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Weekly Essays on Investing
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 blue 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 07-23-10 - Unusual Uncertainty
Market Dynamics letter for 07-16-10 - How To Find The Potential Winners In The Stock Market
Market Dynamics letter for 07-09-10 - An Investment Panel And The Nifty-Fifty
Market Dynamics letter for 07-02-10 - What Happens When A Speculative Fad Tops Out
Market Dynamics letter for 06-25-10 - Stock Prices Are Not Just Numbers, They Are Numbers With A Context
Market Dynamics letter for 06-18-10 - The Stock Market Feedback Loop
Market Dynamics letter for 06-11-10 - The Neglected Factor In Successful Portfolio Management
Market Dynamics letter for 06-04-10 - Every Stock Should Pass The Performance Test
Market Dynamics letter for 05-29-10 - Fundamentals Versus Charting - Mutually Exclusive? Part 1
Market Dynamics letter for 05-21-10 - Buy and Forget
Market Dynamics letter for 05-14-10 - How Relative Strength Can Help Long-Term Investors
Market Dynamics letter for 04-30-10 - Good Stock Buy Ideas Often Become Contagious
Market Dynamics letter for 04-23-10 - Stock Prices And Randomness
Market Dynamics letter for 04-17-10 - Finding Stocks With Major Bases
Market Dynamics letter for 04-11-10 - No Chinese Wall In Japan
Market Dynamics letter for 04-02-10 - Who's The Patsy?
Market Dynamics letter for 03-26-10 - Point And Figure Charting Is So Old-Fashioned As To Be Useless
Market Dynamics letter for 03-19-10 - I Want To Buy Losers
Market Dynamics letter for 03-12-10 - How To Know Which Stocks To Avoid
Market Dynamics letter for 03-05-10 - The Best Time To Buy A Stock As A Long-Term Investment
Market Dynamics letter for 02-26-10 - The Analyst Says Buy - But The Chart Says Sell
Market Dynamics letter for 02-19-10 - The TPARC Report - What Is It
Market Dynamics letter for 02-15-10 - Stocks With Undiscovered Investment Potential Are Always In The Minority
Market Dynamics letter for 02-05-10 - Every Stock In The Portfolio Must Earn Its Keep
Market Dynamics letter for 01-30-10 - Keep The Portfolio Fresh And Performing Well
Market Dynamics letter for 01-23-10 - You Cannot Make Money In A Stock By Yourself
Market Dynamics letter for 01-16-10 - JCG - Randomness And Stock Price Trends
Market Dynamics letter for 01-09-10 - The Stock Market Is Efficient And Only The Fundamentals Determine Stock Prices
Market Dynamics letter for 01-02-10 - Dealing With Stocks In Long-Term Trading Ranges
Market Dynamics letter for 12-26-09 - Is It Still Feasible To Be A Long-Term Investor?
Market Dynamics letter for 12-19-09 - Hidden Information And The Stock Market
Market Dynamics letter for 12-11-09 - The Advantages Of Being A Good Seller
Market Dynamics letter for 12-04-09 - A Voting Machine
Market Dynamics letter for 11-27-09 - A Good Offense AND A Good Defense
Market Dynamics letter for 11-20-09 - Randomness Makes Stock Charts Absolutely Essential
Market Dynamics letter for 11-13-09 - Was It Just Luck?
Market Dynamics letter for 11-06-09 - The Dollar Carry Trade
Market Dynamics letter for 10-31-09 - How Do You Know When A Stock Gets To Be Too Cheap?
