The Price of Wheat in 1909
Take a seat at the 'winner's table'... Don't miss Greg Diamond's new presentation... Why the price of wheat in 1909 is relevant... One of the greatest traders of all time... Thanksgiving, a week early...
Often, the best lessons aren't taught in school...
After all, most people I (Corey McLaughlin) know never learned more than a few minutes of finance during their formative school years.
I was an exception... Mr. Carpenter, my middle-school social studies teacher, went rogue on the state curriculum and taught us about stocks. He piqued my interest in investing when I didn't even know the value of what he was doing.
For Mr. Carpenter's class, I kicked off a paper trade on payroll company Automatic Data Processing (ADP). A paper trade means you track a hypothetical position in a stock without spending real money – great investment practice.
I found Automatic Data Processing by starting at the beginning of the alphabet, and it was the first company that sounded to have a meaningful purpose and a large market for its products and services. Everybody needs to get paid.
When your stock made one of the class's highest returns of the week, you got to sit at the "winner's table" at the side of the room, in one of the fabric recliners around a circular table rather than a standard desk.
This was the start of my investing knowledge and, for a while, the extent of it...
I knew Mr. Carpenter lived in a house near the water in a nice part of town and what he was teaching us sounded important, but I didn't fully grasp its value. I wish I did, but my developing brain was more interested in girls and football.
Many years later, I got into this industry... and started learning a heck of a lot more about money and investing, thanks to being surrounded by smart people who knew what they were talking about, eventually at Stansberry Research. (Turns out, they liked Automatic Data Processing, too... My colleague Dan Ferris recommended it back in 2008, and you'll see it near the bottom of today's Digest mailing as our No. 3 top open recommendation across all Stansberry portfolios.)
It's one of the perks of the job. We never stop learning...
Take our friend Greg Diamond's brand-new free presentation yesterday...
As we told you in advance of the presentation, Greg sees a "rare, historic move" coming to the markets in February 2024 that he believes will catch 99% of investors off guard... And I believe him.
Greg – a former Wall Street trader who was once responsible for nearly $1 billion per day of capital – has nailed each of the biggest turning points of the market over the past few years for his Ten Stock Trader subscribers and Stansberry Alliance members.
And, importantly, he recommended specific trades all along the way. Last year, for instance, in what was the worst year for the conventional 60/40 stock/bond portfolio in generations, Greg posted an 83% win rate with his trades and average gains of nearly 25%.
Now, Greg doesn't profess that anyone should allocate their entire portfolio to his trading strategy. Yet the bigger-picture view that comes with his brand of technical trading has proven valuable for many of our subscribers when they think about the market in general.
So when I say you should listen when Greg makes a big, bold call like he is now, you really should hear him out. Because you won't hear what he has to say anywhere else... and it has proven to be invaluable advice.
You can check his latest message out – for free – here... He's joined by Chaikin Analytics founder Marc Chaikin, a Wall Street legend with more than 50 years of investing experience and lessons to share...
I want to highlight one part of the discussion in particular...
Introducing W.D. Gann...
At no point in the days leading up to the debut of his talk yesterday did I expect Greg to mention wheat prices in 1909 – and why they might be relevant to the markets today. Yet that's what he did yesterday, and it made a lot of sense in the context Greg was describing.
He was talking about legendary trader W.D. Gann, a pioneer of technical analysis who made a name for himself in the early 1900s. He grew up the son of a cotton farmer in Texas, never attended high school, and worked the family farm.
He became interested in the prices of livestock... and commodities, which eventually led to interest in trading in the stock market, too. He studied data about hog production, iron, and corn, which is how he first arrived at his theories about natural "cycles" in the markets.
In 1919, he started publishing daily market letters and forecasts for stocks and commodities with reported 85% accuracy. Then his unique methods of trading – rooted in ancient mathematics, geometry, and even astrology – became more widely known.
Now, I realize this might sound out there...
But then again, so might a lot of things people describe as "normal" today. As Greg explained, Gann was doing things way ahead of his time and the "closest thing to artificial intelligence" of his day...
