just below the surface, then telling the assembled multitude, ‘And now you know!’...
“In Minneapolis, when asked how he could keep close to the market while travelling so much, he dropped his tuxedo pants to reveal boxer shorts printed with stock quotations that he successively identified, finally pointed to his crotch with the delighted cry of ‘And here’s Hughes Tool.” [Hughes Tool, of course, is now part of Baker Hughes International US:BHI ].
Lesson 3: Humility is a virtue
This lesson is somewhat ironic, given lesson No. 2.
But after successfully predicting a stock market top in January 1981, Granville’s picture appeared on the front page of the New York Times. That was something that, according to him, is the only time in history when an investment newsletter editor’s photo appeared on that newspaper’s front page.
It appears to have gone to his head.
For several months thereafter it looked like he could do no wrong, with each of his increasingly bold predictions turning out to be right. This led him to do issue even bolder forecasts, like trying to predict when earthquakes would occur. He eventually began arguing that he deserved the Nobel Prize in economics for unlocking the key to the stock market.
Then came the bull market in 1982, which Granville utterly failed to foresee.
Wall Street has for decades loved to ridicule Granville’s antics, but their motives for doing so were never pure. The track records of the vast majority of money managers are also dismal, after all. What better way of diverting attention from their own poor performance than by focusing on Granville?
The graveyards on Wall Street are filled with those who thought they could do no wrong. As Socrates put it, the wise man is he who knows he knows nothing.
Lesson 4: It doesn’t matter what they say, so long as they spell your name right
Granville laughed all the way to the bank when Wall Street ridiculed his clown-like behavior. At least they were paying attention.
I remember a time in the late 1980s when I appeared on an episode of the “Wall Street Week” TV show hosted by Louis Rukeyser, along with both Granville and Al Frank, then editor of The Prudent Speculator. My designated role was to talk about investment newsletter performance, with Frank an example of someone whose performance was outstanding and Granville an illustration of someone whose performance was awful.
Granville, videogenic as ever, was beaming, while Frank came across more as a fumbling professor. I wouldn’t be surprised if Granville secured more new subscribers from the show than did Frank.
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