Here is another view that speaks to the same thing. TNA (RUT/IWM) rose a little with my Big 3 during 1Q but did lag behind a lot. For May and Jun, TNA has been slipping while the other 3 continue to set ATH records. I would assume that says the little guys are hurting. FNGU is absolutely on fire up 41% just in July. The return trip will not be pretty.

Good comments to look and think about.

One has to wonder how long this cycle can go on. As my earlier post showed this cycle started Nov 1 of last year and except for a short pullback in April, it has been nothing but up.

And yet everyday stories keep coming out that shows the market is definitely slowing. But it seems to be very two sided. GIS, DIS, WBA, and NKE are just a few of a long list of companies that have seen their stock price fall sharply, but it has had little effect on the indexes. The big boys are doing good along with a big number of others based on the fact that the BP% is rising again hovering around 60%.

When does this cycle end, no clue, so just reading the charts day by day waiting for a sign.

That was good, where did you dig that up from.

Here is what this week's breakout looked like on the 60min chart. Impressive for sure.

I am so impressed with what this market is doing. For QQQ, May was up 6.3%, June 6.0%, and now the first week of July at 2.5%. This is a total gain of almost 15%. This is huge and my large accounts are feeling it.

The surge since Jul 1 has been outstanding. As I posted I caught that with a 200% investment in TQQQ/FNGU and my Small Acc is up 7.8% this week.

For my individual stocks, this week I added NVDA back in and upped my COST holdings. Holding SNOW and META from last week. My stocks $ gain for the week are 11% of my total dollars, but the holdings were only 6.6% of the total, almost a 2x gain over the etf's.

I feel a need to celebrate tonight.

Having written my last message, I thought this might be a good time with the July 4th break to review in my own mind what has happened over the past 3 years from a macro picture.

Overall the market has only managed to gain just above 20%. And yet there have been two 30% plus runs. That just goes to show the power of pull backs and how they can destroy gains. So the macro view is that from the ATH of Dec 2021, the market did not get back to even until Dec 2023, two full years of no gains, and that was only if one was the stomach to hold on through the bottoms. All the 2 1/2-year gains have come in the last 8 months.

Drilling down a bit, we get the following big moves:
-24% 1H2022
+32% 1 year gain starting Oct 22 (note that this +32% only got back to even with the -24% down
-12% mini melt down in 4Q23
+36% big move since Nov 1 2023

The two pull backs added to -36% and the two up cycles +68%. If one is going to beat the S&P500, it is imperative to not ride the moves down and be in the market for the up moves. If super stars like Marko and Mike can get is so wrong, it is clear that beating the market is not easy. But with a proven plan it can be done. But if you do it, you will be in a very small minority.

I love these kinds of stories. They make me feel at a lot better about what I am doing.

Yes, both added to about $10K. The point a lot of people miss is that are tax credits, not an actual rebate.

No interest in investing in solar industry. It's dying at least in AZ and CA. Several companies have gone bankrupt and left customers with no customer service, repairs or anything. System panels are out and nobody to repair, but of course they are under "warranty". They have no idea what to do. Big issue here in Phoenix.

They wanted $35K over 25 years so I could save $30 a month. I spend double that on happy hour each week. One of the cheapest expenses in my life. And people are falling for the scam. $6-10K to remove and replace panels if you need to work on the roof.

Look at a 5-year chart and see if you still like it.

Well there you go, I forgot about the early close. Thanks

Wow, what a day for the market. What happened????? Things are sure going Trumps way, does the market like that?

Not betting on this being a long term thing, but I will take what I can get while the getting is good.

I didn't think tomorrow was a holiday. Thur is the fourth.

Hope it work out well for you. You do realize that the 200 ma is 18% from where prices are now and 26% from where I got in. At that point there is a very good change the cycle will be over, but hitting the 200ma will certainly not trigger me to do anything. I am using much better TA's.

Went long in my Sm Acc just before 10am, 100% each for TQQQ and FNGU. FNGU is killing it almost up double TQQQ. Up 1.8% in account so far, will not let all of this get away if market turns.

My comment back on June 16th.

I was just reading a report with lots of charts and one of them was the number of ATH's by year. So far for 2024 SPY has had 70. Okay that sounds good, but 2023 had zero. Turns out QQQ did not make any new highs in 2023 either.

That is pretty amazing since SPY was up 26.2% for 2023 and QQQ up 54.8%. That just tells you how brutal 2022 was.

Just a little useless fact, except to remind that riding the market down is not near as much fun as riding it up.

Understand, thanks.

I have my ratio charts set up also, but the graph that I posted the other day really tells the story.

First of all I mistook your CY to mean current year, not current yield.

Now I understand what you are doing, but you are leaving out part of the actual gain of the etf not having to do with dividends. When they pay the interest they don't bring the price of the etf back to what it was 1 month ago, so there is gain or loss there also.

