Sydney, January 2016,
Laurens Bensdorp.
A Lot of panic in the stock markets, the bear is awake.
2016 has started extremely difficult for the stock markets, we saw a lot of panic and many people have lost a lot of many. The S&P 500 closed the month with a loss of 5% but it was down as much as 11%, so this does not predict a good stock market year at all.
Currently I am in Australia for another private consulting to a small hedge fund and I thoroughly enjoy being here.
Sydney is a wonderful city, lots of things to do, the people are really great and from my hotel, I have a wonderful view over the city and right next to the botanic gardens.
See here a picture;
Travelling to Sydney is always a very large trip from Europe, something to which I normally do not look forward too much but I have to say the business class of Emirates do an outstanding job with first class service and it gave me the opportunity to have a stopover in Dubai and visit some friends who live in Abu Dhabi.
So, as said, the stock market had a very bad start and this certainly looks like the start of a year that can be compared with 2008. The fundamentals worldwide and in the US certainly do not help and since 2009 we have seen a huge price increase.
See below a chart of the ETF of the S&P 500 index which shows a low of 67.10 in 2009 and the market achieved its peak last year at 213.78. That is an increase of 219%!
From a technical point of view we can see a couple of things:
- The uptrend has turned into sideways since mid 2015 and in January it really started to be in bear mode.
- Mid 2015 we had the first attempt of a big sell off but it recovered very well
- But….it did not reach a new high in the markets
- In January it again started to sell of sharply and mid-January it recovered a little but not much
- The main support of the SPY (ETF of the S&P 500 index) is at 180. If we close below that the market is ready to decline all the way to 140
This is bad news for all people that trade a long only strategy as all positions are losing money and will lose even more money when the markets keep declining.
This is why I am always teaching my students to create a suite of non-correlated systems that work in all market types. If you trade a long strategy and simultaneously also place trades that make money when the markets decline you are far better off and historically it has been easy to combine two strategies like this and make more than 20% annualized returns and be profitable every year.
See my earlier blogpost here about this strategy
In a 6 months course I teach a handful of very committed traders one on one to develop a system that just does that. This is the most exclusive mentoring that I do and due to my extensive travel schedule and other business activities I can only take a maximum of 3 people at any time to work with me.
Depending on what program suits you price are somewhere between 17.500 and 35.000 for a 6 months period so it certainly is not for everybody, but I do get you the results. Imagine if you have a 500.000 USD portfolio, you probably can earn within a couple of months your instalment back and you just continue to generate outperforming returns year after year.
2 spots are filled right now so I have only one more spot open. This kind of mentoring is not available elsewhere so I am very picky of who I work with and there is an application process as I need to see if you are a good fit working with me.
If you are interested in talking to me, please click on the link below, fill out the application and I will review it. If I think I can sincerely help you and you are a good fit, we setup a phone call and see if we might work together.