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Strategies & Market Trends : Bonds, Currencies, Commodities and Index Futures -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bearshark who wrote (8948)	1/1/2006 10:28:38 AM
From: Patrick Slevin	Respond to of 12411

I get a book on those stats twice a year from Taucher. An Almanac of stats. Mostly worthless stats, but sometimes interesting reading. Unfortunately the current one is at another home at the moment. The 2003 volume has a similar stat. "The strategy has averaged a gain of 1.89% over the period for the last 50 years." ....worked 42 of the last 50 years (84%) A chart is provided of the '96 rally which gained 0.33%. That chart shows a volatile Dow. slightly up, down, up, down. Really flat overall. ----------- The observation that occurs to me as a result of these stats is that the rally or lack of it does not mean a hill of beans. Two of the most impressive rallies of recent years were 1999 & 2000 with gains of 3.58% and 4.37% respectively. Yet the Dow High was in January 2000 @ 11,750. It's not much of a predictor of anything. It's just a gamble that if you take a position there is an 84% chance that you will walk away with a 1.87% gain. ------------ If any Holiday Dow strategy is worthwhile looking into, my guess it was a modified Dogs Strategy. I believe the way it went was to identify the highest yielding stocks in the Dow and buy the second, third and fourth ones. When I used to watch that Big MO was the second highest yield at least two years in a row and outperformed the DJIA both years. ------------- I'm curious to see how they jazz up the Retail numbers this year. I don't recall that the stores were exactly jumping with people this season.