The Tasgall Group

I have never made money in the markets.? If you follow my advice, that is akin to strapping on a a piece of fishing line to your ankles and trying to bungee jump off a 1,000 foot bridge…..? (more…)

Ok, as promised, a primer on density profiles or meta-MarketProfiles or whatever you want to call them.

(more…)

As soon as I saw the chart in Jason’s post, I could tell there was a profile story there. I’m getting better at “seeing” the profile in a barchart. Here is the 90-minute profile for copper futures:

(more…)

We’ve spent some time in person discussing “magnet” or “density” points but there hasn’t been any data thrown up on the blog. Given the hooplah over yesterday’s bounce (anybody smell a dead cat?), I thought I’d use it to take a closer look at these little buggers. For example, why did the market, obviously trending up all day, stop where it did? Could a trader have gone into the day with any information that could have helped in making decisions? Let’s see.

(more…)

A new (to me at least) popular trend in blogging seems to be the “linkfest”, a blog post that is essentially a long list of one liner links to other blogs that the person found interesting that day or week.? It’s a great way to get exposed to a lot of information really quickly and to learn about new blogs.? Some blogs in particular seem to use this method often, like Abnormal Returns and The Kirk Report.? By doing this, bloggers help create a tight web of references that allow for quick information flow so I hope it becomes common.? But if everyone starts doing it, who will write the articles?

Since adding all the blogs from Ticker Sense to Bloglines, I’ve been going through them mostly with a virtual machete, finding most to be irrelevant to my style of investing or simply poor and uninteresting.? There are a few that are making a place in my daily coffee routine.? One that caught my eye this morning as likely to be of interest to you fellas is CXO Advisory, not because it’s the best blog ever but because it has a great cohesive structure and some very interesting research to share.? The perform inflationary and market forecasts based on the RTV and REY models (similar to the Fed Model) and give daily updates on the status of the market relative to these models.? They also have a great section called Guru Grades that attempts to quantify the success of internet investment guru’s predictions.? The current long-time leader of the list is Ken Fischer, and they have a very interesting article of his on the site.? All in all, an interesting bag of goodies to explore and chew on.? You will note that the market is currently moving in relative lockstep with the 2 models (which are, I grant you, lagging) and that, if you look at what the Bubble looked like, we aren’t in any way close to that kind of overvalued situation.? But then again, you know that.? At the very least, the articles at CXO are thoughtful in a quant sort of way.

It was requested that I make mention of the CPA firm that focuses on the needs of active traders and hedge funds. It is Green & Company run by Robert Green, CPA, who literally wrote the book on trader taxes.

Well, as a self-proclaimed avoider of stocks, I still enjoy contributing to our discussion and analysis of stock pick services. I’m still sorting out a problem in getting my Daytraders.com trial started but, hopefully, I’ll have something to report soon. In the meantime, I want to bring light to another service that looks very interesting: WhisperNumber Risk Sentiment Reports. These reports, updated weekly, provide a model portfolio with unambiguous entry/exit signals. So those are two pluses in that it isn’t a daytrading system with lots of market watching and commission expenses and the calls are not fuzzy. The theory behind it is appealing also. Here is what they say:

The concept is simple – present favorable stocks with low sentiment risk and improving technicals and heavy short interest. Conversely, present unfavorable stocks with high sentiment risk and low short interest and technicals that are long in the tooth.

(more…)

This is by far the tastiest morsel of economic data I’ve ever seen:

Big Mac Index

Now, do you want fries with that?

Having just finish Kessler’s Running Money, I was very interested in his theory about the margin surplus vs. the trade deficit.? John, I suggest you find the time to read the one chapter in the book that breaks down this theory nicely and is really the best part of the book whether or not you care about hedge funds.? But what it amounts to is that we shouldn’t worry about our trade deficit because we have what can be termed a “margin surplus” where our intellectual property gets exported without being put on the books to manufactories in Asia who then export to the US creating what looks like a deficit but is really money in the pockets of the US companies that produced the IP in the first place.? (more…)