Welcome back, everybody. My name is Ftopaglei, and you are listening into the Cyber Expo Next podcast. I am super excited about the speaker I have right now, a very longtime friend of mine. Probably known him for over, I don't know, maybe 20 years, maybe longer than that. Jeffers, how you doing? Look, look great. How's it been?
I'm good. How are you doing? You're looking good, too, bud.
I'm trying. We're trying. You know, we all got to, you know, when you when you break that 50, you know what I mean? Like everything falls apart. So, you got to kind of take care of your body and your health. I know. We just met up at the Money Show. You know, you lost what, like almost like 400 pounds. I'm saying...
Yeah. Well, listen. I, you know, you can see the difference in your intro. You can see your, you got a little pudge of your face there in the intro clip. The pictures in the intro you just played.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen. The next is gonna be what? A facelift. Is that what you have to do?
Nah, just eat right like we're doing and keep moving the body and just stay healthy.
That's it. That's it. So, um, so how's everything going with you? Has it, how you been working? What you been working on? Anything new?
Um, I mean, we got the, we're bringing back the new stock, the new commodity tra-, excuse me, the old Commodity Traders Almanac. We're going to put one out. Um, it's been uh 13 years since we put that out there. So, we got that going. Um, I mean, what really been learning a lot from our, our monthly um webinar with subscribers, with members, we, we did it yesterday and we just ran for like an hour just taking questions, talking to people, hearing what they're thinking, what they want to know about. That's kind of been a real uh source for, for uh information, knowledge, just get kind of get a feel for what's going on in the marketplace, what people are thinking. Kind of a sentiment indicator also. So, um, and just, you know, spreading the word. Santa Claus rally time coming up. So, you know, we've been talking about all the indicators and the seasonal trades and, you know, so it's, uh, it's busy.
Yeah. So, so for some people don't know, um, you know, Jeff, she's been around, I mean, the book's been around since what, the 1960s or something like that. How old?
68 was the first edition. It's as old as me. You said, you know, I'm gonna be...
Your dad owned it, right?
What's that? Your dad owned it.
He started it. It was his brainchild. He, he created it. It was his whole epiphany to take all of the markets' patterns, cycles, trends, indicators, and put it all in a calendar format so he could follow the market's schedule along with your own. I mean, you know, I had that mouse pad from you from years ago, but it's got the times of day to trade. It's, that was one of the first...
Yeah. I, it's not right here because, you know, but I have it at the, at the, the other office. But I love that because it lines up with the half-hourly trading patterns that I did by hand back in the, in the old days when I was a kid, you know, with an adding machine and underlining a bar in half-hour ticks. And it's, it's in, it's a feature of the Almanac for years.
And, and yeah, I know. And it's uh, and I, I, I invented that mouse pad when I was a day trader, when I, when a prop trader 35 years ago. They actually made a clock out of it, you know, and they gave you a piece of paper. No, actually just gave you a piece of paper and you wrote it down. I'm like, you [clears throat] know what? I made a clock out of it and then all of a sudden I'm like, you know what? How can you get this on everyone's desk? Because everybody should have it. I made the mouse pad and I gave it to you. So, it's great. It definitely saves you thousands. But, you know, the Almanac saves you hundreds of thousands. I mean that thing has just been, you know, the longest running book that I know, um, in, in the market industry. I mean it's just every year you come out with a new one. You do a beautiful job. It's a gorgeous book. I mean like, uh, and when did you, when did you take it over from your dad?
Um, around 2000, uh, 2001. It was a bit of a transition. Um, kind of around a time I was getting married and we sort of did the whole, you know, uh, um, gifting...
No, it was just sort of, it's a succession plan, you know, it was, it was well planned out with our, with our accountant and um, and you know, I had been there for, I started with him in like 1989, 1990 and um, you know, I, I just was, it was time, you know, and he was, you know, he was not...
Yeah, I mean it's a long time. Um, so you know, we started uh just learning things from him. I mean, I, I was doing it in my pajamas when I was a kid. You know, you go into his office and, you know, he'd show me charts and, and um, you started looking at that stuff. I mean, I used to ship the books uh out of the mail room. That was like my uh, like Monday Night Football was my book packing night. I would go down there and shipping books to Zurich and Hong Kong and Indiana and Los Angeles, all over the place. You know, it's a staple. It really is a beautiful staple of just having on, you know, having the library of it every year and so on. But explain to everybody what actually is the Almanac for people that don't know what it is.
