I was looking at JTH's fantastic new charts. His recent chart shows how overbought the market appears. To me, it looks as though it could technically stand for a 14.6% correction. With the recent 1% correction... I tend to wonder if we are heading for a rough January.
Here's my take in things. I think we had milder December than expected/anticipated. When you couple that with a slow start in January... It give one reason to pause. 2014 will be a tougher year to grab what the Autotracker Leaders got in 2013. I think 38% increase is a bit out of reach, and 25% will be a better top number.
Why? I'm new at this... But I do see a few key thjngs: one of the bigger things for less earnings: the Feds drawing back their buying. Slowly... But possibly at a faster rate that investors will care to see. The uncertain position of how much the Feds will scale back on QE, will cause big mood swings. I can see the market having triple digit losses right before the Feds make their announcements... And then a quick turn around where they have a nice day where everyone will see a 1% pop or something. Then... A bunch of days at .15% and similar numbers until the next big news day. That seems to be the big cycle. This year... I think the timing of the QE taper("QET effect".... I'll trademark that for now... Lol) will be who mrises to the top of the Auto Tracker and who goes towards the bottom.
So... What goals are you setting right now? BT is reaching beyond $1.5mil. I'm simply looking for another year of learning and applying the basics.
How will this year go?
My goals are to basically grab a humble 1.5% each month (average). Not too bad. 18% is what my goal is. Limit the losses, grab the gains. I'm basing a lot of this off of a simple two day knee-jerk reaction in Jan, but something still tells me 2014 won't be as easy. Then again.... That makes it better for me to learn new tricks. Something different than Buy and Hold. Lol
Jan:
i think I am going to wait till mid-week to see what the market does. My goal prior to Jan was to be all in on the first of the month, and then around mid-jan or so go to safety to try to time the week of bad earnings (that may be the third week of Jan historically. I'll have to double check). But then jump back in for the last week of Jan. The "almanac" basically states that Jan is the temperature gauge for the market. With that, I firmly believe that investors will refuse to allow Jan to be a bad month. They want the warm fuzzies that a good Jan can bring them. Otherwise the year could be choppier than expected.
Other thing to consider... Did we already have our Jan in Dec? Our Dec in Nov? Nov in Oct? And our Oct in Sep?
That worries me a bit. Are we technically a month ahead of schedule? Too get back on schedule, I am assuming be may have a blah Apr/May. Possibly a few good Summer months. Then a normal rotten September rather than the one we had. This year's Sept was Aug. August made us all doubters.
Thats my speculation for now
