Baby Steps
Three weeks ago, growth stocks were in ruins, and we don’t think that’s much of an exaggeration—while the Nasdaq was only 8.5% off its high, things like the Russell 2000 Growth Fund (IWO), which we write about later in this issue, sat than...
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Biding our Time
It’s been a downer of a three months for growth stocks, so we want to start with a positive note, partially in response to some worried questions we’ve started to get as the sellers really dug in their heels last week: term,...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Riding the Bucking Bronco
Investing in general, and growth stock investing in particular, tends to be very streaky—while many would love for a steady, low-stress increase in their portfolios, that’s not how the world usually works. Instead you get periods of time when the gushes...
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Steady Improvement
By the letter of the law, the big-cap indexes remain in the midst of a correction—the S&P 500 sits about 4% off its high, while the Nasdaq is more than 5% below its early-September peak, and many stocks and sectors are being around...
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Bad News, Good News
Our last issue was titled “Burden of Proof is on the Bulls,” and since then, the buyers have failed to step up to the plate, leading to a worsening of the overall evidence—earlier this week, our Cabot Tides flipped to bearish...
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Burden of Proof is On the Bulls
At heart, we’re students of the market, which means one of the key tools we use is spotting the difference between normal, run-of-the-mill action and abnormal, noteworthy action, the latter of which is what usually causes us make...
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