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Weekly Newsletters
Discover The Amazing Power Of Point & Figure Charting
Essays in Positive Portfolio Management
These essays are sent out weekly and they cover various aspects of investing and portfolio management - Click on a red link to view the essay - the essay is in pdf format - be sure to read the "Manage the portfolio like a business" essay that follows the list of weekly essays.
Market Dynamics letter for 05-02-08 - How To Produce Better Investment Performance
Market Dynamics letter for 04-25-08 - A Defense Against Manipulation
Market Dynamics letter for 04-18-08 - The Decision To Buy A Stock
Market Dynamics letter for 04-11-08 - Lake Wobegone and Investors
Market Dynamics letter for 04-04-08 - Finding The Big Winners In The Stock Market
Market Dynamics letter for 03-31-08 - I haven't used point and figure charts for over 40 years because they don't work!
Market Dynamics letter for 03-14-08 - Greedy versus Fearful
Market Dynamics letter for 03-07-08 - The Lessons From Past Bear Markets
Market Dynamics letter for 02-29-08 - Manage The Portfolio As If It Were An NFL Team
Market Dynamics letter for 02-22-08 - If You Can't Predict - What Can You Do?
Market Dynamics letter for 12-28-07 - An Ounce Of Prevention
Market Dynamics letter for 12-21-07 - What Does A Hold Rating Really Mean?
Market Dynamics letter for 12-14-07 - The Secret To Really Good Investment Performance
Market Dynamics letter for 12-07-07 - Long Term Charts Work Best
Market Dynamics letter for 11-30-07 - Tides In The Stock Market
Market Dynamics letter for 11-23-07 - Participation Is The Key To Success In The Stock Market
Market Dynamics letter for 11-09-07 - Good Performance Is Where You Find It
Market Dynamics letter for 10-19-07 - Did The Market Smell A Rat?
Market Dynamics letter for 09-28-07 - A Classic Investment Tool Adapted For Modern Performance Investing.
Market Dynamics letter for 09-21-07 - The Performance Alarm
Market Dynamics letter for 09-14-07 - Overcrowding and Fads
Market Dynamics letter for 09-07-07 - This Stock Is Too Cheap - The Market Is Wrong
Market Dynamics letter for 08-31-07 - Some Stocks Trend - Others Don't
Market Dynamics letter for 08-24-07 - Strange Ideas About Investing - Buying Bargains
Market Dynamics letter for 08-17-07 - Strange Ideas About Investing
Market Dynamics letter for 08-10-07 - Stock Price Determination and Randomness
Market Dynamics letter for 08-03-07 - The Proper Commitment For Investors
Market Dynamics letter for 07-27-07 - Who Holds All These Bad Stocks?
Market Dynamics letter for 07-20-07 - This Stock Is Too Cheap
Market Dynamics letter for 07-13-07 - The Neglected Part Of Portfolio Management
Market Dynamics letter for 07-06-07 - Systematic Adaptation
Market Dynamics letter for 06-29-07 - It Is Not A Secret Message
Market Dynamics letter for 06-22-07 - The Dow Jumps Over The Moon
Market Dynamics letter for 06-15-07 - Complex Adaptive Markets
Market Dynamics letter for 06-08-07 - You Can See Good Performance
Market Dynamics letter for 06-01-07 - When a Bear Market In A Stock Ends
Market Dynamics letter for 05-25-07 - Investment Management As An Art
Market Dynamics letter for 05-18-07 - A Double Check On Wall Street Research
Market Dynamics letter for 05-11-07 - Why Follow A Trend?
Market Dynamics letter for 05-04-07 - Hypothesis Testing
Market Dynamics letter for 04-27-07 - Tracking Manipulation
Market Dynamics letter for 04-20-07 - A Mistaken Assumption About Making Money In Stocks
Market Dynamics letter for 04-13-07 - The Inner Circle
Market Dynamics letter for 04-06-07 - Support & Resistance - Extremes of Relative Value
Market Dynamics letter for 03-30-07 - Not All Stocks Can Be Above Average
Market Dynamics letter for 03-23-07 - Commitment - The Source Of Large Losses
Market Dynamics letter for 03-16-07 - Forensic Stock Charts
Market Dynamics letter for 03-09-07 - Why Use A Long-Term Chart?
Market Dynamics letter for 03-02-07 - When Is A Hold - Not A Hold?
Market Dynamics letter for 02-23-07 - The True Nature Of A Long-Term Trend
Market Dynamics letter for 02-16-07 - Magazine Covers and Contrary Opinion
Market Dynamics letter for 02-09-07 - A Spectacular Degree Of Skewness
Market Dynamics letter for 02-02-07 - 1929 - Rising Interest Rates and Killer Volatility
Market Dynamics letter for 01-26-07 - Successful Adaptation
Market Dynamics letter for 01-19-07 - When Is The Market Wrong?
Market Dynamics letter for 01-12-07 - Getting From Here To There
Market Dynamics letter for 01-05-07 - TANSTAAFL
You can subscribe to these free weekly discussions by sending an e-mail to clayallen@msn.com with "subscribe to weekly letters" in the subject line
Investing as a Business
You Should Manage The Portfolio Like A Business
Your Stocks are Your Employees
They Have A Job To Do!
You should manage your portfolio as you would manage a business. Your stocks represent your employees. They work for you and only through them can your business accomplish its goals. You must decide what tasks your workers are to perform and it is also up to you to define what constitutes acceptable job performance. It is your responsibility to periodically review the job performance of your workers against the standards of performance that you have defined. When their performance on the job becomes unacceptable - it is your responsibility to fire that employee and replace him/her with a worker who is judged to be more capable of getting the job done. If you do not upgrade your work force then the goals of the business will not be met and you might even be forced out of business. Firing workers is not pleasant but it has to be done or the business could fail. This activity does not require predicting the future but only the measurement of actual job performance. Poor job performance is not to be tolerated and since there is always a reason for poor job performance - the simple fact of unacceptable job performance is grounds for dismissal. In this way the portfolio can be kept fresh and the performance can be managed in a businesslike manner.
Poor portfolio performance is simply a result of holding too many poorly performing stocks for too long. Each investor is free to define his/her own standards of performance. But if performance standards are not established, the substandard performance of some stocks will drag the overall portfolio down. It is not a complicated process but it does require discipline and a willingness to act. It also requires a system to monitor and measure the performance of each stock. The Market Dynamics computer software provides just such a performance management system. Market Dynamics provides the essential feedback that allows an investor to quickly and effective evaluate the investment performance of each stock in the portfolio.
A weekly newsletter is sent out to subscribers by e-mail each week. This is in the form of a one page essay and I cover topics of interest to investors regarding relative strength, point and figure charting techniques, portfolio management topics and sometimes I share stories from my experience in the investment management business. These letters sometimes range into the psychology of investing and common mistakes that are made by investors. The field of investment management has intrigued me for years and I have collected numerous examples of investor behaviors that are very revealing in terms of human behavior and the stock market. Overall, I write these short reports to share my experiences in the market and what I have learned about successful investing - of course, P&F charting is a very large part of this effort.
Several examples of recent discussions of portfolio management are available for viewing and/or download.. These weekly essays are in Adobe Acrobat format so you may need to download the Acrobat Viewer from www.adobe.com. I have been writing these weekly letters for almost two years and a complete set of weekly essays is included on the software CD that comes with the free trial subscription.
Just click on a link to view the letter. These .pdf reports can be saved, printed or attached to an e-mail and sent to a friend or colleague.
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