Tag Archives: Trend following

Expertise, Trend following, Truth

Universities: poisoning the well of knowledge

For full disclosure, I do have a university degree, but I’ve worked hard ever since to recover from it.

In my book, “Mastering Uncertainty in Commodities Trading,” the key insight I had during my trading apprenticeship was about discovery that the holy grail of market speculation is within: “this game was not so much about mastering the markets or statistics or even the charts as much as it was about mastering oneself. In speculation, markets are the external reality, but what decides the game’s outcome is the inner process that determines one’s actions.“

Our actions depend on the way we perceive that external reality and how we understand its changes. But the problem of how we know things goes beyond the domain of investing; it is central to everything we do in life. The big word for this is epistemology – the “science” of how we know. It is one of the core mysteries of life which, the more we question it, the farther we drift away from the certitudes we embraced in our teenage years.

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Is it a buy? Gold and Silver round-out a bullish technical case.

One of the greatest worries for investors and savers – and also everyone living on fixed income – is inflation, which could accelerate to levels not seen since the 1970s. One of the asset classes that ofer effective protection from inflation are precious metals. Over the recent months, as many commodities have rallied strongly (Oats, Coffee, Oil, Natural Gas, Corn, Copper…), Gold and Silver spent nearly a year treading water and going nowhere. But yesterday’s COMEX closing prices rounded out a clearly defined bullish technical picture. On the occasion I decided to publish this morning’s TrendCompass Major Markets report in full.

Silver

In May I wrote that Silver looked poised to stage a bullish breakout from the consolidation pattern it’s held since last August. I also warned that it is never a good idea to trade in anticipation of such events, but instead to wait for either a pull-back which often does happen in such circumstances, or for the bullish break-out itself. Now we’ve had a pullback and with yesterday’s strong close the technical picture looks much more clearly defined:

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Asset management, Central banking, Commodity price, Economics, Inflation, Monetary reform, Policy, Risk management, Trend following

Inflation: we passed a phase transition

In April 2012, economist Robert Wenzel[1] was invited to speak at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. On the occasion, he told the central bankers that “vast amounts of money printing are now required to keep your manipulated economy afloat. It will ultimately result in huge price inflation, or, if you stop printing, another massive economic crash will occur. There is no other way out.”[2]

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Asset management, Central banking, Inflation, Market trends, Stock market, Trend following

Bear market or bubble reflation: what comes next?

In March last year, I published an article looking at historical perspective on boom/bust cycles in SeekingAlpha. I suggested then that, “the (still) festering economic imbalances might get resolved along two alternative scenarios. Either we’ll have a full-blown deflationary depression that could see asset prices drop by 50% or more, or we’ll have a strong and sustained decline in the US Dollar, ” accompanied with a continued rise in equity markets. Today, the latter scenario appears more likely. Here’s why: Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Stock market, Trading, Trend following

With I-System through March storm – part 2

March 2020 market storm has been an important test of the I-System model and the way it navigated the unforeseen events. The results have been very encouraging and the system has done well in all affected markets. Last week I summarized its performance on Brent crude oil, Silver and US 30-year Bond. Here we take a look at how it performed in Russell 2000, S&P500 and Palladium markets. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Hedging, Market trends, Oil market, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

With I-System through the storm… with flying colors!

Recent weeks brought severe price shocks in many markets. Their timing and severity took most participants by surprise. In these circumstances, I-System strategies performed superbly well. As this post shows, a few strategies sustained negative results, but this is to be expected. This is why, rather than formulating a trading strategy, we built a stable knowledge framework so that we can formulate and implement literally thousands of strategies within that framework. In this sense I-System holds potential to entirely transcend uncertainty by supplanting it with a more predictable risk class: a swarm of consistent, intelligent and emotionless trading agents, each in charge of a small fraction of portfolio risk. The current experience was an important test for the I-System. The results speak for themselves. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Energy crisis, Hedging, Inflation, Market psychology, Market trends, Oil market, Trend following

Market panics and trend following

Today global capital markets opened to unprecedented price dislocations. ZeroHedge captured the mood: “Panic Purgatory: Oil Crashes to $27%; S&P Futures Locked limit Down, Treasuries Soar Limit Up Amid Historic Liquidation.” Over the recent months I’ve posted many articles on this blog and on SeekingAlpha, basically along two themes:

1) Warning that the markets would experience great turbulence in the near future (see here: “Perfect Storm Gathering…” and

2) Suggesting that the best way to navigate through the storm is by using high-quality systematic trend following strategies (see here, “Trend Following Might Save Your Tail“).

It may be that the time of reckoning has begun But if you followed my advice and used systematic trend following, most likely you’d be having a good day today. The chart below illustrates the net positioning of my 493 I-System strategies at market open this morning: Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Hedging, Market psychology, Market trends, Oil market, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

Trend following and the impact of unforeseen events

“Yes, but how can your system know if XYZ happens and markets go haywire?” This is one of the two most frequently asked questions about systematic trading strategies I’ve used over the last 20 years. Most traders tend to rely on analyses of supply and demand fundamentals to form a judgment about future price changes.

My contention is that this simply does not work and I can make a strong case to back this up (see here, here or here). I can also offer evidence that my systematic approach does work (see here or here) even if I know nothing about the supply and demand economics of most markets I cover. This usually elicits the objection that my system can’t know if some XYZ event might happen tomorrow  (recently, XYZ tended to refer to Trump tweets), upsetting the markets and rendering my strategies ineffective. Recent experience afforded me an (almost) perfect answer to this question (plus another important issue related to trend following). Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Expertise, Hedging, Market research, Market trends, Risk management, Stock market, Trading, Trend following

Do trend followers move markets? (they do).

A few months ago, when reviewing our trades on US Treasury futures, I was so delighted, I drafted a bragging article titled “How we knew yields would collapse?” summarizing the results of our trading. That performance was entirely generated by my I-System model, first built in 1999. I still find myself awestruck that this works… We generated profitable trades through both the bear and the bull market in bonds, literally without needing to know a single thing about the market fundamentals. The trades were strictly based on the knowledge framework built into the system more than 20 years ago (by the way, our strategies are still generating excellent signals in those same markets). Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Market trends, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

How we knew yields would collapse?

While most market experts completely failed to predict this year’s collapse in interest rates (see the chart below), we traded the event profitably. In this article I summarize the the hows and the whys of our performance.

AgeOfQE_CTAsVsS&P500vsExperts

How did we know to short US T-Notes starting in Q4 2017, then reverse and go long in November of 2018? Did we know interest rates would first rise, then collapse at the fastest rate in 50 years? Are we so brilliant as forecasters? Did we have insider information? The answer is, none of the above.

We did not know what would happen – but profited from the events anyway. Here’s how: Continue reading →

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