Well, it's, it's the Stock Traders Almanac and it's basically um a compendium of all the markets' repeating patterns from uh intraday patterns like we were talking about with your, your, your clock mouse pad up to uh multi-year trends, the seasonal cycle, the four-year presidential cycle. So basically what we used to say is that my father, maybe even myself, could basically tell you what the market was likely to do on any given, you know, half hour, hour at any given day, month of the year. Um, it shows you the personality of, of uh different months and it's, it's built on, you know, the, the roots of behavioral finance like what people do repeatedly with their money. Um, a lot of the market cycles and patterns are driven by institutions. You know, that's where the big money moves. I mean, you, you track that stuff. I mean that stuff...
And you know, on the, the longer, you know, cycle, the, the longer, you know, pattern, the swing type time frames, um, it's sort of quarterly behavior driven. You see different patterns around triple witching, around the beginnings and ends of months, the middles of months. I mean, one of the things that we discovered back in the 90s when I had started working for him was that it used to be the last trading day of the month and the first four days was the monthly five-day bulls where most of the market gains made and the rest of the month the market didn't, didn't do much. And then we saw this mid-month spike coming in there which we're like, hm, what's going on there? That's the uh, uh payroll deductions, the bi-monthly or every two-week payroll deductions going into the, the um, you know, 401ks and IRAs and the fund managers have to put that money to work. So that, you know, the kind of discovery. So some of, some of these things shift, but um, it's showing you uh human behavior um and what they do with their money. People pay their bills the same time of month. They, you know, they go on vacation the same time of year, all that kind of stuff.
Now, what, what, now you have the new one coming out, right? When did it come out, man?
The 26, right? So, we'll tell everyone how you can get it and, and everything and so on for the new one. I know you have a lot of people renew it every year.
Yeah. If you, if you want to get it, you know, you know, from us, you, you best do subscribe to the newsletter at stocktradersalmanac.com. You can, you know, click on get the Almanac for free.
We'll post that link up in the next minute. We'll have Rich post that up for everybody.
Tradersalmanac.com. Get it wherever you get your books. Amazon, and you know, people are asking for digital copies, but this is really something tactile. You want to be able to take notes, write some things down, and have something in front of you.
Look how beautiful that thing is. That thing is gorgeous. This looks like almost like, you know, a workbook almost. You know,
It is. It's spiral-bound. You can make notes on the, the diary pages. You know, there's the, the probability number for what the market's likely done on that any given trading day. There's reminders in there about, you know, late October is the best time to buy stocks, especially techs and small caps. There's the Thanksgiving trading, you know, features. We got, you know, you want to buy in a weakness set up nice this year, buying in a weakness ahead of the week before Thanksgiving and selling in a strength for that trade. There's the small cap feast from Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
Yeah. Break that down for us because that's what people I guess understand what the Almanac means, you know? I mean, it's not like you, there's also like the Weather's Almanac or something like that.
It's very similar. It's a combination of seasonal trading patterns and strategies where, you know, places and times create edge for your money, for, for your trades, and also indicators like the Santa Claus rally is often misunderstood. This is something Yale invented in 1972 in his 1973 Stock Traders Almanac along with the January Barometer. So, the Santa Claus rally is not some year-end rally, anything from Halloween to, you know, the end of the year. It is the last five trading days of the year and the first two of the new year. And it's an indicator. It's not really a trade. S&P is up 1.3, 1.5% over the seven-day, you know, trading, seven trading day session when most of us are out doing other things with family, holiday travel, and the people at the desks, that the, the pros are picking up bargain stocks that are sold for tax loss selling and it's a general, you know, up, upward bias to the market. And if it doesn't happen, there's also, you know, year-end window dressing, uh, people putting bonuses, holiday bonuses to work. And it's this general, you know, bullish vibration at, during that period of time. And when that doesn't happen, it shows that there's some other, you know, forces at play there. And Yale's famous line, if Santa Claus should fail to call, bears may come to broaden Wall, means that if we don't get our Santa Claus rally over that seven-day stretch, it's time to start looking at some of the other indicators. And this January Barometer, the full month S&P 500 for the month of January out, you know, as January goes, so goes the year. And then there's this first five days indicator, first five trading days of the year. We stand on the old guy's shoulders and built something called the January Indicator Trifecta. This is on page 20 of the 26. We hit the trifecta. We get a positive Santa Claus rally, the seven trading days. Positive first five days. Positive full month January for the S&P. 29 out of 32 years the S&P is up. So that's 90.6% of the time for an average gain of 17.7%.
