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Strategies & Market Trends : The 56 Point TA; Charts With an Attitude -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bdog who wrote (31816)	8/31/1999 11:38:00 PM
From: Alski	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 79230

bdog, It turns out the tech stocks are mostly too expensive for me to play, at least the way I did in the contest. I did make a little real money on a few of them, like WDC, though. (thanx Ivan ;-) The contest rules were $10K/day into 6 issues. If I tried to do that with $1K/day or with fewer issues, the only one making any profit would have been my broker. I am thinking about rolling over some 401k/pension $ into a self directed IRA and using a similar system, however. It's a pretty simple system for an Attitude seminar grad. Pick a fixed universe of stocks (contest was 71, all techs) that you can get to know and trust. Then zip through a set of tech charts on each one every night. I pretty much don't like Dougr's fav, Parity, but the group and batch functions sure made pretty quick work of it. The first chart I looked at on each was price with a 20/2BB overlay in pane 1, volume in pane 2, SMIplex (I think) in pane 3, and 8,3,5,E stochs in pane 4. I looked for positive crossovers (sometimes "about too"s) in the lower half of the chart on both the SMIplex and 8,3,5,E stochs. For the ones that passed that screen then I went to the individual SMI's (or scatter) and the 89,3,5,E stochs to narrow it down. (Does this sound like the beginnings of that "Star Dust" scan, or does this one already have a name?) Final selection was based on some more of the Attitude doodads. I think there was only one day were I had to stretch to pick six. I remember thinking to myself, "if this were real money, tomorrow would be a good cash and golf day." That turned out to be the day Doug asked y'all to resurrect the Nasty Down Day scan. Anyway, I had some real losers and missed some big gainers; but, obviously, the average worked out OK. I think the discipline of having to pick 6 created some useful diversification, even though they were all techs and sometimes all my picks were in the same sub-sector. Not exactly what a financial planner would call diversification, but a lot better than betting on only one horse. An interesting impression I have is that my best days, relative to the others in the contest, were the down days. I would move up through the pack by loosing very little, or even making a bit, while everyone playing internuts lost all their shirts. Then, there would be those inutty days where the contestants with a portfolio of exclusively inuts would leap way ahead. Sort of like the hare and the tortoise. As fun as those "hare" raising days could be, I think with real money the tortoise would definitely sleep better, and end up winning the race after compounding. Anyway, after adjusting for the bogus "commissions" of the contest I think my real returns would have been about 10% for July and 15% for Aug. I don't have the data to adjust for the AM gaps that couldn't have been played with real money, but I think there were only a few. So, maybe the system might good for 7%/mo. That's about 100% in 10 months. Not too shabby, returns I think a lot of people could live with;-), but also not exactly tested over a wide variety of market conditions. Now I just have to learn how to turn all that into a scan and pick my "universe" of stocks. Aren't you sorry you asked? FWIW...Alski