Gann seems like an eccentric, yes, but only if you don't understand the logic behind his work... He tried to predict the stock market decades into the future by looking decades into the past.
Computers hadn't been invented yet, but Gann studied cycles by manually looking up decades of price data. He pored over the archives at libraries in New York and London, going over the records of stock transactions as far back as 1820. Nobody else was doing this.
Most notably, Gann predicted a market crash in 1929...
He did it in part by looking back at history and the panic of 1873, which you likely have never heard of and even people back then had largely forgotten. He used the same approach beyond investing, too, like to predict when World War I would end. And he wrote a book in 1927 that many believe foresaw the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Eccentrics are eccentrics until they are right about important events.
A Wall Street Journal profile published in 1910 also told a story about how Gann predicted things like the price of wheat – $1.20 – on a specific day a year earlier by using his analysis of price and cycles. As Greg shares in the presentation...
Gann was a fascinating character and a successful trader. He reportedly left a $50 million fortune upon his death in 1955, though that's difficult to confirm. In any case, here is the point Greg was making, derived from Gann's theories raised on the farm that have proven true...
The only number that really matters for investors is price... and short-term prices are based on human emotions, which follow predictable cycles in certain stocks.
Greg has since applied his own experience – first as a Wall Street trader and, in recent years, as an editor with Stansberry Research – to putting these centuries-old ideas into action for subscribers...
This is how he was able to warn about a big market move in March 2020, three months before it happened and without knowing that a pandemic would be the trigger. It's how he called the top and bottom in stocks last year, and why he's so convinced another major market move is coming in early 2024.
Even better, he has a game plan for making trades that could double in value right when these big moments are unfolding. Most folks will likely panic when they should be taking advantage of a prime market... or be overcome with greed at a time that calls for caution. But, hey, that's human nature.
I'm feeling thankful...
Maybe I'm getting bitten by the Thanksgiving bug a week too early... But I'm heartened by the information that I – and you – have access to from Stansberry Research.
Most folks have little to no knowledge of investing and finance. We're fortunate to be surrounded by folks with decades of experience and unique views on the markets.
For instance, millions of Americans are continuing to rack up more credit-card debt than ever, with interest rates north of 20%, when a recession could be ahead. Most would be better off trimming spending if at all possible... and listening to folks like longtime Stansberry Research editors Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig and Dan Ferris, who are urging folks to park cash in a Treasury bill yielding 5%.
(By the way, this spending shift might actually be starting to play out, based on recent data about consumer spending published today... Retail sales dropped in October for the first time since March, albeit by a slim 0.1%. But that included a bigger slowdown in some areas that are the most sensitive to interest rates – like furniture, whose sales fell 2%.)
If you are reading the Digest and have subscribed to Stansberry Research for years, I know you understand why consumers piling on the liabilities might be a problem in the long run... both for them and for certain lenders and other businesses.
But, when it comes to investing strategies, I still know a lot of readers are skeptics of technical analysis and maybe haven't even heard of the kind of research that Greg uses in particular... the kind that can make wheat prices in 1909 relevant today. As Greg said...
Most people have no clue these cycles exist and how to anticipate them.
If nothing else, if you tune into Greg's new video, your investing view might expand to include a different way (or two) of looking at the markets.
Again, Greg is also joined by Chaikin Analytics founder Marc Chaikin, who has five decades of Wall Street experience and is now focused on helping individual investors.
So, watch the video. It's totally free. I'm willing to bet you'll learn something.
That's what I've been trying to do ever since I realized, too late for my liking now, the immense value of what Mr. Carpenter was trying to teach us seventh graders about investing decades ago.
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In today's mailbag, we got a few questions again about how and where to watch Ten Stock Trader editor Greg Diamond's new presentation. You can watch a replay or read a transcript of the free event at your convenience here, and we suggest you do.
Greg details what has led him to forecast a "rare" market move in early 2024... and how he plans to use his trading strategy to put subscribers on the right side of it, as he has done before and after each of the biggest turning points in the markets over the past three years.
All the best,
Corey McLaughlin
Baltimore, Maryland
November 15, 2023