I started my investing career more than two decades ago as a trader, and I was awful. In my first three weeks, I made every mistake in the book. I knew I needed help, or I was going to fail at that assignment, too. So, I turned to computers and designed a quantitative system that did a lot of the work a heck of a lot faster than I ever could.
Something is emerging in the market, and you should be excited. We’re seeing a major shift. Those top 50 stocks in the S&P 500 – the large-caps that have been carrying the index lately – are overweight and the shoe is about to drop. Those unloved small-caps are about to attract Big Money, and the weight will be shifted in their favor. In today’s Power Trends+, my fellow TradeSmith analyst and business partner Luke Downey will show you the small-cap study that put us ahead of the rest, along with a couple others to show you where the market is headed.
I’m proud to say that I recommended the hottest AI stock of the year to my readers. My Quantum Edge Pro subscribers booked profits of 203% in a little over five months… and that was on two-thirds of the original shares. They are still sitting on big gains today with the remaining shares. They already locked in a double on the full position, and are playing with house money. They are effectively getting paid to own this stock.
The stock market is very strange right now. You may be loving life if you’re in a handful of specific stocks, but the truth is most stocks have sucked wind this year. If you look at just the indexes, you see a market that is up big. And that’s true. But you can’t judge a book by its cover, and those of us who dig deeper into the data see trading not normally associated with strong bull markets.
The big day is finally here. It’s an event my fellow stock nerds and I get excited about four times each year. It’s earnings season time once again! And some of the biggest banks, like JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Citigroup (C), and Wells Fargo (WF), crank things up beginning tomorrow. Not excited? That’s okay. I understand. I don’t expect earnings “watch parties” to be high on most people’s list of fun things to do, though my calendar is full of them. But it can’t be ignored. Quarterly earnings give us the most information we ever get about a company’s business.
We can sometimes snooze through the sleepy summer months, but when it comes to July, it really can be a case of you snooze, you lose. July is historically strong, and after recent volatility under the surface, now should be a great time to buy superior stocks on a pullback. But, as always, the question is... which stocks?
As a Power Trends reader, you are well acquainted with my firm belief that successful investors take their emotions out of their decisions and rely on data. That’s the whole point of my Quantum Edge system, which I developed after learning the hard way. I want to introduce you today to Tom Gentile, who similarly overcame some early struggles and developed a proven and successful system that generates profits. Tom is more of a shorter-term trader than I am, but his work is impressive and worth learning about.
If investing were a game, it would be an incredibly difficult one. If it were easy, everyone would succeed. In fact, most people don’t… including the “pros.” It is nearly statistically as probable – or I should say improbable – as winning the lottery. S&P Global (of the S&P 500) published a scorecard on professional money managers and how they did relative to their respective benchmark indexes. Here’s what they found.
As we begin the second half of 2024, things are a little backwards right now. It may surprise you – even concern you – that most stocks in the S&P 500 are underperforming that important benchmark index. That’s scary for investors... right? Well, not exactly.
If you’re invested in an S&P 500 index fund, you’re probably pretty happy with the first half of 2024. The benchmark index gained a solid 14.5% the last six months, which is already about 50% more than the annual average. But what a difference if you own the top performers. Fortunately, I’ve recommended two to my readers, and I own one myself. So I’ll take that as win-win.