- On a day nearly everyone lost their shirt (and their head)…
- … This guy bagged a profit. What was his secret?
- Could you follow his three steps to $3.7 million?
- Another record: Why the top isn’t in despite all-time highs
- Sanctions reversal: Crazy Adobe-Venezuela story gets crazier
- Booze importer’s ingenious workaround for new tariffs
- Reader dialogue: “Taker states” and the escalating red-vs.-blue rhetoric.
It was the day the Panic of 2008 reached its heart-pounding, sweat-pouring worst.
Sept. 15, 2008. Lehman Bros. went under. Merrill Lynch nearly went under until the feds arranged a shotgun marriage with Bank of America. The giant insurer AIG was likewise circling the bowl. The Dow industrials collapsed 504 points.
“We’ve never witnessed this before,” a stricken Wall Street pro told CNN. “There’s no road map for this.”
Meanwhile, Chuck Hughes slept soundly that night, having collected a 14.5% profit on the day.
Fast-forward six months and the Dow had collapsed another 4,400 points. Forecasts of doom abounded. And Chuck ignored them all — buying in at the very moment the market reversed and embarked on a bull run that’s still intact more than a decade later.
And perhaps none of it would have happened unless he’d been diagnosed 20 years ago with Meniere’s disease.
“It’s a disorder of the inner ear,” he tells us. “It also causes vertigo. You know, dizzy spells.”
This was a problem given how Chuck earned his living at the as a commercial airline pilot.
At that time, flying was the only career Chuck had ever known — first in the Air Force, then as a civilian.
Fortunately, Chuck had already acquired some market savvy… and it all started one day on layover at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas.
“I called my broker and placed one trade,” he says. “That trade confirmed the strategy I’d been thinking about and set me on the path to making millions trading options.
“So that when the unthinkable happened and I was grounded from flying, I didn’t have to scurry to come up with a plan. I already had a great trading system I’d been using and profiting from.”
And devoting his full-time attention to that system allowed him to tweak it, refine it, perfect it… so he could collect 14.5% profits on a day the rest of the world was losing its collective head.
“I keep emotion out of every trade decision I make,” he tells us.
“Instead, I rely on a few key indicators — ones that alert me to when stocks are about to launch into massive upward trajectories… or into long-term death spirals.
“This same strategy managed to produce enormous profits during 2008. My indicators showed me what was coming, and I bet on the stock market falling.
“Better yet, this strategy also alerted me to reverse course in the spring of 2009. So I was able to cash in on the comeback rally ever since.
“My system is dead simple,” he goes on. “And it involves only three steps:
- Finding the crossover point between two separate simple moving averages.
- Using Keltner Channels to determine the proper entry point.
- And selecting the right trade to enter by using my ‘1% rule.’”
Don’t sweat these details. Chuck will reveal how to do everything, step by step, during a special event tomorrow. (Details at this link.)
The key point to know today is that Chuck doesn’t try to predict what the market or a given stock will do.
That might seem counterintuitive, but there’s no arguing with the results. “In the last five years, I’ve had an almost unbelievably good run,” he says — 187 wins and 18 losses. That’s a 91.2% win rate.
Oh, and more than $3.7 million in pure profit. That includes gains of $14,621, $50,671, $197,000, $104,000, $96,000… all on single trades.
He’s also won 10 Trading Championships using this technique — validation from his fellow trading pros.
Curious to learn more? Tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. EDT, for the first time ever, Chuck will reveal his step-by-step system during a special FREE online event.
Just follow this link and we’ll send you all the details.
The S&P 500 is taking a breather after notching a record close yesterday.
At last check, the benchmark U.S. stock index was up a mere three points at 3,043. The Dow is likewise scratching out a modest gain.
The Nasdaq is slightly in the red — dragged down by Google parent Alphabet, off 1.6% after an earnings report that revealed rising costs.
Gold is sinking further below the $1,500 mark, now $1,485. Crude is down 1.6% on the day, back below $55.
“New highs are normal in a bull market, not a sign that the averages are becoming overheated,” says our chart hound Greg Guenthner.
“Consider these stats from financial blogger Ben Carlson: Monday’s rally marked the 14th new all-time high for the S&P 500 this year alone — and the 220th new all-time high since 2013.
“I know there’s more than enough negativity in the world right now, from political strife at home and abroad to major fears surrounding the global economy.
“But these fears are a good thing! They say the market climbs a wall of worry for a reason. I’d be much more concerned about the market if sentiment were universally bullish and investors expected stocks to streak higher every single day. But that’s certainly not the environment we find ourselves in today.”
A quick 5 follow-up: The software and cloud-computing giant Adobe won’t be cutting off its Venezuelan customers after all.
