I really like Mark Hulbert’s analysis of newsletter writers. I think he’s been doing it long enough that he knows who’s full of BS and who isn’t. That’s why I thought this article was interesting…
The bullish best
By Mark Hulbert, MarketWatch
After a more-than-300-point decline in the ($INDU: news, chart, profile) Dow Jones Industrials Average over the six trading sessions through this past Monday – enough to trigger sell signals from some technical trading systems -the stock market turned in a powerful rally on Tuesday, gaining 115 points.
What’s next?
For answers at times like these, I find it helpful to turn to the top-performing market-timing newsletters.
For this column, I defined top performer to be one of the top 10 over the last decade on a risk-adjusted basis among the newsletters tracked by the Hulbert Financial Digest. In creating this select list of services, I focused solely on performance attributable to stock market timing, ignoring for the moment the abilities (or lack thereof) of these newsletters’ editors to pick individual stocks or mutual funds.
Note that by focusing on performance over a 10-year period, I made sure that I wouldn’t include either bullish stopped clocks (who thus looked like geniuses in the late 1990s) or bearish stopped clocks (who shone during the 2000-2002 bear market).
I eliminated one of the 10 top performers because it is a purely mechanical model based on the calendar. Its good performance notwithstanding, its current posture tells us little about the market’s intermediate or long-term prospects. (Read an earlier column of mine about this timing system.)
That leaves nine newsletters in this group of top timers. What follows is a brief synopsis of what each of them is saying about the stock market.