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"You like me.  You really, really like me!"  Somebody has sent me a
voluntary, unsolicited contribution of support for my analysis and
commentary!  Thank you!  I guess that's the "proof of the pudding".

I wish we could say the same for today's market action.  After about an
hour of uninspired, but "above the line" trading, it dropped like a
stone.  There were periods of slow improvement, some not, and the market
never did make it back.  Prices closed modestly lower, volume was higher
but not enthusiastically so, +2% above average.

As you can see below, November & December have been good to us.  Look at
the Summation Index.  Of course, the reason behind this is the big money
managers completing their portfolio restructuring after their September
& October selling.

I'm thinking of some of the same things.  I'm in a "wealth preservation"
mode--having been shown I'm too old to be employable in IT.  Yeah,
right!  Wanna see my own hand-built, compiled from scratch Linux system?
OK, no soapbox.

I don't play with stocks anymore.  I manage the allocations of my IRA's
mutual funds.  I monitor each with a 5% Exponential Moving Average of
the week to week price change.  It's a weighted evaluation of how each
fund has been doing over time.  As long as that's positive I don't worry
too much.

I've been trying to think of how I could get Excel to give me more.  Of
course NO spreadsheet, NO formula can predict the future.  The obvious
thing would be to have the whole lot in whichever fund has the highest
average.  But my mutual fund company doesn't like switchers, limits
switches and penalizes too many.  But is that even what I want?

Well, in part.  I think I also want an allocation between all the funds
which minimizes the short term swings in the overall value, while
maximizing the value.  I think it's a "linear programming" problem, and
a mathematical solution could be complex.  It still would be constrained
by the fund company's rules.  And it still would be a "backward looking"
analysis.

The reason I bring this up now, when I have no solution, is to suggest
that: 1) simply trying for the highest return isn't necessarily the best
goal for our investing.  2) There may be real-world constraints on what
we could do even if we knew what that was.  3) More goals complicate our
strategies exponentially and create many more satisfactory outcomes.  4)
Although complexity isn't reason enough to abandon investigation (the
learning involved may be valuable itself), we still need to be able to
step back and keep our sense of objectivity.
sense

 Price    Vola-    Momen-   Volume   Oscil-   Summ.
 Change   tility   tum               lator    Index
 -__+     -__+     -__+     -__+     -__+     -__+

 ___     12/09
 __|_     __     12/12
 __|_     __     12/13
 __>_     __     12/14
 _>__          12/15

Timing Signals:  I don't use or recommend timing signals, but they're
fun to watch.  If I did though, well, I might use something like this.
(Be warned!!  It tends to whipsaw around signal points!)

Last Signal: BUY        Date:  10/31/05 S&P:    1207
Winner or Loser:  tbd                   By:     tbd

See my market tracking charts for '03-'04 and my investment strategy
study at my website(s):
http://www.xprt.net/~pgrogers/Pers.html
http://www.geocities.com/paulgrogers/Pers.html




Paul Rogers, paulgrogers{at}yahoo.com                       -o)
http://www.angelfire.com/or/paulrogers                   /\\
Rogers' Second Law: Everything you do communicates.     _\_V

... Wench: What you use to turn the head of a dolt.
___ MultiMail/MS-DOS v0.35

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