Um, you know, what does it see for this year?
What does it see for this year?
Um, this, what it saw for this year was we had um two out of three, which is pretty solid. Santa Claus was down if you remember correctly and then the first five were up and the full month was up. So bullish bias. Um, here we are up what, 15% of the S&P as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday. Right. As of yesterday.
Yeah. Pretty solid. Right. And our, you know, we put out an annual forecast. There's already one in, in the 26 Almanac, but we put one out uh just before Christmas um every year. And our best case scenario was 12 to 20%. And it was kind of, you know, um a little less than 50 initially, but as the market kept, came back from the tariff tumble and started breaking through those, those, you know, resistance levels, we shifted to, you know, full-blown bull. I still think we got 20% gain potentially for this year. I think we can, you know, the...
You really think we can go another 20% to go?
Not another 20, but the total another year of 20 for, for an annual gain. I'm looking at for 7,100. Um, you know, the, the mid, excuse me, the mid-November sort of weakness was exacerbated by this, you know, Bitcoin deleveraging event and Powell, you know, the 20 October 29th, Powell said, 'Oh, no more cuts.' And now he's, he's, he's been uh, market sort of slapped him around a little bit on that.
But um, that got, you know, the little weakness in mid, mid-November was sort of, was exacerbated. So I think the rebound here which we're seeing the last couple of days, you [snorts] know, can be um, you know, a little bit um stronger and we could get, you know, what we got, 5%, 5% gain over the next five, six weeks is, you know, not, not crazy.
Yeah, we took a little bit of a, we took a little bit of a smacking in the face. I mean the thing it was almost close to was it 70, 69, we dropped down to 65 on the S&P. The Dow also, same thing. I mean that took a big hit at the high. Do you follow the Dow at all or you just...
No, Dow quite a bit. That, that's what, what a lot of the stuff is built on in the Almanac initially. Um, it's still important, you know, and people poo-poo it, but it's still, you know, the non-fly-by-night stuff, still the sol-, you know, the old school economies is still there. Um, we were down what, about 5% Dow and S&P from the, from October...
And then about eight, eight and a half on the, on um...
So I mean considering how far we came all year, not a...
Not crazy. I mean there was some great opportunities. Liberation Day, what you're talking about, tariff day, I call Liberation Day, when back in April, uh, that was, I mean the Dow was down all the way to, gez, 3,800. We're at, you know, 10,000. You bounced 10,000 points just on the Dow there alone. Now, does your Almanac focus specifically on just the market in general or focus on specific industries or stocks?
Um, not, the Almanac is not specific stocks. We do that in the newsletter. We roll information into the Almanac Investor newsletter, but there is a, a feature on sector seasonality in, in the um, in the Almanac. There's uh talking about, I mean, and October is the big buying spree where a lot of these sectors come into play. I love um copper, you know, we, we roll into uh some of the stuff from the Commodity Traders Almanac. We got a copper trade out there right now. I own the miners, you know, the, the miners ETF.
Yeah. Um, good opportunity there. A little concerned about energy. So, we kind of um correlate some of the, the, the commodity-based seasonal patterns. Of course, you know, our, our, our methodology is sort of a five-discipline approach. We look at seasonals and cycles, fundamentals, technicals and monetary policy and sentiment. So when we look, go for stocks, we do a fundamental screen. We technically, you know, look at them on the charts and see what their uh, some of their indicators are, but we do it at a, the opportune time of the year. Uh, so seasonally, seasonal overlay on that. So,
So, so explain, explain to, explain to the listeners, I mean, even myself, like how does the Almanac actually, I think I said it, but I'll say it again, but how does it actually work? Like when, when you write that Almanac, how do you project what's going to happen over the course of the year? I mean, is it working that if something happens with this, it's going to change here? You know, I see it's more of like a work, a workbook wherever it is, but like, and how do you prepare and how long take you to do the, write an Almanac for the following, for the new year?
