EBRI's Annual Retirement Confidence Survey

According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI):

"Workers who say they are very confident about having enough money for a comfortable retirement this year hit the lowest level in 2009 (13 percent) since the Retirement Confidence Survey started asking the question in 1993, continuing a two-year decline. Retirees also posted a new low in confidence about having a financially secure retirement, with only 20 percent now saying they are very confident (down from 41 percent in 2007)."

EBRI also says less than half of those surveyed have any idea how much money they will need to retire comfortably:

"Many workers still do not have a good idea of how much they need to save for retirement.  Only 44 percent of workers report they and/or their spouse have tried to calculate how much money they will need to have saved by the time they retire—and an equal proportion (44 percent) simply guess at how much they will need for a comfortable retirement."

Unfortunately, an astounding 53% have less than $25,000 in savings and investment. Fully 76% of those responding to the survey reported having less than $100,000 put away for retirement.  So, regardless of how much they think they need, few respondents have much at all put aside for retirement.

There has never been a more urgent need for successful investing to rebuild the account values ravaged by last year's market decline.

Read the entire report at 

http://www.ebri.org/pdf/briefspdf/EBRI_IB_4-2009_RCS1.pdf

Trade the Trend

Very powerful training session this morning. One point that hit home is we must trade with the trend. Fighting the trend is like swimming upstream in a swift river.

The question all investors need to answer for themselves is this: Which trend do I want to follow? Short-, intermediate- or long-term trend?

Steve showed us how to use the 5-day moving average and the price channel as stops in the current intermediate trend, and how the 5-day gives us a great exit point during the initial phase of this intermediate advance. The price channel will give us more lattitude when the short-term cycle chop begins.

DDM and QLD Continue to Move Up, Are You? Paper Trade to Gain Confidence.

From this morning's commentary:

"We don't trade against the magenta line (intermediate), even when shorter term cycles look like they are due to decline. We use their weakness instead, to add to long positions...The reason is that big money keeps buying the dips...when I start pointing out how an intermediate cycle has been in a 4-5 week decline that typically only lasts 4-6 weeks, then you have to be ready knowing that some kind of alarm is going to be triggered inside the institutional brain, and they are going to wake up and push the buy button. It happens all the time, several times a year."

Shares of the DDM, our preferred Dow double-beta tracking stock, are up $5.31, or 20%, from their July 10 close. Shares of the QLD, the NASDAQ double-beta tracking stock we use, are up $6.75 (19.2%) during the same period.

Some of you are still on the sidelines during this nice market rally. We had a question from a student some time ago that merits repeating here. She came up after a live training session and asked, "How do I get over the fear of making a bad decision?"

"Through learning and practice," we replied. She was involved in learning already, so we went on to discuss paper trading, and how important it is to use paper trading tools available through your discount broker to practice everything you learn about investing BEFORE you commit any money to a new technique or strategy. Repetition anchors your understanding and leads to confidence.

We hope you are actively investing, and if not, that you are paper trading the insights Steve provides on the site each day. Once you have the confidence that you understand how to invest properly, then you can commit money to the market without fear. You'll never look back.

Already we've had very nice feedback from subscribers who are enrolled in Steve's current training series, which began yesterday. If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity, contact us through the website at TheMarketForecast.com. The first session yesterday is available in the archive for attendees to review.

Are You Conventional?

We recently discussed the flaws in using only history to make investing decisions. Stock market prediction is particularly difficult when investors compound the error using shaky assumptions. Writing in the weekend Wall Street Journal, Tom Lauricella discusses one typical mistake:

"Even though stocks are down about 40% from their peak, the conventional wisdom is that investors should have stuck to their long-term plan and not responded to the market downdraft. But a growing number of advisers think that's foolish...'Historically we know there are periods where you could lose a decade's worth of returns,' says David Lucca, a partner at Dallas-based Rhoads Lucca Capital Management. 'Why would you follow the conventional wisdom?'...

"'The wiser thing is to be prudent,' he says. 'To say I don't care what happens to my money today, maybe in ten years it will be better, doesn't make any sense.'"

Read the full article at

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124795660287062371.html

What are We Seeing in the Markets?

Nice bullish move in the market today, up 3% on the Dow and 3.5% on the NASDAQ. If you're trading the ETFs, the DDM was up 6.25% and the QLD finished up just under 6.6% for the session.

