Here's a Hoot of a Chart

[Arindam]

LIsa,

The ‘annualized percentage’ game is fun, but totally meaningless. E.g., if I’m taking a walk and find a penny on the sidewalk, what’s my annualized rate of return? About a gazillion percent, right? Same-same if I make $0.20 cents per share on a $3 dollar stock held for 14 minutes. Total nonsense.

As for building spreadsheets, that’s worthwhile. I have one to track monthly and annual expenses that I’ve run for 30 years and which gives me a means to track my ‘personally experienced inflation rate’. I can feed that number into another SS which gives me a means to project my income and expenses out to age 120 or so. I run a third SS in which I mark myself to market across all accounts on a twice weekly basis to set up my T-bill purchases.

[Quillnpenn]

gdett2

Re Simon Sez III rules.

per Simon Sez III two (2) simple rules using ema 20, ema 200. ema’s are closer to the vest as compared to the SMA’s.

Very clean charts and hassle free. NO noise.

Above the 20ema, the stock is trending ( buying mode) , Below the 20ema is de-trending (selling mode) and waiting for the SELL signal. Take your mouse and follow along the 20 ema line.

re: TECS place your mouse on 4/26 and what does Simon say to do

re: place you mouse on 5/2/23 and what does Simon say to do.

= = = = = = =

re: LABU place your mouse on 3/27 and what does Simon say to do

re: place you mouse on 5/4/23 and what does Simon say to do with a possible head fake.

But we have to look at LABD for an inverse possible BUY and sell LABU first. (head faking).

= = = = = = = =

re: SPXS place your mouse on 4/27 and what does Simon say to do

re: place you mouse on 5/2/23 and what does Simon say to do.

= = = = = = = = = =

re: NUGT place your mouse on 2/27 and what does Simon say to do

re: place you mouse on 4/14/23 and what does Simon say to do.

re: place you mouse on 4/28/23 and what does Simon say to do.

We can do this all day long on every chart and have Zero losses other than a few head fakes or two.

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

I - Fuel or Hydrogen (H2O) or Electrolyzer generators - dah Future ! and for the long long haul.

re: HJEN place your mouse on 5/2 and what does Simon say to do

re: place you mouse on 5/3/23 and what does Simon say to do.

= = = = = = = = = =

re: TTE place your mouse on 4/17 and what does Simon say to do

re: place you mouse on - sorry we wait for the next sell signal.

= = = = = = = = == =

I wish you guys the best,

Quill - Simon and Lucas (the spider).

Let me know if you see I - Fuel or Hydrogren (H2O) or Electrolyzer generators stocks.

[Arindam]

Gene,

You’ll save youself grief and losses if you ignore Quill’s 20-200 X-over system as the bad idea it is. Better yet, code it, and prove to yourself its worth (or not). Like the 13-50 EMA X-over system he used to pitch, it doesn’t stand up to back-testing.

Yes, he makes money using nearly anything, because he’s a superb discretionary trader who breaks his “rules” when his experience says they need breaking. But if you’re looking for a mechanical, “follow-the-rules” trading system that can turn a profit across a basket of stocks and a variety of market conditions, neither are very good choices.

Don’t have a backtester? Then demo this one. https://stockalyze.com/

SA couldn’t import the data it needed for HJEN. But here’s the results of a back-test run with 6 yrs of data and an (-8%) stop-loss on the other five stocks.

Note: Left-click on the chart to make the numbers readable. What you’ll see is that the system offers a right/wrong hit rate of around 35% (+/-5%) which is the classic profile of a trend-following system which is what ‘Simon Sez’ (and its variants) offers, not the nearly 100% right/wrong ratio he claims, but cannot prove, because he has never done the needed back-testing, merely made unsupported, anecdotal claims.

[buynholdisdead]

Hi Quill,
I do not use stockcharts so can’t fool with it but I noticed that your price labels have a lot less noise than Gene’s price labels do. Meaning Gene has a lot more price labels. Do you have an answer to why that might be?

Andy

[LisaM]

I track all expenses monthly with a spreadsheet also!

Of course, I understand that if it’s a solitary trade it doesn’t make sense. But, if I purchase another short-term investment with the money I just made selling the last one, I can keep it going steady. It will never be perfectly steady, but there is always something profitable to invest in on any particular day, isn’t there? I just need to keep expanding so that I can always find a good one to keep it rolling. As long as I keep the whole account invested everyday, it will act like a mutual fund. Then I can compare returns.

[Arindam]

“As long as I keep the whole account invested everyday, it will act like a mutual fund. Then I can compare returns.”

