This is quite a time to be an investor. And fortunately, also a great time to be part of our community at ETFYourself.com. I say that because we are nearly ready to launch a project for investors that is either 6 years in the making...or 40 years...depending on how you view it. All it took was the right people with skills sets that complement mine.
What’s coming and when? I’ll say days to weeks, but literally as Is type this, a site is being built that our subscribers will soon be able to access at ROAR.PiTrade.com. You’ll notice I did not put a link on that site. Because it is still being constructed.
When it is finished, users will have the ability to type in just about any ETF or stock symbol and get a current ROAR Score. For the uninitiated, this article explain it. Bottom-line: for decades, investors have had many “ratings” and “grades” systems to choose from. I use several of those myself, like the tools found at Barchart.com and Seeking Alpha.com, where I write regularly.
Why another proprietary ETF and stock rating system?
Because ROAR focuses almost exclusively on RISK. Specifically, managing it. In short, it acknowledges that any investment can go up in price at any time, and for any reason. But what differentiates one security from another is how much risk of major loss an investor is taking when they buy it. Because THAT is how I view investing, especially in modern markets, where algorithms and indexes do not care about our feelings. Or our “narratives” around markets. And that can be dangerous, especially to those whose entire tenure as investors has been a blissful one, with headline indexes either rising unimpeded, or rising following a sharp dip.
There really are other scenarios! Working with my friends at PiTrade.com a NYC-area fintech company started by some very sharp, focused and forward-thinking professionals, we’re just about there. The back end programming to convert ROAR from “Rob looks at a ton of charts and cobbles together spreadsheets“ to “it’s a site, app and portfolio-building tool for investors,” is just about here.
As soon as we have places to look or even screen shots, we’ll share. Right now, finalizing the data checks to be sure the whole A to Z process is tight is our focus. So stay tuned.
Using ROAR to drive portfolios is about to get easier
I started charting by hand 40 years ago. And 6 years ago, we sold our investment advisory firm, in part to focus on research. I’ve produced a lot of content since then, but this brings it all together in way that investors can use much more effectively. Because ROAR Scores are a snapshot summary of what I think of any security at any point in time.
Even more significantly, we are finishing up automated versions of 3 different ETF portfolios.
2-ETF portfolio (SPY-BIL), updated here each Tuesday, and available to be automatically traded at PiTrade.com, with an Interactive Brokers account you set up through them.
6-ETF portfolio (no inverse ETFs) soon to be available exclusively at PiTrade.com.
10-ETF portfolio (includes inverse ETFs). The same model that has brought a lot of people to ETF Yourself here at Substack and to our Seeking Alpha service. The big upgrade here: a more efficient, automated model, which we back-tested 10 years. Importantly, not a “make it look good” back-test, but one that I truly believe is a reflection of the risk-managed process I’ve evolved over the past 30+ years of professional investment management.
We’ll blast an announcement when this is all in place, days from now.
In this issue:
Indexes: We’ve learned in recent years that most often, one day’s opening drop is another day’s buy the dip. The one that occurred today, for similar reasons as the one 10 months ago (global trade saber-rattling), is something we can’t draw conclusions on based on a day. Or possibly even a week or month. But in a market stretched this far, on the back of an AI trade that needs a lot to go right to fulfill expectations, we have to always be on the lookout. One of these dips will be the one that destroys wealth. Because it doesn’t stop for a while. I’ll show you some “lines in the sand” that could prompt action, below.
ETFs: I don’t often use the word ANGRY when talking about investing. But the way income investing is being portrayed in some places in the social world? That makes me angry! Long on lies, short on facts. I explain and show exactly what I’m talking about, below
Stocks: It looks like about 10-20% of stocks were up through mid-day Tuesday. One thing to watch going forward: there’s a point at which it becomes more obvious that the selling pressure is overwhelming whatever “story” (excuse) people paid to be bullish are saying. Below, I explain how to spot that point, where a market goes from the awkwardly-named “pause that refreshes” to “the bear market that un-retires people and creates family turmoil.”
Plus, my latest market thoughts, and the latest update to the ROAR Score. Here’s the Weekly ROAR.