Every day on CNBC-TV they show a 200-day moving average line superimposed on the stock price history. It seems they give great credence to this manufactured line as it represents 10 months of price action. What is it? Does it really mean anything?

The line represents the addition of the closing prices of that particular stock, mutual fund or index for the past 200 trading sessions that have been added up and divided by 200. That is then placed on the chart at that point. For example if the price of the equity started at zero and went up exactly one point for 200 days the average would be 100. A dot is then place on the chart at 100 even though the equity price is now at 200. Each day the new closing price is added after dropping off price number 1 and the new group is added up and divided by 200. This is done each day. Nothing complicated.

Does this mean anything?

This is considered to be a very useful technical indicator, but like all technical indicators you must understand how to use it. There is one rule for any technical indicator: no single one is a Holy Grail for predicting future price action of a stock, fund or index. WAIT! Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

The 200-day MA is not a predictor, but it does establish the current trend of whatever you wish to measure that has a recurring event. You can use it for the average price of housing, cost of gold, global weather temperature, medical costs, etc., etc. that can then be plotted on a chart.

You don’t have to stay with 200 days. You may modify it to any number of days or time periods you wish from two on out past 200. Many technical analysts use 10, 20, 50, 100 and then plot these on the same chart simultaneously to see when one crosses over another. These are called oscillators and thousands of traders use them to determine buy and sell signals.

Because the 200-day MA is composed of 200 price entries it has been determined that it works best when used with something that has many factors represented. In the stock market this is indexes and mutual funds. Mutual funds are composed of many stocks or bonds and the price action of any single equity does not cause a major price swing.

If you will keep in mind that the 200-day MA will show only the major long term trend it can be a very useful investment tool.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

Inverted interest rates? What’s that? Who cares? Even if you don’t understand what Mr. Greenspan is saying (and almost nobody does) it is important to you because it could mean you might lose you job next year or have to cut back on some of the things you want to acquire.

It really is very simple, but most of the media broadcasters don’t understand it because they are reading from a script written by someone else who doesn’t understand it either. Let me take a whack at explaining it in plain language.

There are two kinds of interest rates – short term and long term. The amount of interest paid has to do with the amount of time that is involved. We are talking about long term and short term bonds that pay dividends. If you lend me a thousand dollars with the agreement I will pay you back in one year you can easily understand that the risk is less than if I agree to pay you back in 20 years. The amount of risk is reflected in the rate of interest. Longer is higher and shorter is lower. Pretty simple.

Now we throw the monkey wrench into the machinery. Greenspan arbitrarily sets interest rates rather than letting the market place determine them. The so-called Fed Funds rate is the short-term interest rate set by Greenspan that banks charge each other when one bank loans to another or from the Fed. The basic policy of banks is to borrow short and loan long. That means they borrow money at lower rates (5%) and loan out at higher long-term rates (6%). Unfortunately, we now have the monkey wrench that is ruining the machinery because the short-term rate is higher than the long-term rates.

This effectively cuts down on the amount of money banks have to loan and means the banks must cut back on loans for new business and loans for old business expansion. This is a very effective tool that our big money guru is using. Big G has said he wants to slow down the economy and he is doing it. He thinks a 2 ½% growth is fast enough; however, when you slow to 2 ½% from 6% that is 58%. Too much, too fast. What would happens if your company had 58% reduction in growth?

Money is the lifeblood of our economy. When you curtail the money flow it is like a person having congestive heart failure. Some people die and some businesses go bankrupt, but both must slow down drastically.

The amount of money flowing in our economy must be increased and the quickest way to do it is for Greenspan to reverse his course and start lowering the rates. Most of this break in the stock market can be laid at the doorstep of Mr. Greenspan. His micromanaging can lead to a recession.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

Today we are inundated with tons of information about the economy, stocks, government agencies and foreign governments. They show us charts and graphs of the increase/decrease in oil production over the last 5 years, the amount of maple syrup produced in Vermont for the past century, the time it takes to bounce a signal off the moon and all kinds of other nonsense that we can live without. The talking heads on the investment programs, both radio and TV, tell us how this is going to affect the price of certain stocks and the market in general. Well, maybe.

