Even my clients have grown despondent in their concerns and fears that the market's triumphal march higher has ended, and with its ending chimes the death knell of the investment opportunities I favor (and guide their portfolios toward). Certainly, the ~9 month decline calculates as among the more unbearable, but "the market you are in
always feels like the worst."
I attempt to keep my readers (and clients' portfolios) on the right side of the market; for example, warning and assuming a defensive posture last October and November, then counseling in late-March that what then was ballyhooed elsewhere as a double-bottom in fact was not. And, finally, that this decline, too, would end. They always do.
Point your finger at
this cause and
that effect, and their follow-on problems -- for the markets, for your portfolios, for the economy, etc -- loom ever larger. The problems never really disappear, especially not the type that we suffer today, but the markets themselves continue. And because we are human we create the problems and the opportunities -- even the vaunted portfolio management done by computer algorithm, because their programming comes from the fallible minds (and emotions) of humans. So slough off your despondency; the times they are a changing.
While my trades might appear random, they are anything but. Stocks always oscillate, so
long term investors provide sufficient leash for those oscillations. Each investor has his or her own preferred methodology that presumably achieves consistent success;
I prefer an investment opportunity that remains within a long term up trend but merely pause for the intermediate term. The intermediate term can stretch on for months, sometimes years, and sizable price and percentage declines and rises could occur regularly and repeatedly during the consolidation phases, but the bases -- assuming you identify them correctly -- always offer fantastic investment opportunities.
Excellent companies, with a strong executive team, and an exciting, interesting product or service, make for great
long term investments -- and are not difficult to find. Alas, it is the process of investing that trips us up, fraught and beset as it is by our emotions and expectations.
I do not attempt to sidestep the inevitable bases that occur. I monitor closely each of the investment opportunities I favor for signs of long term change, and whether that change, should it occur, might endure. Consider only four of my
Core 9 Opportunities...
1) Apple/AAPL could -- not will, but could -- decline to ~$145-135, or lower, as other traders posit. (Go
here for yet another bearish opinion.) And even if it does, so what? Perhaps it comes as no surprise, but I disagree with their (chart) analysis;
I perceive
Apple/AAPL to qualify easily as a buy. (In fact, I purchased more shares just 2 weeks ago at ~$153.)
2) Google/GOOG scares many investors, including those who have been wrong -- habitually, congentially wrong -- on the company, and its stock. I look at the company, and see more than a "one trick pony"; I look at the stock, and despite the
obvious ugliness of its chart, see fantastic opportunity for it to rise, and dramatically so. Soon.
3) Intuitive Surgical/ISRG is a great opportunity to show how wrong most chart readers can be when they attempt to analyze chart action, which is one reason why chart reading has a bad reputation (and gets a bad rap from me). The failure, though, lies not in the chart, but in the chart's so-called
readers. Rather than use
ISRG as this post's lesson, I will use...
4) Johnson & Johnson/JNJ.
