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Strategies & Market Trends : Stochastics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jason Loren Bauer who wrote (417)	4/1/1998 12:38:00 PM
From: Wayners	Respond to of 927

<<I think the reason I've done well is that I take my profit early.>> Amen. I agree completely with that one. You can never go broke taking a profit. There is no reason to take chances holding stuff that doesn't still have a high probability of going up. I may miss out on profits by selling into a trend using 5 day stochastics--but I will always miss out on trend reversals and that's the important point. There's always greener pastures in the stock market where the odds are higher/more in your favor. There is never any excuse for holding a position where the risk has increased. <<There is a lot of money to be made using stochastics (backed up with some FA).>> Agreed. I limit my FA analysis to knowing when upcoming news is scheduled for. When is the next earnings announcment for the company I'm interested in? When are earnings due for the other companies in its sector,especially the leaders? I want to know approximately when earnings warning would come also. I also check the company's conference/trade show schedule. I've seen a lot of stocks jump just because of a show or conference is starting. I also don't care about past earnings and sales figures. They are meaningless. If I'm going to make forecasts for the future from historical data--its not going to be using sales and earning, its going to be using price and volume. Why try to forecast price from earnings and sales when you can make better forecasts directly from historical price and volume? Never could understand anyone trying to make forecasts of price based on past sales and earnings. Using FA, I also have no way to know how a new product will actually be received or how much in sales or earnings a new product will generate so basically I figure FA is a waste of effort--and not only that, it causes you to fall in love with companies which just clouds good judgement. P/E;s calculated on past earnings are equally meaningless. P/E's on analysts estimates are probably worthwhile, however the variations in what is considered overvalued or undervalued is so great that unless there is something grossly and obviously out of whack, I find those calculations as well to be often useless.