Back in the Soup
During the past month, the way we thought about what was going on was that growth stocks had finally put themselves into a position to get going after a two and a half month stretch of tough, choppy trading. Instead narrow,...
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Time For A Little More Buying
One of the many adages about investing in stocks says, “Never sell a dull market short.” The theory, basically, is that if the market isn’t going up or down, it’s likely to go up, given that that’s the trend...
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Seeing More Setups, but Still in the Spin Cycle
Two-plus months ago, speculation was running rampant and most growth stocks had made giant moves over the prior six to nine months. So when the sellers finally stepped up and cracked the intermediate-term uptrend in growth...
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Sellers Fading—but Will the Buyers Show Up?
We’re all about going with the evidence, and when it comes to growth stocks, the evidence was nearly uniformly negative (or at least not positive) for most of the past month. The vast majority of leading stocks, many...
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Waiting for a Buying Opportunity
Let’s start with the good news this week.
Fourth quarter results are in for all but one of our companies (Jushi) and they were terrific, showing average revenue growth from the year before of 167%—a number that would be even without...
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Less is More
In the real world, persistence is almost always associated with good things. If you’re a salesperson, you don’t give up when a few accounts turn you down; you keep selling until one customer bites. If your team is developing a new they...
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Open to Anything, but Playing the Odds
Last year saw a ton of “wow, we haven’t seen this kind of unusual market action in decades!” situations, but instead of reverting back to normal behavior, 2021 has had plenty of tricks up its sleeve as The...
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More Cracks Appear
At the start of November we saw a couple of blastoff-type indicators flash green (like the Three Day Thrust rule), and that turned out to be the start of a powerful intermediate-term advance. During the next two-plus months, progress was relative there...
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“Legal Weed Stocks Dip Despite New Jersey Governor Signing Recreational Cannabis Bill Into Law”
That was the headline on one of my news sources yesterday morning, implying that the action of the stocks in light of that legalization event was somehow illogical. But as know...
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Simply Put: Very Impressive Action
Two weeks ago, the major indexes and some individual stocks began to flash abnormal action, a couple of key leaders were threatening to break down and some late-in-the-advance type of action (heavily shorted stocks going nuts) was occurring. Importantly, the...
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Unexpected Events Occur Frequently
One of the unique things about the market (and a big reason so many investors have trouble) is that it doesn’t follow the usual “bell curve” of probabilities that dominates the real world. For instance, given that the market’s average is...
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2021 Kicks Off With a Bang
A funny thing happened while I was preparing this issue yesterday. Not funny ha-ha. Funny odd.
I was updating my performance tables and noticed that the performance of the Marijuana Index year-to-date was exactly the same as its performance all...
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Taking Things on a Stock-by-Stock Basis
We believe one of the main reasons our system has proved durable is that it doesn’t focus on just one or two factors, but incorporates things from different angles. For instance, when selecting stocks, we’re not only looking charts...
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Happy New Year
It’s been a long, strange 12 months, but it’s also been a very prosperous period, at least for growth investors—with one day left in the year, the Model Portfolio is up around 60%, easily besting most major indexes. Happily, that builds our...
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The Point of Peak Perception?
It’s a truism of investing that stocks bottom when the news is terrible and pessimism and fear are the prevailing sentiments—but peak when the news is good and optimism and greed reign.
You have only to look back to March a..
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Into the Homestretch
We’re past the halfway point in December, which means many of us have other things on our minds, be it getting out the snow shovel (a foot of snow hit the ground here last night), buying last-minute gifts or perfecting your eggnog-based...
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Mostly Sunny, Chance of Showers
In the last issue, we wrote about the myriad crosscurrents that were still being seen—while the major indexes looked good, the day-to-day rotation was wild among sectors and themes, with news-driven moves the norm for a few weeks. But also...
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The Future is Full of Surprises
One of the oft-told tales of the California Gold Rush is that while most miners failed to strike it rich, the real money-makers were the people selling shovels—and of course that immigrant from Bavaria, Levi Strauss, who sold denim...
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Wild—but Positive—Action
The healthiest market environment is generally one where most participants are rowing in the same direction—the vast majority of stocks and sectors glide higher (with the occasional pullback or shakeout, of course) as investor perception of the future steadily improves. Even if broad...
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Believe What You See
There are usually a couple of times each year where the market really messes with people, catching the vast majority of investors off-guard. (Remember the old saw: The market does what it has to do to fool the most investors One...
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