When you step back to get a better view of the market because the trees are in the way you really get a different view. No matter what stock or mutual fund you own there is one important factor that is causing all of them to change. It is the mass thinking of all the people who own equities of any type. The stock market is a reflection of this mass thinking and causes changes in human behavior. This mass thinking does not necessarily reflect what the economy is doing at any specific moment.

Take the euphoria of stock buyers at the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000. All the mass psychology was bullish and everyone knew the market was going to go higher. The economy knew better and stocks headed down. The market was a reflection of what we could not see.

Currently many people are becoming bearish and think the market is headed lower, but no one really knows until after the fact. It is dangerous to be either bullish or bearish at this moment. So what is the best course of action when you are not sure of what to do with your money? Keep in mind that protection of your capital, especially your retirement money, is a prime consideration. If you own a stock now that has been going up you don’t want to sell it, but you can protect yourself against loss and lock in profit by placing an Open Stop-Loss Order with your broker. Keep moving the stop up as the stock goes higher.

If you have a stock or fund that is going down you must either sell out or place an order to get out if it goes down further. Usually 10% is about right. If your stock is $40 place your stop at $36.

If the mass psychology becomes too negative it can cause massive selling and even the best equities get flushed. All boats go down when the tides goes out. If you do not have a loss limit in place at all times you will lose your investment capital. The example of this was what happened when the World Trade Center was destroyed. Selling was caused by mass psychology and had little to do with valuation.

It is a herd instinct and you don’t want to be led to slaughter will all the other dumb animals. Protect your money. Put in a stop today.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

Because you don’t feel too sure about which stock or mutual fund to buy you decide to become a member of an investment club. Each of the members contribute a certain amount of money each month and then meet to decide what to buy or sell.

It is a nice camaraderie, but what do you know about making money in the stock market? The members decide what services to buy to obtain information on stocks and funds. Certain members will be designated to do research on a particular stock and bring it to the next meeting.

The members become buried in gathering data – doing research and forget that the end result is to make money. It is relatively rare to do any technical analysis. They gather reports from so-called investment analysts at the big brokerage firms. Recently the Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating the recommendations of their in-house analysts because of the very poor results of their calls. Some have been accused of giving buy recommendations on stocks it was obvious were dogs. Let’s hope the SEC does something besides a slap on the wrist.

We used to have a guy where I was a broker who wrote reports. He was told to do a report with charts and graphs. He said, "OK, do you want it to be bullish or bearish?" He could slant it any way we told him using the same facts and statistics and never tell a lie. The small investor is at the mercy of these people.

One of the greatest sources of information is Morningstar. They have every bit of information that is available about a company and they will sell it to you at a reasonable price. My problem with all this information is there is one important thing they cannot tell you - if I buy it, will it go up?

After more than 30 years in the business I will tell you that all the information you can gather about any company or mutual fund is totally and completely worthless. Trying to pick a winning stock is very difficult so what I do is let a very smart guy do it for me and he does it at no charge. How? Simple. I hire the manager of a no-load mutual fund that is currently going up and I buy that. As long as his fund is advancing in price I will keep it and as soon as it starts down I sell it and find a new smart fund manager who can make money for me.

There is no such thing as a "good" mutual fund. At times they are good and at times they are bad. Good is going up. Bad is going down. If a fund has been advancing for more than 60 or 90 days at the rate of more than 2% per month it will show up on my Buy list. I don’t need to know anything else about it and no further research is necessary.

Show this to your investment club members. A chart is helpful, but the numbers will speak for themselves. The only research your club needs to do is find a no-load mutual fund that is advancing the most in the last 90 days. Forget about 3-year and 5-year performance. What has it done lately? Your club can be a winner every year.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

The recent criminal fiasco in the mutual fund industry is being used by Wall Street to persuade investors that market timing is a bad thing. The late trading by Janus, Bank America and several other well known mutual funds is falsely being called market timing.

