Stock Market Trends

I travel a lot for work, or rather I used to until Covid19 hit. My last work related trip was to Florida to a convention on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). I stayed in a beautiful Hilton Hotel near a marina with a great resturant and bar. I’ve been a long time Hilton Honors member and use the AMEX credit card a lot to gain points, status, and rewards. My Hilton Honors came in handy when my family and I were stranded overnight in Miami because flights were cancelled due to a nasty storm. I was able to secure a hotel room on short notice that didn’t cost me an arm and a leg for all of us. ...

I invested in Terra Tech Corp (TRTC) back in January 2018. Marijuana / Cannabis type stocks were making big moves back then and this company looked like it would capitalize on it. At the time it was trading around the $4 to $5 range and I picked up 200+ shares of it for about $4.82. Since then I watched it do a reverse stock split and get put on the Pink Sheets. I should’ve sold but I felt that pot stocks are a long term play as America finally get’s their shit together and legalizes it. Still, it hurts a little watching this stock slip into oblivion. This is a classic case of letting my feelings for a better future interfere with what the market tells me. ...

Every year in November investors and traders look toward ‘Black Friday’ as a way to gauge how well the end of the year is going to go. Black Friday is the day that retailers and shops are supposed to finally make money for the year, due to heavy demand for ‘stuff.’ It’s too early to tell but I want it to be a good year. Wanting and what will happen are two different things in reality. ...

Now that Wall Street has accepted a Biden win, we’ll see more easing from the Fed and hopefully a great Santa Claus rally. That should be good news for stocks and for the ones in strong uptrends, it will be awesome! However for the ones in downtrends, well they get coal in their stockings. Here’s a tale of two worlds, NVIDIA’s performance vs Intel’s. Machine Learning and Data Science in general requires big computers to do data processing. The CPU (central processing unit) chip has dominated the market for years with Intel (INTC) being the big winner in the space, until now. With the creation of the GPU (graphical processing unit) a whole new way of model building (and Bitcoin mining) has emerged. This has turned NVIDIA into a monster, and it looks like it’ll keep going for now. ...

We are living in crazy times. The (Stock) Market is reaching all time highs when the rest of Main Street is falling apart. Amazon is trading in the $5,000 range and people think the market doesn’t represent the majority of us. I agree. The Market is NOT for Main Street and it will never be. It’s for a small group of the population that’s seeking to reallocate your funds to their account. The market is rigged and it will forever be that way. ...

We all went on our first cruise last year on Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCLH). S and I had a great time, our kids were bored. When my wife first proposed the idea of going on a cruise, I rejected it. I was like “why do I want to be cooped up on a floating metal coffin?” I was wrong, I had a blast of a time. The food was fantastic. There was so much to do for entertainment, and different port of calls were great too. Overall S and I had a fun time and we decided to do another cruise again. We were planning something for this or the next year when Covid19 hit. With a few cruise lines having infected passengers, the near halting of travel, and the Covid19 pandemic, it’s not hard to imagine these companies ’taking on water.' ...

The markets have been in a complete freefall over the past few weeks. The likely culprit is Trump’s mishandling of the Covid-19 (aka Coronavirus) response and overinflated prices. Who knows what is the real market contagion here but I think it’s time to make a shopping list. With free falls in some of my favorite holdings (MSFT and AAPL), I can’t but help think it might be time to add to these long term holdings and buy more stuff like ETF’s and Mutual Funds. This is not for speculation but for long term investing so my choices will be based on what I think will do well over the next 5 to 10 years. ...

Identifying stock market trends is like eating and drinking the Zeitgeist. It has to be inside you to understand it. You have to be social, go outside, go to parties, etc. If you’re not “hip” then you’ll never see emerging trends until they’re already established. Then it’s a matter of chasing their coattails and riding them for a bit. Years ago Howie had a great tag-line for his blog, it was “Trends… Find them, ride them and get off.” I thought that was a great way to frame the problem and represent one way to generate “alpha” for the short term. Get in on a trend before it takes off and then ride it up (or down). The next trick is getting out, as Howie so eloquently puts it, “ride them and get off.” ...

I went long $XLV in mid January 2007 for one of my personal IRA accounts. Its had its share of ups and downs but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or a fancy neural net, to figure out that health care is a long term bet. If you don’t believe me, look around for all the graying baby-boomers who want to desperately hold onto their youth. This time I’m holding XLV for a very long time and won’t be shaken out of it. ...

CMG is hitting an all-time high these days and after eating their tasty food, I can understand why. Good food at high prices is always a surefire way to make your stock a winner, until your fickle customers become cost conscience. My favorite dish is the chicken burrito bowl w/ sour cream and the red hot sauce. :) Update I posted about this stock back in May 2007 when it was trading at $82 or so and now, in 2019, it’s way higher. I love the food just as much now as I did back then. I’ve had my share of burrito bowls over the years! ...