Following this morning's commentary we were looking for the indices to "push through their still resistive 30 and 50 (on the Dow) moving averages...Once those averages are surpassed, significant automated buying kicks in, and a renewed intermediate up trend can grow some legs." After the Dow blasted through those moving averages to trade at about 8500 within 30 minutes after the opening bell, the market never looked back, closing at 8616.21.

But let's go back to last week. In the commentary for both Thursday and Friday Steve took a slightly bearish posture, stressing that the moving averages were providing stiff resistance. However, he indicated we would see the intermediate weakness ending when the market broke above the 5-day moving average. On Monday he also emphasized that continued weakness was "not a given, because the Dow's long-term cycle is still rising" and the intermediate cycle was deep in the reversal zone.

In Friday afternoon trading on our 30-minute chart of the Dow we had a nice bullish crossover with the market trading above 8120. It was a good time to be long in a short-term trade and the market advanced another 25 points through the closing bell. Much to our pleasure, that signal has not reversed, indicating we should be on the long side of the market through this 500-point move.

If you missed that signal, you had another good shot on Monday. On the daily chart of the Dow the market pushed through the 5-day moving average, which had been so unyielding, above 8200. That signal got you into a 400-point move.

If you missed that one, too, be patient. We don't chase profits. Short-term and momentum cycle dips are good re-entry points for getting into a rally that you missed the first time. And remember we can make money in both directions.

(While the NASDAQ and Dow have each been up approximately 5.7% during the time we are discussing, the QLD is up almost 11.4% and the DDM is up about 12%.)

Is this the start of a bullish intermediate cycle? Steve says,"[F]or now, what we are seeing could be considered a short term cycle rally with the POTENTIAL to turn into a full intermediate advance but we want volume to confirm as well."

So far, so good. Stay tuned.

The Problem Most Investors Face Using History to Predict the Stock Market

Good information is critically important to making decisions about your investing. The problem is, there is so much "noise" out there that it can be difficult to focus on the few things that will be the most helpful to you. So the default setting for most investors is to look at history.

The history of the market: what happened last year, the last 10 years. The history of the stock you're considering buying: the most recent quarterly earnings, last year's results, how much it's up (or down) in the past five years.

Unfortunately, that type of history will not make you a better investor. How many times have we been told that "past results do not guarantee future performance"?

This is why at The Market Forecast we ignore almost all news--it concerns itself with what has already happened. And it's not useful, because we can't change it or act on it. We want to know what's going to happen next. Read the news for entertainment, not stock market prediction.

Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal reveals one of the greatest pitfalls of relying on history: What if the accepted history is just plain wrong?

He writes that even though U.S. stocks as a whole have underperformed the long bond for the past 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 years,

"Still, brokers and financial planners keep reminding us, there's almost never been a 30-year period since 1802 when stocks have underperformed bonds.

"These true believers rely on the gospel of 'Stocks for the Long Run', the book by finance professor Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania that was first published in 1994.

"Using data assembled by other scholars, Prof. Siegel extended the history of U.S. stock returns all the way back to 1802. He came to two conclusions that became articles of faith to millions of investors: Ever since Thomas Jefferson was in the White House, stocks have generated a 'remarkably constant' average return of nearly 7% a year after inflation. (Adding inflation at 3% yields the commonly cited 10% annual stock return.) And, declared Prof. Siegel, 'the risks of holding stocks decrease over time'."

"There is just one problem with tracing stock performance all the way back to 1802: It isn't really valid...The 1802-to-1870 stock indexes are rotten with methodological flaws.

"Another emperor of the late bull market, it seems, has turned out to have no clothes."

Read the entire article at

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Does-StockMarket-Data-Really-wallstreet-2749436021.html?x=0&.v=4

So, which history do we use?

Cycle analysis is the only tool we have found to be accurate in predicting the markets. Then we confirm with a handful of useful technical indicators, including the 5-, 30- and 50-day moving averages, along with volume. And we employ our crossovers for intraday and short-term trades.

That's it. Everything else is just noise, or entertainment.

Only 25%?

Earlier we wrote that only 25% of stocks outperformed the market.  William J. Bernstein writing in Money Magazine provides further information:

"In fact, researchers at the investment management firm Dimensional Fund Advisors found that from 1980 to 2008, the top-performing 25% of stocks were responsible for all the gains in the broad market, as represented by the University of Chicago's CRSP total equity market database (see the chart).

"As for the bottom 75% of stocks in the U.S. market, they collectively generated annual losses of around 2% over the past 29 years."

Read the entire article here:

http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/09/magazines/moneymag/stock-strategies.moneymag/index.htm