Wall Street, better known as Maul Street to most investors, does not want to you to find out about market timing. The reason is very simple. If you learn to sell you might take your funds and do something intelligent with them.

First let’s understand what market timing is. Very simply it is a proven method that gives signals to buy and another signal to sell. Many of these methods are associated with stocks and mutual funds yet there are those that signal overall market conditions. We are on the verge of another sell signal for the general market and several market timers have already given those signals to sell. There are many excellent systems and they all beat the Wall Street lie of Buy and Hold. The key to all market profits is selling not buying.

The criminal acts of the mutual funds had nothing to do with this method. The hedge fund managers knew the stock holdings of the mutual funds in question and AFTER the market closed companies would make announcements of their earnings, new products approved by the FDA, legal actions, etc. that would definitely impact upon the stock price the NEXT day. If it was good news the fund would allow big money players to place their orders after all official trading stopped. That’s 4:00PM New York time.

The fund price might be $20 per share, but depending upon the amount of stock in their portfolio it might make the settlement price the next day as much as 5% higher. That doesn’t seem like much, but if you had shown a purchase of 10 million dollars on the close that day and sold it out the next day you would have a profit of $500,000. That is money removed from the fund that belongs to the shareholders. This is NOT timing. This is fraud and the parties should not only repay all those stolen monies to the fund, but should also see jail time and be banned from the industry for life.

If you want to find out more about market timing type in ‘market timing’ on your computer and do a search. There are scores of them, but you must do your due diligence to be sure that what they are telling you is true. Always ask for references. Make them prove what they say. Don’t bother to ask your broker as he will tell you the Wall Street lie that it doesn’t work.

Because of the precarious nature of this market I encourage you to look into this NOW.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

Wouldn’t it be nice if you were only in the stock market when it was going up and have everything transferred to cash while it is going down? It is called ‘market timing’ and your broker or financial planner will tell you “it can’t be done”. What that person just told you is he doesn’t know how to do it. He doesn’t know his job.

Even the Federal Reserve wrote an article saying that market timing does out perform the S&P500 index which is one of the best market directional indicators.

There are many advisory services that offer market timing. If you search on the Internet under “Market Timing” you will find them or you may look in various publications such as Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities magazine or Investor’s Business Daily newspaper. Once you have found several you will find that some have several buy and sell signals each year and a few average only one timing signal per year. Here it depends upon your personality and your approach to the market.

For the active trader the more signals the better and for the longer-term investor the slow signals are best. You will have to do your homework and will want to send for a trial subscription to their newsletters. You might have to try several until you find one you like.

Instead of subscribing to an advisory letter you may decide to make up your own timing signal. It will take some initial work, but once done you will not have to pay anyone else for the service.

Most of these timing methods use two a simple moving averages of from 50 days to 200 days plotted with the S&P500 Index or the NYSE Composite or the Nasdaq Composite if you are investing in the high tech stocks or mutual funds. Yes, this definitely works with mutual funds. The longer the time of the moving average the less frequent will be the Buy and Sell signals. The signal is generated when the index penetrates the moving average line. When the index is below the moving average and goes through it to the upside you have a Buy and visa versa for the Sell. Nothing complicated.

If you want to piggyback the work of Investor’s Business Daily look at their Mutual Fund Index where they show both a 50-day and 200-day moving average lines. Both of these methods gave sell signals last September/ October. Would your investments have been more profitable if you had gone to cash at that time? Probably. The 200-day line still has you in cash while the 50-day line had a Buy/Sell in January and a new Buy about April 20.

Basically what market timing does is protect you from any big loss in a bear market. The first rule for all smart investors is to protect their capital. If your broker does not know how to do this you need a new broker.

It’s your money. Keep it.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

Two weeks ago I wrote about what the Securities and Exchange Commission was doing to regulate the mutual fund industry to help the small investor, the “poor folks”. It really added up to zero.

