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 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.

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.

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.

I picked up a few shares of XLE yesterday. I figured it was beaten down enough and should revert back to the mean, hopefully around $60. Update: Now sold… Chart wise I see two things happening. First, I see a window was opened when XLE fell off the cliff in March. I should probably do the statistics on it but the general wisdom is that eventually this window would be shut.

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.

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.

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 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’ve been following the China iShares, FXI, for a long time now and I noticed that Maoxian posted about it nearing its all time high. This reminded me of the time when the talk was that FXI might be overextended or possibly reaching a top. At the time, it sure looked that way. I even posted on my old site saying that the trend might be over but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if my initial call was wrong.

There’s something to be said about buying winners. Winners continue to win, and in the case of stocks, they keep making new highs. I know that AAPL is a favorite holding of Howard and his hedge fund’s strategy of finding and investing select stocks making new 52 week all time highs is a smart. The trick is to buy the right company making the high. It’s safe to say that Apple is the right company, its emerged as an innovative powerhouse once again.

Could the trend party in IYR be over? Maybe. A lot of information can be gleaned from observing a price chart, mostly technical information. A lot of traders/investors forget that fundamental and sentiment information also drives prices up or down. Learn Stock Trading, Investing, and Risk Management There are a handful of financial and trading books that have made a HUGE impact on my investments. If you want to trade and learn about money and risk management that I suggest you get the Tharp book.

EWM was good to me in the past, too bad I sold it! Update EWM. What a great ETF for investing into the Asia area. This is one of those emerging market ETF’s that I should’ve held onto for the past 13 years. Once again I’m going to repeat what I wrote about passive investing: diversify, buy low cost mutual funds/ETFs, and dollar cost average. Look at EWM now, trading around $27.

My FXI neural net model continues to show an UP trend. Nice to know! :) Update I realize that after 13 some odd years, this one sentence blog post with a FXI chart is very much out of context. This post was a simple confirmation of a model I built for trading/investing in this particular ETF. This was the early days of my learning Data Science and boy was my model wrong from the start.