If you have read some of my recent posts you will know that I’ve started a new portfolio called Zero To A Million. This is a project where I am attempting to reach $1 million in equity by investing a small amount into the stock market each month. This strategy is part quant, part discretionary […]
What Are The Best Performing Stocks Of The Last 20 Years?
20 years ago we were in the middle of the dotcom bubble. This was not a great time to invest since many stocks were at their peak earnings. Many never recovered and a few went bankrupt. However, some companies grew out of the rubble and posted mouth-watering returns. I decided to look at which stocks […]
How To Automate Your Trading With Amibroker
Long time users of Amibroker will know that it’s an excellent software for backtesting, scanning and many other tasks. However, automation of trading strategies is not one of it’s strengths. Fortunately there’s a new and simple solution which I discovered in a new class called Trading And Investing Automation For Amibroker. This solution involves linking […]
Trade Ideas Review – Is It Worth It?
Trade-Ideas is a stock scanner created with active day traders in mind. The scanner has become quite famous among day traders for its endless customisation, massive amounts of data and prominence among well known day traders. One of the platform’s main selling points is it’s artificial intelligence engine nicknamed Holly that identifies trading opportunities in real-time. Holly is […]
October Update – I’m Backing Britain
October was a fairly busy month. I published a new class to Marwood Research and made three more stock investments for our long term portfolio. As I mentioned in a previous post, this portfolio is part of a project called Zero To One Million where I am attempting to get to $1 million in equity […]
What Is The Truth About Zero Commission Trading?
Popular brokerages like TD Ameritrade and Schwab have cut their trading commissions to zero and more brokers are following suit. A reader asked about the impact of zero commissions on trading so I thought I would share my thoughts below. Mixed Feelings My first impressions of this news are mixed. It’s great to have zero […]
Are Treasury Bonds Really Better Than Stocks?
There’s a study that has been doing the rounds for some time called “Do Global Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” In the study, the authors come to the conclusion that most stocks fail to beat the return on cash (1-month Treasury bills). In fact, across a sample of 62,000 global stocks between 1990-2018, 56% of US […]
What Did I Buy In September?
If you read last month’s update you will know that I recently started a new investing portfolio called ‘Zero To One Million’. This is a project where I am attempting to hit $1 million in equity through the process of investing a small amount (typically $1000 – $1500) into one or two different stocks each […]
How Do Stocks React To Blockchain Announcements?
Recently a study called Bitcoin Speculation or Value Creation was published looking at how individual stocks react to the news that their firm is investing in blockchain technology. The authors found an average price gain of nearly 15% after the first announcement but this is typically followed by a price reversal over the following three […]
Testing A Reader’s RSI Trading Strategy
A reader asked if I could backtest a trading strategy based on the RSI(2) technical indicator. Most RSI strategies trade mean reversion setups, however, this is actually a trend following strategy. The idea is to follow trends and use an RSI(2) pullback to get a better price entry. We wait for the RSI(2) to turn back […]
26 Stock Market Strategies That Beat Buy And Hold
Profitable stock market strategies are not easy to come by. One proven path is to seek out stock market anomalies. A stock market anomaly is a rate of return or investment strategy that seems to defy the efficient market hypothesis. Today, most investors agree that markets are fairly efficient even if they don’t believe in […]
Only Optimists Make Money In Stocks
I came across the following quote on Twitter: Unless you’re a perennial short seller, pessimism about the future is of no help. Only optimists make money in the markets. D Mutukrishnan Mutukrishnan has a great way of words and I think this quote is very true. If you’re too pessimistic about the market you’re going […]
August Stock Picks And Updates: Amazon And Alibaba
First off, a few updates. You may have noticed that this website now has a shiny new name, Decoding Markets! The old one, jbmarwood.com, was too ambiguous and made me sound like an author of fantasy novels. Decoding Markets reflects the new direction that I want this blog to go in. It’s not about me, […]
Improving Trend Following With The PE Ratio
In a previous article we looked at the effects of introducing price to earnings data to a mean reversion strategy. Although the effects were quite small, we found that we could improve a simple RSI strategy by avoiding stocks with negative PE ratios. We also found that stocks with PE ratios over 15 produced higher […]
Should You Combine Trading Strategies?
The general advice with trading systems is that you should try to combine multiple trading strategies together in order to get the benefit of diversification. Having a suite of profitable trading algorithms means that you can obtain a smoother drawdown and reduce your chance of having a losing day, week, month, year. However, is it […]