Not taking into account the dividends, the absolute price (without dividends) of the eft has risen from 50.64 from 12/29 to 50.865 yday. That is a .44% rise that needs to be accounted for. The yield from dividends would be on top of this.

It is just like calculating the gain for a stock that pays dividend. The dividend is only part of the gain. The difference is that for stocks, the dividend is a small part of the overall gain whereas for a MM etf the dividend is the biggest part, but not all.

I would think that the yield you calculated for Jul1 dividend would be over stating the actual yield for Jun, because they over paid the dividend and brought the price of the eft down from what it was when the dividend was paid a month earlier. This is a real loss for your account.

I find this a very interesting pattern. Looks like a pretty solid floor. Only real concern is that BP% took a hit today.

You might want to check your numbers or tell me how you got your number. Our numbers are way off for FLOT. For YTD you have 5.88% and I had 7.04%

FLOT began the year adjusted for dividends at 49.38 and ended Fri at 51.085. This is for 12/29/23 to 6/28/24. The numbers have now changed with today's dividend, but the result is almost the same.

This is a gain of 3.4528% for 182 days.
Just doing simple math of 3.4528%*365/182 gets 6.92%.
If I account for compounding I get 7.04%.

Interest+1 per day= 1.034528 ^ (1/182)
Compound for the year = (Interest+1 per day)^365 - 1

For the first time this year the monthly APR for FLOT and TFLO have fallen below SGOV.

However, the graph below is what I am watching for FLOT. The blue line is a 30day moving APR and the orange an 8-day MA. I drew a red trend line on the graph, and I think that tells the story. The trend is down, and I have now real reason to believe it is going to make a major move back up. With SGOV and FLOT running about the same, even if FLOT went back up and I wanted to get back in, the lost interest would be small compared to the extra that I gained.

So next week I will start moving my FLOT holdings over to SGOV.

Note: The spikes and dips of the 30 days moving APR is because I really don't have a way to get the actual 30 day data since the market is not open on the weekends. I picked the number of data points to include that gave me the best avg of 30 days. The actual 30 day period can range from 29 days (dips) to 33 days (peaks). But the trend in clear.

All the funds that I need to trade with go into SGOV when I am in cash. 43% of my account is in FLOT, the rest I trade with out of SGOV. I was considering moving out of FLOT since interest rates had been coming down but looks like that trend is reversing.

FLOT APR was 7.02% last month, but mtd (6/25) is 5.56%
SGOV numbers are 5.76% and 5.06%.

YTD APR is
Flot 7.15%
SGOV 5.35%

Really don't expect to have to, but if I really need to make a trade when I don't have my laptop, I will just use TOS web on my iPad or even my phone if critical.

Looking like yday was just a bounce and the decline is going to continue this morning. Long ways to EOD.

For me Edge was okay and it was as good as most, but I like TOS web much better. IB had no real time cash balance ledger which was a real pain. Had to wait until around 8pm for it.

Yes very good, I totally forgot.

I just read this article after I wrote my other post. I strongly urge you to real it. It will really make you think.
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/modern-marxist-theory

Here is the summary, sobering.
There is a large number of Americans who associate a soaring stock market with all that is good and great about America. For true patriots, and true believers in the American dream, a bear market would be better confirmation of the inherent goodness of the USA. A bear market would show that the checks and balances that the founders of America were so careful to add to the constitution to ensure power never became too concentrated were working as they should. A soaring Nasdaq is a sign of US failure, not success. US corporate power needs to be curbed. If it is not curbed, either a financial or currency crisis looms.

This is an interesting article from the Dallas Fed about the state (sad) of business. I guess I am surprised to hear this kind of news out of Texas. If it was Calif or NY, I would expect it. From where I set in Phoenix, I don't see that at all. Almost ever time I gas up at QT (one of our major discount gas stations), I see parents coming out with 2 to 3 kids and all of them have big drinks and snacks easily worth $30-$40. And when I drive down the street, I see new cars all over the place.

The comment about car inventories building up caught my eye and I thought really. So I checked the real numbers. Car sales have been up over last year every month but one this year. So that didn't check out to me.

I know a lot of people are struggling, but there are a lot who aren't. I guess we have managed to bring our country down to a 3 world one, where we have two very different classes of people, those who have money and those that don't. There are also two more classes that leads to what I just said, a class of people who see a future and those who don't. If they don't see a future, they give up.

But I also know there has to be a lot of truth to the article, they just didn't talk about the right things. Too many businesses are closing their doors because with prices required to remain profitable, they don't have enough customers to support keeping the doors open.

And then just yday a trucking firm in Texas just shut their door with no warning. Eventually the why will come out.
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/texas-logistics-company-500-truck-drivers-abruptly-ceases-operations
“Due to the abrupt decision by our private ownership group to close our doors at the same time business was surging, I am completely devastated and heartbroken for the 2000+professionals I’ve had the pleasure of working with.”

