Today I’m in Las Vegas at the Stansberry Las Vegas conference. It’s great to be here with so many friends, colleagues and subscribers.
I’ve been on the road a lot this month. I’ve got some highlights to share with you along with a dip into the TradeStops mailbag to answer some subscriber questions.
Let’s get going!
Two weeks ago I was in New York City at the 10th Annual Finovate conference. Here’s how the Finovate group describes their conference: “Finovate conferences showcase cutting-edge banking and financial technology in a unique, short-form, demo-only format.”
TradeStops is financial technology and so I thought I would go and see what all the fuss was about.
It was a very big conference with 1,600 attendees and 70 companies presenting their financial technology. Most all of the companies presenting were pitching their technologies to financial institutions.
I’m glad that I went, but it reminded me that there’s no place like home and that we’re doing just fine without doing business with the big institutions.
TradeStops is about the individual investor. It’s about you, not one-size fits all.
I’m sure that if I focused my efforts on the institutional market, I could generate some interest in TradeStops but that’s not where I want to be or what I want to do. I want to build great tools for individual investors … tools that allow individual investors to finally realize the promise that true investing holds.
Which brings me to Las Vegas … and my kind of people.
It’s fantastic to be here with so many individuals that are serious about managing their own money and who are looking to make the most of the investment research that they subscribe to from outstanding publishers like Stansberry Research.
While I’m here I’m even going to be interviewing a dozen or so individual investors who were brave enough to send me their investment histories and let me analyze their past performance and see how the TradeStops strategies might have helped. I’m really looking forward to that.
Like I said, TradeStops is for individuals … for you. I’ll be sharing some of the investor stories that come up here in Las Vegas in the coming days and weeks. For today’s stories, I’m dipping into the TradeStops mailbag.
TradeStops subscriber Tom C. recently asked, “OK, what gives with the metals?”
I’ve gotten a lot of questions from readers recently about my views on gold and other precious metals. I’ve been calling for caution for the past couple of months. I continue to feel strongly that caution is warranted.
Here’s the most recent TradeStops SSI chart on gold:
As you can see, gold has been on an absolute tear in 2016. The SSI Entry signal in cash gold was triggered back in April and we haven’t even seen a pullback into the Low Risk Zone for gold yet.
I’m expecting one soon.
Gold needs a breather. A correction will be a healthy thing for the long term gold rally. A correction down into the $1,200 – $1,250 range would be just what the doctor ordered. We may see one more burst higher but we’ll see gold correct 7% to 10% in the next month or two.
One of the strongest reader responses we’ve ever had was in response to my recent article on how to Triple the S&P 500 with just 9 ETFs. In that article I showed how an investor could use the 9 Select SPDR ETFs (basically 9 sectors of the S&P 500) along with the TradeStops SSI system and Risk Rebalancer, to triple the performance of the S&P 500.
The unique twist to this particular strategy is that it requires that 7 out of the 9 Select Sector SPDR ETFs have active SSI signals in order for the system to be fully invested. Here’s the chart summarizing the performance results:
TradeStops subscriber Leland H. asks, “If the number of ETFs with an active SSI Entry signal drops below 7, do I sell all of the ETFs?”
Great question Leland. The answer is no. If fewer than 7 of these ETFs are stopped out in the SSI system, then you don’t do any new buying or rebalancing until you get the broad market re-entry signal of 7 or more of these critical ETFs being SSI buys. As you get stopped out of the ETFs you just go to cash.
Interesting isn’t it? You can see in the chart above how this critical component of the strategy kept this system (the green line above) out of the market in 2001 – 2003 and missed the worst of the 2008 downturn.
I love it when I can get the upside that the market has to offer and miss the downside. That’s exactly what this system achieved.
In fact, the response to this article was so great that we created a more detailed article showing the exact rules. You can read it all here.
Thanks to all of our subscribers that send in their questions and comments. We love to hear from you and will be sharing more of the feedback we get in the coming weeks and months.
For the individual investor,
