donshogren.com

It’s a quiet weekend, so I was looking for a topic. Pelosi’s husband getting attacked by a Big Lie believer in his own home is just too depressing, so I rummaged around on CNN and Facebook, where I came across stock pundit Jim Cramer’s apology for having continually recommended buying Meta at the “bottom”. Meta is Facebook, basically. After a steady decline since the inflation wars began, the “bottom” dropped on Meta stockholders to the tune of another 25% on Wednesday.

All crocodile teary, Cramer apologized. Sounds like that could be some validation for the previous post, by golly.

But first, people who know I’m retired may be wondering just how it is that I have weekends. I have a part-time job. Actually, I’m still in training. For ten months now I’ve been spending at least three hours of each weekday morning studying the stock market, because I’ve had it with third party investments. They are, for the most part, legalized scams. Mutual funds don’t exist because some altruistic soul decided there should be a way to help nice people build some wealth toward retirement–they exist to use your money to make someone else money. On the dip, you are the last one out. On the rise, you’re the last one in. Plus costs. Each way.

I’ve known this for at least twenty years without doing anything about it. I’ve watched ETFs like QQQ (look it up) average 15% gain a year for those twenty years and sat on my thumbs, a sceptical participant trapped in the process of people just doing their jobs in a system of transferring wealth to the wealthy.

So now that I have the time, I’m working on my own system based on the observation of patterns in the trade of moderately volatile stocks. It has rules. I won’t get into all of that here, but there is limited risk. Here are my simulator results:

That’s 364% APR, if my Excel skills are up to snuff, almost all on the Nasdaq–the Nasdaq that is down 29% for the same period. Actual trading will involve more timing issues, I realize, but this is not day trading, here. The average holding period is probably somewhere between two and three trading days. Only 4.45% of my 320 transactions are same day buy/sell, and none of them are pre-or post-market, where actual trading is subject to increased bid/offer margins and unpredictable arbitrage results.

I’m ready for phase two, a limited actual trial. I’m confident, but The Little Hun is going to want a little more evidence. Wish me “luck”.

So as I said, there are rules. One of them is: don’t pay any attention to the recommendations of analysts or whatever Cramer is pretending to be, and that brings us back to the beginning.

Cramer apologized. He almost did it well. He almost made it all the way through the bowed headshaking and the choking sighs, until host David Farber, a horse’s ass of another color, asked him what went wrong.

“I trusted them, not myself,” was Cramer’s reply, meaning the Meta management team. Some mea culpa.

Let’s all say it together. It doesn’t matter why, Jim Cramer.