What was i thinking cmt

And my three and a half year old loves puzzles, right? The problem is that when you go take up the puzzle box, the piece puzzle, like 30 pieces are missing, 20 are under the sofa or bed. We are putting together this piece of the puzzle, without all the pieces. So how do we solve for that? Once a week, every week, without exception, my entire career.

I block my calendar for 6, 7, 8 hours. And I look at every single stock in the world. Okay, I have 70 pieces of a piece puzzle. What are these missing elements trying to tell me? Chris, are you starting from a US domestic equity standpoint? Or do you go around the globe every single week looking at every equity market? Well, I tend to do on Sundays, and it depends on what I did Saturday night, often that determines the answer to that either — honest answers are welcome here. But I also have to know my audience, right.

And, you know, putting together a coherent market call that is really focused and tries to capture the interest of the reader every single day. And in terms of timeframe, are you looking at daily charts, you go into smaller periodicities?

Are you looking at very long term trends, just a weekly closing bar? The goal of this business is to own something, and for it to keep paying you, right? At some point, something will change. I got to move on and find a better place for my capital, or what if my time horizon is six months, but after two years, the stock still working?

So I think a lot of that question time, like, what do I look at, you know, what duration what type of chart I think you have to look at everything.

And you have to make a very balanced judgment on, Is this a stock I can own today? But I tell you to any of our listeners who just heard Chris talk about both going through sounds like maybe upwards of charts, every weekend, I can I can vouch for the truthfulness of that statement.

So you actually had to do it from a cab, and you did it without charts. Thank you for saying that. If you want to be the best fundamental guy on the street, or the best macro guy on the street, or whatever, it requires that level of intensity every single day, knowing your space, knowing your names.

And, you know, I know others have said this before me. But one of the great strengths of technical work is you can get a very good understanding of the world in 30 minutes, right? And, you know, that I think is the appropriate way to approach this business. And you know, we talked earlier about making contrarian career choices. What is that telling us about what the narrative of the story is out there? That I think is a very good way to think about what we do every day. Those are equally as.

And its founder seems more interested in going to space than running the company, right? Those are the three inputs. A colleague of mine, who just moved to a new house was digging through his basement, through some old artifacts. It was 10 forecasts for Lehman Brothers in For the next 10 years, right. What was their favorite stock for the next 10 years in ? Oh, it was Microsoft. And I think we all know how that played out over the next 10 years. So we have to be very, very in tune or aware of kind of getting trapped in the recency bias that often leads to unlikely forecasts.

And I would say that Carter Worth is very similar. The question I would have for you then is, is being as visual and discretionary as you are, is there room in your world for backtesting?

Systematic mechanical thinking or mechanical processes? Do you lean on those at all? Or is it purely discretionary? And we lean on that as much as we lean on kind of our qualitative approach.

But most of these stocks are still in fairly decent uptrends. Because we know what the hit rates look like from those conditions in the past, we know what the forward returns look at. Now, again, like anything here, the arbiter of whether that call is going to be successful or not, is what the market does here, or what those times do over the next couple months.

Those are your choices, irrespective of what people perceive to be the stress of the moment. I love the, you know, the history, the markets are always giving us perfect examples of the points we try to make.

But I think the most recent one, obviously, the COVID low, if you remember back then I mean, it was forecasts of some pretty dire outcomes.

And legitimately I mean, you can understand why I mean, it was it was truly the fastest, most rapid, deepest economic collapse, perhaps in history in the forecast for worse to come. Exactly right. And, you know, that was talked about on display for the last 18 months.

And, you know, something that I found super interesting, kind of, as you kind of came off the COVID lows last year, you know, into the summer into the fall, like, remember, the 6 7 8 months off the low last summer, last fall, there was still widespread skepticism about where the economy was what the market was doing.

And we made a point of really trying to incorporate that that historical perspective, that behavioral perspective in how we thought about COVID and the markets interpretation of it. So the idea that it was this slow motion crisis, and everyone knew what was going on, I think is revisionist history, right? People woke up to the seriousness of 08 when Lehman went away. We just woke up to it very quickly.

Very well said, Chris, I wanted to ask you about, you know, within the Strategas team, you have experts in every field economists, policy experts, and you know, you think about economic data, maybe on a monthly or quarterly delay, policy inputs tend to be quite fungible, at least in this country.

And so how do you reconcile as a team, when, as a technician, you you have the agility to have hard numbers, tick by tick, or hour by hour or day by day? How do you reconcile that with the other members of the team? Or do they find their roles to the investment strategy of the of the whole firm, maybe serving a different purpose than what the technical team produces?

And they both happen to a lot of our quant stuff, the same thing. And I think as a group, we do a very good job of challenging each other getting on the same page presenting a cohesive call to our clients.

So I think one of the best if not the best cop on the street has such a respect for what the market is telling them, as well as what the economic data might be saying. Did you feel like there was anything missing from your toolkit as an analyst at that point? So yeah, this is an interesting story.

