SmoothSailing#16

In an attempt to learn and improve my trading, I signed up for the Blue Collar Investor subscription service for a while and paper-traded his recommendations.  He, Alan Ellman, uses technical and fundamental analysis using screens set up to filter stocks for ones that are moving in the right direction.  My conclusion is, that gives you about a 50% success rate.  Over the few weeks I did this, on average half of his picks did as expected, half cratered.  So I still don’t see any advantage to overly relying on technical analysis or on using individual stocks.  My analysis is not professional and certainly not rigidly scientific and I only did it for a few weeks, so it’s not going to convince a statistician, but it reinforces my original conclusions.  ETFs are the way to go when selling options.

Full disclosure:  I experiment a bit so I do own some individual stock, some DIS and some AMZN, the result of selling puts and put spreads.  Both are severely underwater, even though when I got into them they had great fundamental and technical numbers.  Sheesh.  I need to continue working on my voodoo skills there.