Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Guess what trend followers will now be doing...

The markets took me out of my last long position today in my standard portfolio, and all major indices are now on a short signal. In addition commodities such as gold, silver and crude oil are also on short signals. Therefore you can guarantee that the major trend followers will be acting on this information and going short these various markets. Depending on their system parameters some may already be in positions, some will be waiting for their entry points to be hit. As I've said before, the timing of the entries and exits may differ slightly, but trend followers en masse will make (as well as lose) money in the same time periods in the same markets.

Remember that also there are two basic types of trend following systems - the more popular style where you have differing parameters for entry and exit signals (such as what I use) which can mean that you can be on the sidelines at certain times, and there are also systems that are in the market 100% of the time (such as the system used by Bill Dunn of Dunn Capital Management, who was profiled in Michael Covel's book Trend Following).

No doubt a lot of people will be saying that the current drop is overdone, the markets are oversold and will rebound from here, etc, etc. All I know is that there will be trend followers, based all over the world, who will be following the price action, and if their systems say go short, they will be going short. And I, for one, do not want to be on the other side of their positions.

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