Lisa,

Being benchmarked against others is something that’s imposed upon us from our earliest days in school. But it’s really just destructive bullsh*t. What matters isn’t one how one is doing relative to anyone else, but how one is doing in terms of meeting one’s own, self-set objectives, starting from where one is at.

Let’s move the discussion to non-financials, such as fishing. If you’re on the water with a partner, do you feel badly when they hook a fish? Do you gloat when it’s you that catches one? There’s no one else I’d rather be on a small creek with than my son, because there was zero competition. As we’d work our way upstream from one pool or run to the next, we’d take turns being the first to cast. We both could read the water, and we both knew where the “money casts” were. But we’d work the pool systematically, bottom to top, so as to give the other guy a chance to have “fresh” water on his turn. Small creeks tend to be brushy, and the casts tend to be tricky. So there’s a real joy that comes when you see someone do a good execution, especially if it also raises a fish. The fish he catches is as much the fish you could have caught. You want the other person to succeed, because he wants you to succeed.

Same-same when I was teaching the lower-division rhetoric series, aka, Comp 101. Some of my students came into the class already writing well and left just the same. Some came into my classes having been failed out of other instructors’ classes. It wasn’t that they couldn’t write. It was that they thought they couldn’t write for having been told so most of their life. What they lacked wasn’t the ability to say what they thought or felt, but to see marks on a piece of paper as means to grab a reader’s attention and to engage with him or her on turf they could make their very own. In short, the point I hammered on was they had “a voice”, and they needed to own that voice, because it was no one else’s.

At the end of the quarter, all student were thrown into an auditorium for 2 days running and given this 90-minute assignment, whose combined grade was the whole of their grade for the course. Using description and narration, SHOW --not tell-- how some person or event in your life influenced your attitude toward ‘honesty’. (or some other equally abstract quality). Afterwards, the five or six instructors of the various sections would gather and grade the papers on a scale of 1 to 4 (roughly, grades of ‘A’ to ‘F’). No instructor graded his own students’ papers. Consistently, the other instructor would gripe to me, “Charlie. Your students can’t write for beans. Look at the spelling mistakes, Look at the grammar.”

I’d retort. “Was the voice authentic and compelling? Did the writer succeed in making his point? Did he meet the objectives of the assignment?”

“Well, yeah,” they’d concede. “But I’m going to have to mark the paper as ‘2’ and not a ‘1’.”

Not a one of my student ever failed that exam. Not a one ever was given a ‘D’ (and this was from instructors hostile to me who had likely failed some of those same students the previous quarter). A few caught ‘C’. A few caught 'A’s. But the bulk of them earned a ‘B’, because I had done my job, and they had done theirs, all without benchmarking to no other standard than those that were self-set.

[LisaM]

Arindam,
First of all, I love this story! Second, hard to imagine that you taught composition because I think of that as subjective, and the tendency in technical trading is objective. Now I will be paranoid about my grammar here. Sigh. I’m glad you gave those students a chance to be seen a different way. Not everyone can conform to the mold, but everyone has their strengths.

Sadly, I lean so objective that I never saw it as comparing myself to others, simply comparing my swing trading results to the other investments I could have been in instead (opportunity cost analysis). If I can’t do better than an index fund, I’m wasting time. Except that it’s fun, but that’s not enough.

You taught at a college on the quarters system? Those are not common these days.

[Arindam]

Lisa.

I loved the quarter system, both as grad student at Berkeley and later as an instructor at OIT. The pace is fast. The goal posts are obvious.

As for the “grammar” and “mechanics” stuff that most confuse with “good writing”, that’s something any competent secretary or editor can clean up, and those things have nothing to do with ‘composition’ (at least as I taught it).

Try this exercise sometime. Close your eyes and have someone read to you. Can you see how the words are spelled? Can you see whether they confused ‘it’s’ for ‘its’? Without knowing the author’s name, can you guess age, gender, stance, experience, or character quality just from the words they choose to use and how the author delivers them sequentially in time ?

“Call me Ismael. Some years ago, never mind how many…”

Ten words, and you’re hooked by Melville and his tale of the chase for a white whale.

And once you’ve got that riff started, and the audience hooked, you can take them wherever you want. You control the narrative, and you can be bold or shy, serious or silly as you see fit.

Think back to your days in comp classes and the dread of having to read your paper aloud before the class. Within weeks, I had my students rushing to volunteer to read what they had just written, because they wanted to share, and they knew they had a welcoming audience in their fellow classmates. It was that developed self-confidence that got them through that godawful, 2-day, final exam. They walked into that auditorium knowing --from having done it-- that they could run a riff on paper and that the graders could just go pound sand if they didn’t like the spelling and mechanics.

