Investing Strategies

October 2019

Negative Interest Rates Could Be Coming to the USA

October 18, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, monetary policy has had an “Alice in Wonderland” feel. The whole thing has been a crazy experiment — and the experiment is still ongoing. The next bizarre chapter could be negative U.S. rates. Negative interest rates have already shown up in bond markets all around the world. If negative rates come to America too — and if NIRP (negative interest rate policy) is implemented by the Federal Reserve — the central bank that

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What Investors and Farmers Have in Common: The Enduring Power of Cycles

October 16, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

What do investors and farmers have in common? Their work is dominated by cycles. A farmer who does not understand cycles — the ebb and flow of the seasons, a time to plant, a time to harvest, and a time to let the ground lay fallow — will not remain a farmer for long. Investors, too, have much to gain from understanding cycles (and much to lose from ignoring them). That is why we’ll talk more about cycles in the

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The Unicorn Bubble Has Popped

October 11, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

Over the past year, multiple Silicon Valley “unicorns” — companies privately valued in the billions, or even tens of billions — came to market via initial public offerings (IPOs). Investors seemed enthusiastic, scooping up the shares of these loss-making companies no matter how much cash they burned. WeWork appeared to be the worst of them all; we wrote about the company on Aug. 23, describing how it summed up “everything bad about the Silicon Valley unicorn bubble.” Now it looks

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July 2019

The Personalization Trend Is Taking Over

July 26, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

Call it narcissism, or call it knowing exactly what you like — either way, today’s consumers crave products that fit nicely into personal preference buckets. These may be functional, ideological, or taste-based, pick your poison. To demonstrate, take a look at LikeFolio trend data on consumer demand for “personalized” and “just for me” products… As advertisers amp up their targeting game and search gets smarter, the new expectation is for brands and products to know the consumer and pitch products

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Stocks to Watch After Prime Day 2019

July 19, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

Prime Day has turned into the ecommerce version of “Christmas in July,” with discounts and deals as far as the eye can see. As shoppers log in and click their way to big savings, LikeFolio got busy analyzing consumer behavior to find out which retailers and device makers benefitted the most. Prime Day 2019 Sets Revenue Records Amazon reported that Prime Day 2019 was “the largest shopping event in its history,” citing sales surmounting 2018’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday

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May 2019

The Dangerous Allure of Survivorship Bias

May 1, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

The way to build wealth in markets is to do things that are smart and safe. If you develop a playbook of smart and safe investing decisions, you can return to that playbook over and over again. The repeat application of smart and safe habits is a wealth-accumulation process. It’s valuable to create a process like this and then stick with it for years, or even decades, on the path to your long-term goals. Emphasizing “smart and safe” sounds obvious

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April 2019

There’s a Multi-Year Global Meat Shortage Unfolding: Here’s Where to Invest

April 26, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

There is a global meat shortage going on. Today we’ll cover two strong investment ideas, as this is part of a powerful trend that could shape agricultural markets for years. A meat shortage might sound funny, but the impacts are deadly serious. The shortage has already become a worst case scenario for China. If the problem is contained within China, that is one thing. If it spreads to other continents and countries, we could have “porkageddon” on our hands. The

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January 2019

Groundbreaking New Study Shows Why Wall Street Pros Need TradeStops

January 16, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

For years, we have tracked the performance of a “Billionaire’s Club” of the world’s best investors. Through quarterly filings, we are able to see when these investors buy and sell and compare their results to how they might fare using TradeStops. What we have found is that, in most cases, the performance of these top investors could be improved, sometimes dramatically improved, by using TradeStops to manage their portfolios. Our software helps make the best even better! In the past,

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How to Beat The Most Dangerous of All Biases

January 9, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

We know that certain bad habits are hazardous to your health. And many know that cognitive biases — irrational tendencies built into the brain that lead to poor judgment — can be hazardous to your wealth. Over the past six decades or so, dozens of cognitive biases have been identified. One of the oldest and most dangerous of these is “confirmation bias.” There is no way to calculate the total amount, but it’s safe to say veritable oceans of investor

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December 2018

Monitoring Your Portfolios During a Downturn

December 3, 2018Lisa Lenda

As a TradeStops member, you know our mantra is to always have an exit strategy. One powerful exit strategy is to focus on the overall state of your portfolio by using the Portfolio Volatility Quotient (PVQ) Analyzer tool. If you have a long-term portfolio that’s sitting on large unrealized gains, it can be difficult to monitor the historical high-water mark — and hence a true picture of the portfolio’s health. Here’s a solution we touched on in last week’s webinar

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September 2018

Probability Series #3: The Mental Technique Jeff Bezos Uses (That Investors Can Use Too)

September 4, 2018TradeSmith Research Team

Great decisions tend to look easy in hindsight. Through the lens of history, a hugely successful call — like starting a company that changes the world, for example — appears to be an obvious move. But big decisions always look easier after they’ve worked out. Making the call in the moment can be tough. There is a useful mental technique that applies here — a probability technique — that Jeff Bezos used to make his big call on starting Amazon.

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August 2018

Probability Series #2: The Bombers that Never Came Back

August 21, 2018TradeSmith Research Team

In an earlier probability series, we wrote about the medical doctor who beat roulette. The lesson was that, if you can learn how to “put the odds in your favor” — to make use of probability, in other words — you can possibly find ways to consistently win where others lose. And while investing is not a “game of chance” like roulette, the discipline of investing is very much about probability (though a lot of investors don’t realize it). Probability

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