Talking Trends

From 2013 to early 2015 trend traders profit from a few large trends – crude oil falls 70%, stocks rise 40% and the U.S. Dollar rallies 20%. Since then, performance stagnates. Over the past two years, many markets move sideways and exhibit nasty V-shaped reversals. As a result, many trend following strategies take many small losses as they buy near tops and sell (or short) near bottoms.

I want to show you how and why trend traders have been losing money over the past two years. In the podcast, I discuss a couple of charts from the major sectors: Bonds, Currencies, Commodities and Stocks.

In these directionless environments, trend traders rely on risk management to keep losses small and simply wait it out until trends come back. When they do, they have the capital to take advantage.

I believe discussing the individual markets can help answer the question many have been asking since 2015: “Why are trend traders losing money?”.

Blog post: http://www.michaelmelissinos.com/blog/why-are-we-losing-money/

Disclosure

Past Performance is Not Necessarily Indicative of Future Results

This communication is for information purposes only and should not be regarded as an offer to sell or as a solicitation of an offer to buy any financial product, an official confirmation of any transaction, or as an official statement of Melissinos Trading LLC. All information is subject to change without notice.

These charts show examples of trends. Inclusion of a chart as a trend example does not imply any kind of recommendation to buy, sell, hold or stay out.

Since 1984, Berkshire Hathaway underperforms the S&P 500 more than half the time (4,198 out of 8,363 days). Yet, Berkshire doubles the S&P 500 in average annual returns and achieves a total return ~43 times higher.

Case in point: too much focus on short-term underperformance can inhibit us from capturing the long-term upside.

Blog Post: http://www.michaelmelissinos.com/blog/performance-on-any-particular-day-doesnt-matter/

Charts can deceive us. The same market displayed on different scales can distort our opinion on whether the trend is up or down and how strong the trend is. In this short article, I compare and contrast the look and feel of the stock market prices on both linear and logarithmic scales.

The linear chart looks and feels like a bubble. We see the parabolic nature of the uptrend and think “I’ve seen this pattern before (in 2008 Crude Oil, 2011 Cotton, 2000 NASDAQ and others)”. In linear-scale charts, early data cannot tell the full story.

The logarithmic chart doesn’t look and feel like a bubble. Unlike the “bubble” chart, the logarithmic chart below might leave you feeling that the stock market could rally another 100% to the top green up-sloping line. Here we can get more a feel of the ups and downs, especially in the early data. We can see the tail end of the post-Great Depression recovery (1929 top to new highs in 1954); the long sideways slog that is the 1960s and 1970s; again from 2000–2014.

Charts distort our opinions and feelings about markets. Personally, I prefer to get my hands on the daily price data and not use charts at all. With the hard data, I can test different ideas and theories; not be swayed by the look of the chart or have to worry about whether the market is in a bubble or not.

Charts here: http://www.michaelmelissinos.com/blog/bubble-or/

Brazil stocks, government bonds and currency suffer large one day losses last week on bribery allegations against their pro-business president. Markets, not liking this too much, quickly sell and the Brazil stock market finds itself limit-down; the currency (Real) down 6% and bonds down ~4%.

A few things to think about...

1) If you invest most of your money into one country, you put yourself at risk of a Brazil-like event wiping out a good chunk of your cash.

2) In the event of an event like this, and you see your accounts down 10-20% in an instant, do you know what to do? Do you have a plan for handling this? Or do you just let it ride and expect to be bailed out by a rebound?

3) Reading headlines, without a rules-based plan in place, can scare you out of your investment - possibly near the bottom of the move. In the U.S., this occurs most recently in late 2008-09.

Blog Post: http://www.michaelmelissinos.com/blog/the-brazil-bloodbath-a-couple-of-comments/