FAQs Frequently Asked Questions

And here:

Members have calculated potential risk/reward based on their trading style by going through our report archives and reading our books and articles to gain a deeper understanding of how they might use our current buying and selling strategies given their style of investment, tolerance for risk, and timeframe.  

Pocket Pivots and other buying or shorting strategies are tools that members can use to their advantage depending on the overall market. In bear markets, nearly no buying strategies except for the short term ones to within a few days or less will be profitable. Even William O’Neil and other famous traders who made money buying base breakouts were unprofitable doing so during bear markets. Thus market timing which profits from market trends is key. 

Since the Focus List is designed for time horizons beyond a few days, it can remain with few to no names during sideways or bear markets until markets find their major lows and we start seeing logical entry points in leading names that can outperform major averages using our various buying strategies. 

The only thing constant in markets is change. For example, William O’Neil’s base breakout strategy worked well prior to the year 2000 then compressed markets quashed its profitability, thus I observed an early buying strategy within the base in 2004 which worked much better that I called the pocket pivot. This too had its life expectancy as several years later, QE and other changes that affected markets quashed its profitability. 

So we then quickly pivoted and advised members several years ago as can be seen in the report archives to only buy pocket pivots on constructive weakness after they occur, as opposed to the original way of buying them on strength. This minimised risk thus made them profitable once again. 

Our books written for Wiley & Sons as well as our articles on numerous publishing platforms (Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities, Forbes, Marketwatch, et al) detail this evolving process, thus we underscore the point that there is no black box when it comes to trading. One must stay in sync with any material change in the markets so one can adjust their strategy accordingly. Indeed, the MDM made such a change as detailed here which made it profitable once again: