The State is Back
After a month’s break, we’re going to start publishing the free daily State of the Market report again…version 2.
For the uninitiated, the SOTM report is not one of our proprietary strategies. The State is simply a daily snapshot of what some of the simple free strategies we’ve talked about on this blog are saying about the market for the next trading day.
Being without the report for the last month reminded me why we launched it in the first place. Because (a) most readers don’t have the technical wherewithal to follow some of the strategies, and (b) without a central location for readers to see all the strategies in one place, they tend to be dust in the blogosphere wind – I hope the SOTM helps readers to stay focused on things that work.
A Few Changes to the SOTM
First, we did away with the single “aggregate prediction” that combined all of the short, intermediate, and long-term predictions. Folks were way too focused on that single number, but that missed the point of the report.
Unlike the MarketSci strategies which signal very clear and concise trades, the SOTM report has multiple uses depending on the individual investor. Short-term traders (like us) might more heavily weight short-term predictions, expecting to make big position changes daily. Less aggressive investors might focus on the longer-term predictions, expecting to just catch overall market themes. This new report tries to respect that difference.
And second, we tried to make each strategy on the report a bit less “binary”. Generally speaking, when we test ideas on this blog they tend to be either “all in” or “all out”. That’s fine for a proof of concept, but there are usually some pretty simple ways to modify those simple strategies to take a more scaled approach.
For example, rather than just use 50/200-day moving average crossovers for the Golden Cross, we take the average result of 50/150-day, 50/175-day, 50/200-day, close/150-day, close/175-day, and close/200-day variations. In future posts I’ll lay out more specifics re: all strategy modifications.
Other Stuff
We’ll be adding a detailed description of how the report is calculated later this week. It’s similar enough in spirit to the old report that I wanted to go ahead and push it out there now sans-details. More to follow.
Also remember that we have special RSS or Email feeds (different than our regular blog feeds) that you can join to be notified when the report is updated after the close each day.
Happy Trading,
ms
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Filed under: State of the Market Report | 5 Comments
Michael, thanks. You are correct in that it is very helpful to see all these strategies in one place.
Glad to see this is back – havent started on my own state of the market report unfortunately…. but it will be on my new year resolution list…
How was skiing and Korea? Are you still over there?
It just started snowing here in London and I really feel like boarding!… while being stuck in the office :((
RE to Jez: Skiing was great – a little early in the season, but most of the runs were still open. Food was amazing – the Other takes sniffing out good restaurants very seriously, so we tried all sorts of Korean food I’ve never had (but I’m paying the price for it now). Back in Taipei (my second home) for the next 6 weeks or so. michael
Thanks, good to have the SOTM back, I look at it mostly for the abnormal market filter.
RE to James: thanks, I put the AMF at the top of the report this time because I think it’s such an important concept, but it was buried down in the report in the old version. Always good to hear from folks making use of it. michael