I beg them to hire me. Unfortunately, he does. And Jason always jokes if if he was a good forecaster, he would never have started a financial services company going into what would be this apocalyptic crisis, right. And he throws it on my desk and says, read this. This is your job now. And I just remember that moment. And I mean, the origin of the book, great book, tough one to get through, right.

As I kind of said it was like, chance meetings then with Ralph and with guys like Frank, that really solidified this and really planted the seed that hey, like, this is really interesting, right? I thought I was gonna be some some great economist or some great strategist. But man, this stuff is really fun and really interesting. And I think about why I was attracted to kind of the, the technical approach.

And I keep coming back to the idea, I was always an athlete growing up, I always liked competition. This I felt was markets in general. This, to me was the closest I would ever get to playing sports at a high level is the sport of markets every single day.

I love playing golf. And the one similarity, I think, between the two endeavors golf and markets, the second in golf, you start thinking about 2 3 4 shots ahead.

And markets are similar. You have to deal in the here. And now. You know, having just played a round of golf with my son this morning, not well, I might add, I would also add that another parallel and I was actually thinking about this morning was that when you do have a bad shot, you have to forget it.

Because you can still bogey the hole, you can still part of the hole and investing is so so like that. And you know, if you have a bad month, if you have a bad quarter a bad year, you have to as long as you are sticking to your process.

And you got to take a lot of swings. Look at what these guys can do. Can I do this? Can I try to do this? That was I think the best part of the curriculum is listening to these really, really renowned investors, how they use this stuff in their problems. But you know, what falls into your toolkit.

So obviously, throughout a three level multi year program, we cover things like point and figure charting, as well as statistical methods. But number one, the reminder that every indicator that you may quote, or I, might quote is simply a derivative of price.

And that has to be the ultimate arbiter. And you see this a lot when people talk about like divergences. Number one, right? So remembering price as kind of the first input. And I have to be very sensitive and very mindful of how I present what I do, right?

That is a really, really valuable input. One thing you mentioned earlier about being I guess, being inspired by what you read in Market Wizards and other other books and whatnot. And then you mentioned Stan Druckenmiller, I believe it was at one of your annual conferences for your client conferences. And Stan was a speaker. And he went through this entire sort of monologue on why he was so bearish.

And why he had ticked off all the reasons for why he thought the market was was, you know, set to fall apart. I thought that was brilliant. I remember as a firm, what a great privilege it was for us to have Stan, maybe March of , right? We were kind of right at that bottoming process. And it was so easy as it always is near lows to come up with a very compelling bear case. Because you have to recognize that, hey, I can have these strong philosophical or intellectual beliefs.

I think it kind of the role that we can try to serve as, you know, whether you want to call us technicians or just market observers, right. I think we are observers of markets. We can be a check on whatever your intellectual leaning says should be. How much of the technical toolkit in your research process actually makes it into client communications? And the product you deliver? I publish every single day.

And I also want to be the first thing people read in the morning, I want you to wake up with my work in your inbox. And this has been true for years and years and getting more exaggerated and more exaggerated. Like that. I want Oh, oh, no. That was actually the conclusion of my post. I think sometimes we spend too much time in this business, thinking about what might work next, as opposed to just celebrating what is working.

Anyone really make any money in banks and homebuilders from through You frustrate people for the next decade. Maybe we can actually transition a little bit to markets. Are you seeing anything that would raise concerns for you? Are we just continuing in this rotational bull market? I think this is still very much a bull market. Right, right. So I think what a lot of people see is like this devastating contraction of breath, the last three or four months is actually not very different than what you see in any year or two off a low.

And our kind of big theme for Was the language frustrating, but not fatal, right most second years off of a low are frustrating markets. Now, there was a couple things that stand out. Because yields already went to Copper already went down 20, crude already went down And the flows reflected as well. Look at February, March, April, everyone out there was a convicted cyclical bull, convicted bond bear, and then there were the flows to prove it.

And the positioning to prove it. The big outflows for financials, big inflows into bonds, big outflows from energy. But the positioning backdrop is meaningfully different today than it was in February, March April that I think kind of observation number one very important. On March 31 right bond yields were on March Say Chris, what will financials do?

Financials have kept their heads above water in what was a very unfriendly rate environment for them. Look at these insurance stocks. AIG Look at that. Look at Pru. An unusually slow or weak signal could indicate CMT. Electromyography EMG uses a small needle-shaped electrode placed in your skin to measure the electrical activity of your muscles. Genetic testing involves taking a blood sample and testing it for defective genes known to cause CMT. Most people with CMT should be able to have their diagnosis confirmed by genetic testing and find out exactly which type of CMT they have.

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You may experience feelings of shock, denial, confusion or fear. Some people are relieved that there's finally an explanation for their symptoms. Couples with a family history of CMT who are thinking of having a baby can be referred to a genetics specialist for advice.

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Page last reviewed: 18 February Next review due: 18 February