Now the SEC is going to make new regulations for hedge funds to protect the rich folks. And it is more window dressing. In fact, it looks downright stupid. When I say rich folks it is because in order to qualify to invest in a hedge fund you must have assets of one million dollars and income of $200,000 per year for a single person and $300,000 for a couple. With this kind of money you can hire an attorney or financial expert to read the hedge fund document. Furthermore, the major investors in hedge funds are not little investors, but pension plans, endowments and universities that are supposed to be administered by professionals.

The SEC says they want to put in regulations to help prevent fraud. Hey, you guys, what about all the fraud you did NOT find in the regular mutual fund industry? They missed multimillions of fraud in standard “poor folks” mutual funds and now they want regulations to protect the rich folks. All this will do is create more useless expensive jobs in Washington. Every time you hire a new government worker it is the same as putting more tax on everyone, rich and poor.

The Senate Banking Committee voted it in by a 3 to 2 committee decision. Three Democrats for and 2 Republicans against. It is the usual liberal Democrat who wants “feel good” legislation that does no good, but tells the public “we care”. Such expensive nonsense.

And how are they going to put this new regulation into effect? More paperwork without question. The funds would be required to hire a Compliance Officer who would write out a set of trading procedures and a code of ethics. Because I have owned a regulated brokerage company I can tell you this is a pile of BS. The new compliance officer is paid by management. He is a toothless tiger. And the SEC will come to do an on-site audit every 2 to 5 years. Because my company was in Florida they did not show up until January or February.

What is most interesting is that there were only 46 hedge fund fraud cases during the past 5 years involving about one billion dollar. In an industry with more than $800 billion in assets this is a spit. Let the rich folks sue and don’t burden us “poor” taxpayers.

This new regulation means nothing and is merely a first step for more stringent rules to follow. It is another additional cost of doing business and adds to our taxes.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

Let’s first define insanity. It is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And that is what most investors do and they can’t understand why they are not able to make money in the stock market.

Do these investors need a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a talk with their minister or none of the above? I know, you think they should talk to their broker or their financial planner. Believe me, folks, these two are part of the problem and not the solution.

If they knew the answers everyone would be rich. Let’s go back and look at who taught these mavens how to invest. The Wall Street brokerage houses taught them or rather did not teach them the most basic rules of the game. Why? Because brokerage houses want you to buy (for commission) and they do not want you to sell even though that means another commission. There are two basic reasons they don’t want you to sell and it has nothing to do with that one selling commission.

If you sell you might take your money out of your account and that is one of the things the Maul Street crowd never wants to happen, but the most important is they make money when your account is invested. It is not a lot, but it in a nice steady 1% or more. You are their unspoken collateral in the worldwide money shuffle.

Any broker who suggests a customer sell is usually chastised in some way or just plain fired. A broker who allows large sums of cash to accumulate in customers accounts is told to invest (?) it or hit the road. The house (that’s the brokerage firm) does not want to see customers with big cash balances although there are times when that is exactly where they should be. Remember 2000 to 2003? During that three year period wouldn’t it have been better for your account to have had no stock or fund positions?

Brokers or financial planners are not taught simple methods to protect customer funds. And I mean simple. Too many folks during the 2000 debacle lost 40% of their money and more. There was absolutely no reason for this if basic money management techniques were instituted.

Customers could be made aware that they should not give back more than 10%, maybe as much as 15%, of their portfolio value when the stock market goes in the tank. That occurs on a regular basis. Declines in equities of 20% to 40% happen regularly and no customer should be mesmerized into holding during those periods.

During the 2000-2001 period there were less than 3% recommendations by brokers to sell and those sells were after the stock had crashed about 80% to 90%. It is too late then. Your money is gone. If brokers and financial planners had been taught to advise people to place 10% stop loss orders their retirement accounts they would be much fatter today.

Stop doing the same thing over and over again because of bad advice. Learn to sell when your position goes negative. Don’t be one of the insane.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

Who are the successful investors?