Yeah, yeah. Ultimately, the editing needs to be done. But that’s a very late stage in the comp process, and something even an idiot computer can do, though not very well, nor very gracefully, and certainly not very uniquely. The stuff produced by spelling and grammar checkers is uniformly soulless stuff that could benefit from the inclusion of a few "mistakes’.

PS. For being an INTJ, I can move between the “white-collar” world of class rooms, academic journals, and philosophy conferences and the “blue-collar” world of hard hats, tool boxes, chain falls, and overhauling ship’s main engines. Both are just trouble-shooting and problem-solving, and in either, it’s easy to tell who’s good at their job and who’s not. So, add another book to your list: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

[Arindam]

@LisaM

If I can’t do better than an index fund, I’m wasting time.

Lisa,

If that’s want you want to be your goal, then that’s your choice to make. But you should ask yourself whether that is your own idea or something them selling indexes want you to think. Also, as the recession/depression deepens and the customary benchmark, the SP500, goes down, down, down, will you chase it? Will you comfort yourself by saying you lost less than it?

When the bulls are running, a no-brainer index fund is good way to go if one wants to be what Graham calls a ‘defensive investor’. But when the bears are prowling and growling, active management is the safer play, and Quill’s methods applied to inverse funds would be a good way to go with a part of one’s assets under management.

Track down the recent interview with Danielle Demartino Booth. Things are going to get ugly. There’s no avoiding that, and in that environment, the game becomes survival.

[gdett2]

Hi @buynholdisdead, @Arindam, @Quillnpenn & all,

Busy the last couple days.

First, thank-you all for the responses. I gleaned something from every one.

I cleaned the charts I was using but they still did not tell me what I was looking for.

Then I saw Quill’s chart on a different thread and picked at it until I got this:

Much simpler.

Now I clearly show the same points as Andy had here:

Lisa, I will save a screen shot each day on a couple of these to see how the labels progress each day. I notice on LABU using these charts that March 24 was the last label, a buy, with additional ups and downs after. I don’t know if there were labels in the April 17 to 24 period that dropped off.

I believe by comparing the “messier” chart with the “cleaner” one, I can look at the parabolic, RSI, etc and try to stay away from some of the questionable moves.

@buynholdisdead

I do not use stockcharts so can’t fool with it but I noticed that your price labels have a lot less noise than Gene’s price labels do. Meaning Gene has a lot more price labels.

I found the answer (example above). They have a few different products on the site. I started in SharpCharts and found the simpler display by chopping into the ACP StockCharts. The defaults are messy!

Gene
All holdings and some statistics on my Fool profile page
https://discussion.fool.com/u/gdett2/activity (Click Expand)

[physician]

Arindam or Quill,
I have a question. The UCO chart just gave a green bar for today which isn’t over. Does one wait until the end of the day and see how the day turns out or buy when the bar turns green? The chart I am using is SimonSez3. Its showing a green bar on both the 1 month and 2 month now whereas yesterday at the close it was arc and red. I thought on the 2 month and day setting it would not give the indicator until the close of the market…doc

[buynholdisdead]

That looks good Gene. Now on April 7 and 8th how would you play that? Yes that April 24th looks like it would have been a problem too!

Andy

[gdett2]

Hi @buynholdisdead,

On the TECS chart:

The “bottom” label is on the 5th, so buy on the 6th. Looks like a top around 23.25

The “top” label is on the 25th, so sell on the 26th. Looks like a bottom around 23.00.

Depending on the exact buy/sell, it could have lost money.

The May 1st label of 21.28, buy on the 2nd for a max of 22.60-ish.

That is my understanding of it …

And currently, it is below 22.58 …

Gene
All holdings and some statistics on my Fool profile page
https://discussion.fool.com/u/gdett2/activity (Click Expand)

[Arindam]

“The UCO chart just gave a green bar for today which isn’t over. **Does one wait until the end of the day and see how the day turns out or buy when the bar turns green?”

Doc,

It’s far too early in the day for me to start cussing. But your question is exactly the sort of thing that annoys me. Who gives FF what SS3 is or isn’t and what its “rules” are?

What should matter to you is the bet you’re trying to make (or not) on the underlying, namely, the price of crude --or whatever UCO tracks. Next question: "How do you want to express that trade, and in what time frame do you want to do it?

If you don’t know exactly what to do when confronted with every set of conditions you encounter, then you don’t have a trading plan. Period. You’re just bouncing off the halls, knee-jerk reacting to flickering lights on a screen.