Each day brings more information about where the economy is going.

To add to what NQ posted, when I first started trading everybody on the board was trading TNA. After many years of struggling, I switched to TQQQ and the road has been a lot easier. Over time I started to even include SPXL in order to smooth things out a bit. Since the beginning of May, my account is up 14%, which in 3x terms is 41%. So, by throwing in FNGU and some of the other things that I do, I have managed to even out gain TQQQ.

But over the same time period TNA has only gained 1.3% 1x. That is a disaster in my book. I wish you luck, but you are traveling a very hard road in my opinion.

We did about the same, I was up 5.7%, but that has to be multiplied by somewhere around 1.4 to be the effective yield with the increased overall investment level.

Excellent, you are having a good day.

So far 2 good entry points have passed for a NVDA short. The first one was Thur when an engulfing candle was printed. The second one was Fri when 10ema was crossed for my long exit. Maybe there will be another entry point with a s3 set up. Might take a small state just for fun, nothing really serious. I am happy to ride the pull backs in cash.

However, if we get into a real bear market, then things are different, I would be more aggressive. Don't think we are there yet. w3 setups back in 2022 took 1-2 months to set up.

I was late with my long entry on the last cycle up. I never really like to enter just as a trend line is breaking, but prices really jumped when it did. I should have recognized the w3 setup and been more aggressive. Wave 3's are just so powerful.

But what a great reset of prices is underway, meaning a good long is coming in the future.

If I short and that is a big if, I will probably stay with the indexes, especially QQQ/SQQQ. I am not much of a shorter for the reason I have stated.

Well in the end, no fireworks for the week, with SPY and QQQ each gaining .2% and setting new ATH's. The month is still very good and I would be happy if next week was a zero gain also.

SPY now has 7 closes above uKC and QQQ 9. I will probably be looking to exit at 10ema if it comes to that, just like I did NVDA today. Over extended prices tend to come down fast, so no need to wait to exit has been my experience. SPY ended the week with a very nice no information doji.

 
 .	wk	mtd	alloc	yield 
 SPY	.2%	3.1%	50%	1.6% 
 QQQ	.2%	6.3%	40%	2.5% 
 FNGU	-.4%	7.8%	10%	0.8% 
 .	.	.	.	4.9% 
   

SPY dividend today 1.759024

This story like several before finally hit me hard enough that I wanted to make a comment about it. Short sales are when the property owner and lender agree to a sale. Both usually take a big haircut, but the lender gets 100% of the cash generated by the sale. The property owner loses all their original investment. The alternative is that the lender ends up holding the property and bears all the responsibility of running it and trying to find a seller, and still takes a big loss.

Banks are not very good real estate people from what I have seen. It is just all about making the books look good and doing the bidding of the FED's, profit doesn't seem to be much of a motive. Case in point, buying and holding millions of dollars of long term bonds while interest rates have been rising for 2 1/2 years. Anybody with any sense, would have sold when the loss was much smaller.

This article only talks about two recent short sales, but I enjoyed that Blackstone was one of them.

Short sales were very common back in the 2009-2012 era when prices became very depressed. In late 2011 I bought the house that I am in now for 40% of the asking price back in 2007. My wife's sister even got a better deal from a bank buying 17 acres in northern AZ for $50K which had sold just a few years earlier for $500K.

So far housing has not been the problem, but the CRE market seems to be dying by 1000 cuts. It isn't even close to being over. If we go into a recession than I would expect the housing sector will be added. If anyone needs to sell their house in the next 10 years, my advice would be to sell at the first concrete sign of a recession. Back in the early 80's, I was living in Austin and across the street from me was a great couple, who ran a plastics business out of their home. All they did was sit my the pool and take orders. One day, boom, they were gone. I tracked them done and they bought a short sale house in a very upscale country club subdivision for I am sure less than 50% of its recent sales price. They were just renting by me, I had no idea. Those who can read the market and are patient, can do very well.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/price-discovery-equals-short-sales

 
  
 .	.	.	.	Purch	Short	Loan	TL	Bank 
 .	.	.	.	Price	Sell		Loss	Loss 
 Related Companies	NY	$153M	<$50M	>$100M	>$103M	>$50M		 
 Blackstone	.	NY	$605M	$186M	?	$418M	?

Yes gamma has gotten to be quite the big buzz word for option traders. It is just a fancy way of saying your "time value" is quickly going to zero.

I just looked at a QQQ option that expires today. QQQ is steady around 486.
A 486 call option is worth $1.14.
The June 21 option with the same strike is worth $2.13, which means one will take a 50% haircut by tomorrow morning if prices do not move.

I learned long ago to not hold options to expiration. If you don't sell at least a few days ahead, one will lose all that time value. This of course works in your favor if you are selling options, which is a strategy that I like.