There are those who follow the advice of their brokers and financial planners or those who choose to use their own good judgment? If you care to compare the results of the past 4 years from 2000 to now I believe you will see who as done the best job.

In the old days at the Chicago stock yards they used to have an old sheep who led the lambs to the slaughter when they arrived on the train. It seems there were lots of investment sheep in 2000 that followed the advice of their brokers and financial planners and were slaughtered. Let’s hope you were not in that herd.

When the next train (bear market) arrives (and it will) in the station and you get off I hope you will not follow that old sheep. You have been given another chance to recoup some of your money (current bull market). Don’t be slaughtered (again).

The successful investor is one who thinks for himself. Are you an independent thinker or one of the sheep about to be cut into pieces? Do you relish the idea if thinking for yourself and participating in financial success? Of course, you will be scorned by Wall Street and their minions and told you need an “expert” to help you invest your money. We have seen what the “experts” did from 2000 on.

During the last 4 years I challenge you to check out the price of any growth, stock or index mutual fund in January 2000 and compare it with the price of today. The S&P500 Index lost 50% of it value and has rallied 37% from the recent low, but is still down 29% from the high of 2000. With the bull move of the last 8 months you won’t find very many, if any, stock funds that have come back to those old highs. Yes, there will be individual stocks that have made new contract highs, but very few of them have done well enough to get the poor sheep (pun intended) back to even.

For the past 100 years there have been consistent secular 16 to 18 year bull and bear markets, one after the other and within them have been shorter cyclical bear and bull markets where the thinking investor has been smart enough to be investing or be in a money market fund.

It is timing the long-term bull and bear phases and is relatively easy despite what Maul Street tries to have you believe. If your broker or planner has not learned how you need a new and smarter advisor. You, and only you, must break away from the herd to learn to think on your own to be a success in the market.

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870

The higher the market goes the more confusing are the "experts". In the September 14 issue of Investor’s Business Daily newspaper we find the great prognosticators such as:

Sheldon Jacobs, editor of No-Load Fund Investor newsletter quoted that he is recommending having more cash in your portfolio.

Louis Navallier, manager of three aggressive mutual funds, remains very bullish. He says now is the time to load up on tech stocks.

John Wallace, another mutual fund maven now has become positive toward small-cap stocks for his mutual fund.

Any time you need someone to agree or disagree with you on anything in the stock market you can find a Wall Street "expert" who will agree with you. There is an old saying "The market climbs a wall of worry" and the higher it goes the more worriers there are. Yes, it is scary, but you have to make your own decisions and you can’t listen to those people because if you check their past records you will find they have made some real "boo-boos". The experts are not as expert as they would like you to think.

Is there any way to figure out the stock market so you can have a good return on your money and still sleep at night? Yes, there is. You listen to the only "expert" you will ever have to. That is the market itself. And how do you do that? It is not as complicated as they would have you believe. Let me show you how simple it really is.

The first thing you need to know is if the market is going up or down. Right? You need a simple indicator. The plain vanilla one I recommend to the non-sophisticated investor is the S&P500 Index. Any time the S&P500 daily close is above its 200-day moving average the market is going up. When it falls below sell everything and go to cash. How simple can you get? You will find these numbers published every day in Investor’s Business Daily.

Even though I am considered a professional trader (17 years an exchange member and floor trader) I no longer try to pick individual stocks. It is just too much work so I let other experts do it for me - FREE. I only buy no-load mutual funds that are in the top performing (never mind the category) 1% of all funds and are outperforming the S&P500 Index for the past 12 months. Not 3 years, not 5 years.

Don’t get carried away with trading. The simple plan is watch the S&P500 Index and only look at your mutual funds once a month to be sure they remain in the top category. You will beat all the "experts".

Al Thomas’ book, "If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!" has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. Read the first chapter at http://www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Copyright 2005

al@mutualfundstrategy.com; 1-888-345-7870