Investor Insights:
My first job paid $0.75 an hour. That was in 1976.
It was a restaurant job. But back then, job duties werent well defined.
Bosses yelled things like: If theres time to lean, theres time to sweep and Do something, even if its wrong.
They expected us to work to receive that princely sum of $3.35 an hour in todays dollars.
I learned making money is hard. I also noticed some jobs were easier than others.
Bosses made more money in two ways. They did work. They also told us to work.
I saw it was possible to make money from the hard work of others.
I never forgot that lesson. Thats why I use technical analysis when looking at stocks.
Technical analysis focuses on price action. All I need to trade is my indicators and a stock symbol.
I dont worry about the companys name. I dont know what the company does.
When my indicators say buy, I buy. I hold until the indicators say sell.
I guess I think about stocks differently than many investors.
It seems fair to say most investors think of sales, earnings and other information when evaluating stocks. This information is the domain of fundamental analysis.
Thousands of investors analyze a companys income statement. They scour balance sheets and statements of cash flows.
Financial statements provide 156 different pieces of data. Investors do a lot with that data.
Consider sales. You can find the price-to-sales ratio by combining data from the income statement with the stocks price.
You could compare sales to earnings or any other data series. You can calculate the change in the sales over the past year or the past quarter.
There are thousands of ways to evaluate the companys sales.
This process can be extended to earnings, cash flow or any information in the financials. By one estimate, numbers in financial statements can be sliced and diced in 2,090,365 unique ways.
Smart people around the world are doing many of those calculations. Then they decide whether to buy or sell the stock based on their math. As they buy and sell, they move the price of the stock.
By following the price action, we let analysts do the math, and then we follow their models.
Research shows the current stock price is the result of all those models.
Eugene Fama won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics for showing new information affects prices almost immediately, which means that the market is efficient. In other words, the market price reflects the analysis of every investor analyzing the stock.
His work says if a stock is worth $430, the market price of the stock is $430. When the market price is $370, the stock is worth exactly $370.
Thats because the current price is based on all the information available to investors around the world.
I could certainly build a model and create my own price target. But other investors do that.
I dont need to duplicate their work. I see their work in the price action.
If their models say a stock is undervalued, they buy. With a little more economic theory, we see what happens next.
Each company trades a fixed number of shares. When there are more buyers than sellers for those shares, the law of supply and demand says the price will rise.
When the models say a stock is overvalued, sellers push the price down. Its also the law of supply and demand at work.
The up-and-down moves of stock prices simply reflect the fundamental models. By tracking price action, I can ignore the fundamentals.
Thats important because fundamentals change slowly. Fundamentals can also diverge from the price for extended periods of time.
Following fundamentals often means missing big price moves.
The chart of Bed Bath & Beyond shows how investors using fundamentals were led astray.
(Source: Standard & Poors)
In the chart, sales change just once every three months. Sales rose for three years until late 2018, while the stock price declined.
With falling prices and rising sales, the price-to-sales ratio declined. Value investors saw a bargain. Their indicators said buy, even as prices fell.
But remember, the price was falling. It still is.
Technical analysts focused on prices. They ignored the sales data. They avoided the stock.
In the end, the price was right.
This is one of those times its safe to ignore fundamentals.
This sounds obvious, but when prices are falling, investors lose money.
For some reason, falling prices attract fundamental investors. They often lose money waiting for the turnaround.
Eventually, if the company survives, the price will stop falling. Thats the time to buy.
Fundamentals will never highlight that moment. Only technicals will.
Collect Up to $2,500 Tax-Free From Your County Treasury [sponsor]
Have you staked your claim to as much as $2,500 in tax-free monthly income from your local county Treasury? Most every town across America offers it. Multimillionaires collect it every chance they get. Yet most middle-class families still havent taken advantage of it. Click here for more details.