Humble thanks for the undeserved compliment, Mark. Do I know you?
To answer your question, macro tends help me find undervalued sectors. I don't short -- can't, I play the market in a SEP/IRA, so the only shorts open to me are funds, like USPIX, BEARX and such -- so I concentrate on bottom baser situations. There was a guy on SI once, Jim Goodman, whose newsletter Kevin Watson once turned me on to. Excellent stuff, his posts are still on SI, just search for "psycles." All about sector rotations and how to take advantage of the tops (puts) and bottoms. Anyhoo, I've got a ton of Yahoo! portfolios of stocks, broken down by sectors of my chosing, and to help me identify stuff that could be ready to pop, based on the charts. Been doing the bottom baser pop thing with Kevin for months.
Macro trends also help me when dealing in sectors where I don't really want to get into specific stocks much, such as gold stocks. Right now, I humbly believe, the macro indicators I follow are telling me it is a good time to be in miners. So, instead of buying a bunch of mining stocks, a while back I got a bunch of precious metals mutual funds. No huge moves, but easy does it, plenty of time to tweek the mix along the way, hurrying slowly, as Josef Sudek would say.
As time goes by, I enjoy trading less and less, wish to have longer term holds more and more, so I'm leaning more toward the shotgun approach, if you know what I mean.
Hope that makes some sense.
Cheers,
Svejk
