Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).
“To know what a company does is not important at all. And I rarely know what I’m trading.”
That might not sound like much of an investment philosophy. It sounds more like the gut impulse of a teenage trader with their first hundred bucks on Robinhood.
But it comes from our Chief Quantitative Strategist, Mike Carr.
Understand, Mike has spent about 40 years building trading strategies. In that same span, he’s worked on cryptography for the National Security Agency, coded nuclear missile paths, and co-managed mutual funds and private accounts worth up to $200 million.
Suffice to say, Mike is no harebrained trader shooting from the hip.
And his latest claim to fame is building our Signals software with TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan.
Signals are like hidden fingerprints in a stock’s price action – patterns most people would never think to look for. Every time one fires, the software checks what happened in that stock after the same signal fired in the past.
We trained an AI on the best signals Mike’s built over his 40-year career and directed it to find more. And what came back blew us away.
Take one that goes against Mike’s own instincts: buying a stock that’s dropped on more than half of the last 21 trading days.
Mike normally follows trends. He says this signal “violates just my general beliefs about the markets, but it works.”
We also covered last week’s Nasdaq 100 sell-off, the worst day since the pandemic crash. Mike went back through past sell-offs like it – 2000, 2008, 2020, and 2025 – and found one factor that separated the ones that turned into bear markets from the ones the market shrugged off.
Finally, we talked about TradeSmith’s AI ambitions… how they fit into our newest improvements to Signals… and took a glimpse at what’s coming down the road.
Watch my full conversation with Mike right here:
Every morning, our Signals software scans 2,467 stocks for the rare setups that came right before past moves. In a test last January, the top 100 trades it posted gained an average of 11.6% in seven days.
No system wins every time. The goal is to put the odds on your side.
On Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 10 a.m. ET, Keith Kaplan is holding a free presentation on how Signals works. You’ll also see a trade Mike made this spring with his own money, in a stock he knew nothing about, and how it turned out.
Sign up for Keith’s presentation and you’ll unlock free access to Signals until 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Nov. 18. Type in any of 2,467 stocks and see which signals are firing before Monday’s open.
Click here to save your seat and unlock your free access.
To building wealth beyond measure,
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily
P.S. Which TradeSmith analyst would you like to hear from next, and what should I ask? Tell me here.