If you want to trade intra-day, then do so. If EOD, then do so. Seriously, you need to go back in time a couple of months (or years) and walk the tape forward, one bar at a time and pay attention to what the tape --THE TAPE, not a bunch of rules you didn’t write-- is telling you to do. When you begin to see patterns, you write them down as follows: If conditions ‘X’ occur, it seems to be prudent and profitable to do 'Y". That becomes your trading plan: the set of rules you wrote, the set of rules you understand, the set of rules you trust, the set of rules that are yours and no one else’s.

Why did UCO, DBO, etc. jump today? Who knows? Likely, the demand/supply factors changed. Also, given that oil had become so dramatically oversold, some of the price jump can be explained by mean-reversion. Also, today seems to be ‘Relief-Rally, Risk-on Friday’, and everything is catching a bid (except the stuff that’s an obvious short on ‘optimism’, such as the PMs).

Arindam

[Quillnpenn]

Doc,

what we are looking at today is live. We don’t do EOD (end of day) trading.

=

For the people who are coloured blind and just follow the rules for the ARCs. Now observe todays OHLC. It opened on the low side and it is moving north. So we have committed to buying UCO after Selling SCO first.

For exercise DOC: find me any losing trades since September of 22 to the present. On 9/2/2022, you bought FTNT with $ 10,000.00. At each sale, you will compound the profits plus principal. Using a stock analysis program, it will probably say you lost your Tommy John underwear.
Swing Traders since September had 7 out 7 successful trades with Zero losses.

Charts again DON’T lie, people do.

Quill -

[buynholdisdead]

Just in case you missed this Doc. Here are Quill’s rules.

Simon Sez III in review

Simon Sez III Wikipedia says that "Simon Says "is a children’s game for three or more players. One player takes the role of “Simon” and issues instructions to the other players, which should be followed only when prefaced with the phrase “Simon says”. Players are eliminated from the game by either following instructions that are not immediately preceded by the phrase, or by failing to follow an instruction which does include the phrase “Simon says”. It is the ability to distinguish between gen…

Simon Sez II in review

re: Simon Sez in review II, III, IV re: Petty Ca$h re: Ellevest.com Simon Sez II. “Wait-one bar ARC to ARC” per Simon’s Werld® rule signal ** Re: Barchart.com re: Stock Market Quotes, Stock Charts, Market News - Barchart.com When an ARC aka Smiley Face appears to do the following: 1 ) For the TOP ARC, we wait and wait until the next day when the price drops below the high signal to SELL the stock. 2 ) For the BOTTOM ARC, we wait and wait until the next day when the price bar is rising up…

Andy

[LisaM]

Gene, Your chart looks more like the setup I have in stockcharts right now. I don’t know for sure, but the only possibility for a place where a label might have appeared and dropped would have been on the 23rd. It could have been the lowest low for a while. But I don’t think they would have labeled it because the next day opened lower than the close on the 23rd. I have tried to search stockcharts for how it places these labels, but have not been successful so far. It would be nice to know. Keeping screen shots will be helpful. Sometimes I do, but I have not been consistent in that. I think you will be happier with this cleaner chart. Thanks for letting us know that the big difference in the amount of price labels was switching to ACP instead of SharpCharts. If I see anymore label moves, I will post them here so we can all learn from it.

[LisaM]

Is anyone else thinking XLE might be a good idea for buy today?

[Quillnpenn]

Doc:

Re: Simon Sez III

Are you into Crypto coins, are you a nervous nelly or do you have nerves of steel.

= You Swing Trade the same way with Simon Sez III. The following chart is daily followed by a 4 hour chart of which I look at all day long using my Egg timer.
= Daily -

= 4 hour -

Some folks will use some kind Analytical tools that will be saying Swing Traders will be losing their Tommy John Underwear. Charts don’t like, people do.

Money talks, BS walks. With the above charts, find me a losing trade.

At every buy signal place, a dollar amount.

I am showing the money as Jerry Maguire is screaming " Where is the Money".

Commission-free Stock Trading & Investing App | Robinhood

your allowed to place a dollar amount when asked to Buy in or Sell in for the Cryptos

and buy in shares or sell in shares for regular stocks.

Quill - a poor church mouse scratching for a living as a Swing Trader.

[Quillnpenn]

re: XLE
It is certainly Ollie !
If you have Stock charts, look at the right hand side and click on the Globe ICON which will show all of them doing well today. Some will have to wait for a buy signal.

The only chart missing is XRT

Enjoy the rest of the trading day

Quill -