Market Dynamics letter for 10-23-09 - A Faulty Assumption About Stock Investing
Market Dynamics letter for 10-16-09 - Successful Portfolio Management Depends On Chart Analysis
Market Dynamics letter for 10-09-09 - Successful Stock Investing Is A Two Step Process
Market Dynamics letter for 10-02-09 - Focus On The Major, Long-Term Trend
Market Dynamics letter for 09-25-09 - The Trouble With Stock Market Predictions
Market Dynamics letter for 09-18-09 - Using Long-Term Charts To Control Risk
Market Dynamics letter for 09-14-09 - Stock Prices Represent Expectations
Market Dynamics letter for 09-04-09 - A Biased Random Process
Market Dynamics letter for 08-28-09 - Stock Charts Ask The Right Questions At The Right Time
Market Dynamics letter for 08-21-09 - Everyone Knows Stock Prices Are Random
Market Dynamics letter for 08-14-09 - Four Years Of TPARC Reports - Lessons Learned
Market Dynamics letter for 08-07-09 - Randomness and Long-Term Trends of Stock Prices
Market Dynamics letter for 07-31-09 - Buying Begets Buying and Selling Begets Selling
Market Dynamics letter for 07-24-09 - The Mystique of Point and Figure
Market Dynamics letter for 07-17-09 - Fads and Herding Behaviors on Wall Street
Market Dynamics letter for 07-10-09 - Relative Strength - A Tool For Measuring Performance
Market Dynamics letter for 07-03-09 - The Desert Fox and Investing
Market Dynamics letter for 06-26-09 - Why Ignore Bad Performance?
Market Dynamics letter for 06-19-09 - The Activity That Most Portfolio Managers Neglect
Market Dynamics letter for 06-12-09 - The Simple Truth About Bad Performance
Market Dynamics letter for 06-05-09 - The Academic Condemnation Of Stock Charts Is Counterfactual
Market Dynamics letter for 05-29-09 - The Sell Decision Is Critical
Market Dynamics letter for 05-22-09 - Participation Versus Prediction
Market Dynamics letter for 05-15-09 - The Strange Case Of Baldwin-United
Market Dynamics letter for 05-08-09 - The Dynamics Of Stock Price Movements
Market Dynamics letter for 05-01-09 - The Future Does Not Exist Today
Market Dynamics letter for 04-24-09 - Why Do Most Institutional Portfolios Under-perform?
Market Dynamics letter for 04-17-09 - Distribution - Wall Street's Well Kept Secret
Market Dynamics letter for 04-10-09 - A Close Look At The Random Walk
Market Dynamics letter for 04-03-09 - Why Do I Use Charts?
Market Dynamics letter for 03-27-09 - In The Stock Market, You Can Make Your Own Luck
Market Dynamics letter for 03-20-09 - A Compass and A Speedometer
Market Dynamics letter for 03-13-09 - Why the random walk is mostly wrong, for most stocks, most of the time
Market Dynamics letter for 03-06-09 - Stock Charts Measure Trends - They Don't Predict
Market Dynamics letter for 02-27-09 - The 80/20 Rule For Stocks
Market Dynamics letter for 02-20-09 - How Can Charts Work, If The Stock Market Is Random?
Market Dynamics letter for 02-13-09 - Knowing Which Stocks To Sell
Market Dynamics letter for 01-23-09 - Who Needs A Second Opinion On A Stock?
Market Dynamics letter for 01-16-09 - Social Proof In Bear Markets
Market Dynamics letter for 01-02-09 - The Lesson Most CFAs Never Learn
Market Dynamics letter for 12-26-08 - A Mathematical Herd
Market Dynamics letter for 12-19-08 - The Case For Using Long-Term Stock Charts
Market Dynamics letter for 12-12-08 - The Mystique of Point and Figure
Market Dynamics letter for 12-05-08 - How To Find The Big Winners In The Stock Market?
Market Dynamics letter for 11-21-08 - Buy, Sell, Hold?
Market Dynamics letter for 11-14-08 - Managing For Better Performance
Market Dynamics letter for 11-07-08 - The Future In A Rear View Mirror
Market Dynamics letter for 10-31-08 - The Ultimate In Contrary Opinion
Market Dynamics letter for 10-24-08 - The Vix - An Indicator of Fear
Market Dynamics letter for 10-17-08 - The Future's Not Ours To See"
Market Dynamics letter for 10-10-08 - A Very Common Mistake By Investors
Market Dynamics letter for 10-03-08 - Don't Fight The Fed
Market Dynamics letter for 09-26-08 - The Random Walk Hypothesis - Truth Or Nonsense
Gap in the preparation of the newsletters
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?
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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