Yesterday was the deadline for Adobe’s Venezuelan users to download any content stored in their cloud accounts; the company said it had no choice but to dump them in light of U.S. sanctions against the Maduro regime.
But the feds appear to have granted a last-minute reprieve: “After discussions with the U.S. government, we’ve been granted a license to provide all of our Digital Media products and services in Venezuela,” says a company blogpost. Adobe’s Venezuelan customers will also get 90 days of free service for their inconvenience.
Hmmm… When this story broke three weeks ago, we mentioned how this decision didn’t discriminate among Venezuelans; opponents of the Maduro regime were cut off just as surely as its supporters. Sounds as if the opposition squawked loudly enough to the Trump administration that the White House decided to grant Adobe a waiver.
That’s government for you — arbitrary and capricious. God forbid people should be allowed to trade freely among themselves…
…Which brings us to a brilliant workaround for the new U.S. tariffs against goods from the European Union.
In the same way that the tariffs apply to single-malt Scotch but not the blended stuff… the tariffs apply to French wine, but only in bottles of two liters or smaller.
Thus an outfit called Florida Caribbean Distillers “has begun importing truckloads of bulk wine from France and bottling the product at its plant between Tampa and Orlando,” reports NPR.
Imagine the biggest container of boxed wine in the world and that’s what you’re looking at here — the company “is importing wine in 20- or 40-foot shipping containers, with a giant pouch inside.” From there, it will be put in conventional bottles selling for under $10 each.
For now the product line is limited to rosé, but the firm plans to add a sauvignon blanc and a pinot noir next year.
“Le Rosey,” as it’s known, will be marketed under the hashtag #TrumpTariffFree.
Ugh — must everything be made political now?
Which brings us to a full mailbag on Friday’s main topic of “taker states” and the prospect of a new American civil war…
First, a point of factual clarification: “Your map shows New York as the most ‘donating’ state and Virginia as the biggest taker, but your text calls out Connecticut and Kentucky, respectively. Which is it?”
The 5: Sharp-eyed, you are. The Rockefeller Institute crunched the numbers a couple of different ways. Indeed, the map relies on a slightly different methodology than the question of how much money comes back to the state for every dollar sent to D.C.
A state-by-state table with the dollar figures is found on Page 15 of this PDF.
Beyond that, the feedback we got reinforced our concerns about where the political rhetoric is going.
“Aren’t these the same people in the liberal/progressive/leftist states that keep saying that the rich should pay their fair share? Well, since these blue states are generally richer than the red states, then they should put money where their mouth is. But once again the phrase ‘The left always project’ comes to mind.
“With the kangaroo court trying to undermine our best president since Eisenhower, and millennials not knowing where the Pacific Ocean is located and George Soros and his well-placed leftists in courts and Congress, we are headed for a revolutionary civil war.”
From the other side of the divide: “Why are we building ships in Mississippi, when all the major shipbuilding and infrastructure for shipbuilding during World War II was in California? Why does
Alabama get to build future space capsules when the knowledge and infrastructure started and still exists in California? (Ah, politics.) Don’t tell me that California comes out even when we have the fifth-largest GDP in the world.
“We don’t need right-wing ‘red’ states who can’t even carry their own water telling other Americans what to think or do when blue states are paying the bills. And this goes back to a basic fundamental in the Constitution, where even the smallest of states get two senators, no matter how many people they represent.”
Here’s a less polemical, more ground-truth perspective from the Plains/Rockies…
“I try to keep my ear to the ground in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota and somewhat in Utah and New Mexico.
“There are large numbers of people — especially in rural areas (which means they are outnumbered big-time by the urbanites) — who have reached the level of frustration with government to resort to arms in what they will call self-defense.
“And — this is critical — not just against the FedGov, but against their state governments, and in many cases their county governments where large hinterland areas are being wagged by the tail of the urban area.
“But they won’t be the ones to start it — they figure that they need to be the clear victims. In the meantime, they’ll grit their teeth, arm TO the teeth and try political solutions. Even though they figure that those options will fail. But it is like smoking in a powder magazine: All it may take is a tiny bit of hot ash to set things off.”
The 5: Interesting, for sure. Keep us posted, please.
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
P.S. Clear your schedule for tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. EDT.
Because 10-time trading champion Chuck Hughes is about to drop a bomb on everything you know about trading.
His proprietary, self-taught trading system has personally banked him more than $3.7 million in extraordinary real-money profits in the last five years alone.
And for the first time ever… he’s going to reveal his step-by-step system during a special free online event tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. EDT.
Just click the button below and we’ll send you all the details.
