FACT: If investors make money, they remain engaged in the stock market with all its splendor and immense potential. If they lose money, they usually lose interest and move on. Over the past two decades, my role as I've embraced it has been to help you maximize those positive probabilities that make you money.
If you are willing to get engaged, I will provide you with an entire smorgasbord of probability enhancers. Let's call them Level I enhancers. These are the 10 essential foundations of your investing which Grayson and I wrote about in much detail in our book, Tensile Trading.
For those of you not familiar with our methodology, these are the 10 essential stages:
- Stage 1: Money Management
- Stage 2: The Business of Investing
- Stage 3: The Investor Self
- Stage 4: Market Analysis
- Stage 5: Routines
- Stage 6: Stalking Your Investments
- Stage 7: Buying
- Stage 8: Monitoring
- Stage 9: Selling
- Stage 10: Revisit, Retrieve, Refine
Every season in sports, you hear the same refrain. Pick your favorite league and you will hear it said that teams need to get back to the basics. The basics and the foundations are always what's important. So too with investing, The 10 foundations of investing must be revisited on a regular basis before one can move on the Level II. This blog is mostly about what I'm labelling Level II enhancers.
Your investment profits are based on probabilities. There's no such thing as a 100% certainty trade that will generate a profit. But I can confirm from experience that by piling on a number of the key probability enhancers and by consistently investing with the winds of probability at your back, profits will magically appear in your account.
These Level II Enhancers are what we detail in Stage 4 (Market Analysis) of our book and in Stage 5 (Routines).
At this juncture, I'd like to step back a bit and share with you the two objectives in my writing the Traders Journal blog for over 11 years. My first goal is to "inform" you. As an educator (and full-time investor), I'm trying to acquaint you with the most useful investment tools and to appraise you of what is required to become a consistently successful and profitable investor. My second objective is to " motivate" you. If I don't excite you to take action or to inspire you with a spark of self-reflection that says "yeah, I want to do better," then my blogs will be little more than bubble gum for the mind.
So in an attempt to light that spark, I'd like to ask you to focus on your diligence here. Diligence is an attribute that all successful investors possess. There's no such thing as having too much diligence when it comes to investing. Diligence is what facilitates you working constantly towards perfecting your charts, indicators, ChartLists and routines. Diligence is what drives you to sort through the mountains and valleys of investing information. Embrace this reality: profits are the personification of diligence.
Now back to Level II. It's all about organizing your analysis, charting the most appropriate indicators, devising the most relevant routines and timeframes to fit your personal investment style. Level II is all about the most correct daily, weekly and monthly routines that capture the majority of these probabilities.
In the StockCharts.com universe, all this is synonymous with your individual collection of ChartLists. Think of it as your garden from which you grow profits. So....it's Springtime. There's much to do to promote new growth and fresh beginnings. It's a great time and an appropriate season to revisit your own garden indoors or out. In the investment arena, the metaphor is your personal assortment of ChartLists. This is indeed your financial garden from whence springs your portfolio's profits.
Your garden of ChartLists will only bloom profits if you judiciously fertilize it, water it and weed it. Fertilizing it requires that you populate your chartlist with the most appropriate tickers and indicators. Watering it requires that your routines (daily, weekly and monthly) are the best and most time efficient as possible. Weeding it requires that you jettison non-profitable indicators, charts and routines. The wrong ones will cost you precious time and cherished profits.
In closing, I submit to you that Grayson and I — hand-in-hand with thousands of users in our Stock Market Mastery ChartPack community — have been doing precisely this for over a decade. The result is one heck of a healthy garden, and you are always welcome to visit and harvest what you deem most appropriate. Warren Buffett once said, "There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult." The complete antithesis of his quote is the Stock Market Mastery ChartPack. It simplifies and routinizes the complexity of the stock market, thereby boiling it down to the essentials. With eye-opening transparency, the ChartPack garden will expose you to the most high-leveraged, most appropriate indexes, tickers, charts, indicators and routines for your consideration.
Unlike life and your average job, investing requires that you maintain the same personality with the same tools and the same routines every single day or week. Unapologetically, the reality is that your ChartLists and your routines are what will determine your success as an investor. The world is yours. GO FOR IT!
P.S. The latest ChartPack update reflects equities added and dropped from ALL key indexes. For example, with the S&P 500, Ceridian, Brown & Brown, and Match Group were added, while Perrigo Company, NOV, Inc. and Union Group were dropped. Index inclusion matters a lot! Just since being added to the S&P 500, Brown & Brown has risen 30% from $56 to $74.
Trade well; trade with discipline!
Gatis Roze, MBA, CMT
- Author, "Tensile Trading: The 10 Essential Stages of Stock Market Mastery" (Wiley, 2016)
- Developer of the "Stock Market Mastery" ChartPack for StockCharts members
- Presenter of the best-selling "Tensile Trading" DVD seminar
- Presenter of the "How to Master Your Asset Allocation Profile DVD" seminar
Trade well; trade with discipline!
Gatis Roze, MBA, CMT
- Author, "Tensile Trading: The 10 Essential Stages of Stock Market Mastery" (Wiley, 2016)
- Developer of the "Stock Market Mastery" ChartPack for StockCharts members
- Presenter of the best-selling "Tensile Trading" DVD seminar
- Presenter of the "How to Master Your Asset Allocation Profile DVD" seminar
