I Was an Awful Trader Until This – You Can Use It, Too
I started my investing career more than two decades ago as a trader, and I stunk at it.
In my first three weeks, I made every mistake in the book.
Greedily chasing a stock that was ripping higher? I did that.
Buying a falling stock because I had a “gut feeling” it would turn around? Did that, too.
Following the herd into a crowded trade? Add that to the list as well.
I was so bad that my boss openly took the opposite position for every trade I made. To make matters worse, he didn’t even bother looking at the stock or doing any research. All he needed to know was that I made a trade, so he bet the other way.
I was losing thousands of dollars, but my boss made a ton of money taking the other side.
All of my intuitions, gut instincts, and emotional swings took me in the wrong direction… and cost me money.
I almost quit the business entirely. I couldn’t bear the thought of trading anymore, so I went back to being a broker. I took orders by phone, and I placed trades for other people.
Then one day, a big client requested that I track “unusual activity” in all 2,800 European stocks trading across all the exchanges.
Track nearly 3,000 stocks?! Are you kidding?
It was impossible to look at that many stocks all day long, every day, let alone try to spot unusual activity.
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.
Tech to the Rescue
To be honest, I didn’t even know how to code back then, but I was more than happy to figure it out if it would help.
Did it ever.
With computers handling the bulk of data retrieval and analysis, I could research more stocks and variables than ever before.
I realized that the human brain, as amazing as it is in so many ways, is no match for massive data analytical firepower.
And… I didn’t have to get my emotions involved with trading anymore. I didn’t have to rely on “gut instinct” that steered me wrong more often than not.
The early results were outstanding, especially after my early failures. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of a life-changing journey and a dramatic shift in my success as an investor.
By that point, I was hooked. I sharpened the tool more and more. I poured more money into it. I beefed up the algorithms.
All the while, I was in effect building an artificial intelligence stock-picking system before A.I. was cool.
You see, computers aren’t born with intelligence. They need to be programmed to get “smart.”
And if you’re going to provide instructions for a computer to do a job, wouldn’t you want to provide the best instructions?
Of course. So, I “uploaded” some of the smartest investing minds into my algorithms.
Throughout my career, I’ve had the pleasure of working with and studying some of the world’s most brilliant investors. I’m talking about folks who wrote dissertations on Sallie Mae before it went bankrupt. I studied turtle trader Richard Dennis, who helped 23 ordinary people become millionaires. I was huge into William O’Neil, the investor who founded Investor’s Business Daily.
Then there were the people I worked with every day and the institutional clients I spoke to on the phone. I picked their brains and bought them more than a few pints of ale (I was in London at the time) studying their philosophies and successes.
I broke down all of their models and rules, did my own research and number crunching to find out what worked best, and then took the best of the best to build the rules that govern my Quantum Edge system.
Fishing In a Small Pond
Ongoing technological advancements give us far superior technology and algorithms than a couple of decades ago. For me as an investor, this translated into a better and more reliable way to find the absolute best-of-the-best stocks to own.
When I log on early each morning, my computers have already done more data retrieval and analysis than probably an entire brokerage firm. My system assigns a Quantum Score to roughly 6,000 stocks every single day – a single number that lets me know if each of those stocks is an opportunity, a danger, or just not going anywhere.
I make a few additional clicks of the mouse or taps of the keypad, and I’m left with a targeted list of stocks with the critical ingredients to generate profits. I identified these ingredients and wrote the algorithms based on all my years of research, testing, and signals I observed firsthand as a middleman matching up buyers and sellers on multimillion-dollar institutional trades.
They can be summarized as:
- Outstanding fundamentals
- Strong technicals
- Big Money inflows spotted by our computers
I don’t fish in a massive ocean and hope to get a bite. I narrow it down to a small pond full of exotic fish where I’m likely to snag the best of the best.
Matching Wall Street’s Advantage
By utilizing technology, you can spot key activity across a universe of stocks, all the while avoiding the emotional turmoil of investing decisions and the often dangerous media noise.
I remember very well in the summer of 2018 how the market was throwing a temper tantrum as we were in the middle of a trade war. The news had investors in a panic saying we were looking at a mirror of the 1987 Black Monday crash. Investors had pulled $30 billion out of the markets in the prior month alone.
But when I got the signals for The Trade Desk (TTD) in July, I was better able to look past all that outside noise and focus on the data.
And it was worth it…
Over the next few years, The Trade Desk exploded for as much as 1,100%.
Anyone not using software to collect and analyze information in our world today is hopelessly outpaced by those who do. You probably already use technology in most areas of your life, so why not leverage its power in investing as well?
Huge investment banks now run technology 24/7/365. Firms invested billions of dollars creating systems that give them critical market information first. And they have the firepower to act on that information in a fraction of a second – before most people can even turn a computer on.
Wall Street uses this edge to beat individual investors, but we can level the playing field. We can give ourselves a similar edge with data analytics, supercomputers, and proven analysis.
That’s the whole goal of my investing services like Quantum Edge Pro. We can meet and even beat Wall Street at its own game, using technology-enabled superpowers to make big, reliable profits – over and over again.
Talk soon,
Jason Bodner
Editor, Jason Bodner’s Power Trends