We’re starting off the month of February on a good note. CLS rising 8%, META closing at a record high, APP rising 4% and AMZN gaining 2% today all contributed to our year-to-date gain of 7.7%. That compares to a YTD gain of only 2.7% for the S&P 500.
After the bell, Google announced earnings, and it looks like they missed a bit on expectations for Google Cloud growth. We’ll find out what AMZN says about their AWS cloud growth when they report earnings this Thursday.
CLS surged another 9% higher today, which brings our total gain in this stock to +27.9% in just the 4 business days since we re-purchased shares following their earnings report. This illustrates the point that just because we sold a stock because it fell below our 50-day MA rule doesn’t mean that we can’t buy it again after it meets our buying rules. In this case, CLS re-claimed its 50-day MA last Friday, and the earnings took a lot of risk out of the purchase.
This brings our YTD gain on our portfolio to +8.6%, and our overall 5-month gain to +30.6%.
AMZN reports earnings after the bell Thursday. Remember the rule I wrote about in my “Holding through Earnings” post a week ago? We only hold a stock through the earnings announcement if we have a cushion of a 15% gain or more on the stock. In the case of AMZN, our gain is 34.5%, so we’ll hold it through Thursday.
I hope you’re getting a good understanding of how all this rules-based robo-investing works. As I mentioned, any trading system has to be compatible with your temperament. This system happens to be compatible with mine for a portion of my portfolio. I’m not blazing any new ground here. Trend-following chart-based systems like this have been written about in at least a half dozen technical trading books written by well-known super-investors.