We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP236: Momentum Indicators for the 2nd Quarter 2019 w/ Dr. Richard Smith (Business Podcast)

Episode Date: March 31, 2019

On today's show, Preston and Stig talk to momentum expert, Dr. Richard Smith. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: Which momentum trends billionaires are currently investing in Why it sometimes better t...o wait 6 months after a billionaire bought stock to take a position Which commodities have a good price momentum How to use momentum in your options strategy BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Download Richard Smiths' free report and try his system free for 30 days Richard Smith's Blog Daniel Crosby’s book, The Behavioral Investor – Read reviews of this book NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's show, we bring back our good friend, Dr. Richard Smith. Richard is an expert in momentum investing and is the founder of Trade Stops. He's an alumni of Berkeley and has used his background in statistics and mathematics to model normal and non-standard momentum trends in financial securities. Since Stig and I are avid users of his momentum service to augment our own value investing approach, we are always thrilled to have him on the show and talk about the current, trends and ideas. So without further delay, here's our interview with Dr. Richard Smith.
Starting point is 00:00:38 You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host, Preston Pish, and as always I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson. And like we said in the introduction, we are joined by popular demand with Dr. Richard Smith. So Richard, welcome back to the show. Love being on your show, guys. Very happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Well, we're thrilled to have you here, Richard. So on today's show, we really want to talk about the current market trends that you're seeing and which momentum trends you're seeing as being
Starting point is 00:01:25 profitable. But before we go into that, let's start off by talking about what you suggested the last time you were here on the show. And I just want to refresh people's memory. You were here in last summer in August of 2018. And during that time, you were excited about small cap stocks and energy stocks. And since that time, we've had a lot of volatility in the market. And I'm just kind of curious how that's performed for you. I think it illustrates pretty well my approach to investing overall what happened with energy stocks in particular. So at the time that we last met, mid-August and XLE, the energy sector ETF, was at about $71.00. And, made a high six weeks after that at about $77.
Starting point is 00:02:09 And then, you know, along with the market, everything else in the market in October of 2018, started a pretty steep decline and turned red in my system at about $66. So, you know, got stopped out with about a $5, about an 8% correction on that stock. But energy stocks went down as low as $54 in December. So getting stopped out at $66 was pretty good in my book. Just turned green again in my system in early March, again, at about $64, $65 a share. So able to get back in about six months later at about the same price that my system had stopped out on.
Starting point is 00:02:45 I think that was a really good response. I also think it's really interesting for the listeners and important for the listeners to know that whenever you follow a momentum strategy, whenever you do see a drawdown as you see there, you might be thinking, why should I be using a system like this in the first place? But then the value does not only come from picking the winners, but also from calling the losers instead of just like holding on and, you know, praying and hoping for the best. I think the value, a lot of it comes from the psychology. So you could look at this and say, oh, well, you know, hey, you stopped out at $65 in November.
Starting point is 00:03:18 And then you just got back in at $65, you know, six months later. Why even bother getting stopped out, right? Well, if you had had to live through that whole 20% drawdown down to $54, that might have been the point where you panicked and threw in the towel at the low. And that's what used to happen to me as an investor. I would often wonder like, how does the market know exactly when I throw in the towel and then turn around and go back up, right? I just needed a system for myself where I could make sure that I was on board some good long-term trends, not have to worry too much about getting out at the top or buying at the bottom.
Starting point is 00:03:53 Perfect. And thank you for also summarizing the conceptual framework. We know you pay very close attention to what billionaires are investing in, including Warren Buffett. Now, based on your research, what are the billionaires buying right now that you find interesting in the momentum perspective? I think the last time we talked billionaires were pretty heavily into consumer discretionary stocks. And that has continued to be the case. They're still about my system. It seemed to be about 22 percent of their capital of the billionaires that I've I follow allocated to consumer discretionary stocks. So one that I was just looking at Stig is Dollar General. Got good momentum. New highs around $120 a share right now has been in the news as well. In general, I'd say the billionaires are still focused on consumer discretionary stocks, financials, industrials, and also information technology. Dollar General is one stock that a few of the billionaires that I'm tracking are particularly interested in. So Richard, it's really interesting to see how you're tracking all of these allocations across all these key influencers in the space. So when you invest in stocks that are similar to their picks, are you digging into
Starting point is 00:05:03 their 10Ks and 10 Qs or is it more simplified based simply on your momentum indicators? Oh, absolutely. I see what I'm doing is essentially a form of what's called factor investing, kind of pioneered by Cliffassness of advanced quantitative research. Some of the well-known factors include value, volatility, momentum. Cliff Asnus was kind of the pioneer of momentum as a factor. He convinced his PhD advisor at the University of Chicago, Eugene Fama, right, of the efficient market hypothesis, that momentum was indeed a factor in the markets that could generate above average returns or good alpha. So I use the billionaires essentially to get my value factor, right? So I'm not going to be the guy who spends my life reading financial statements, reading quarterly
Starting point is 00:05:50 reports, et cetera. I want a good filter for value in my decision making. So I say, hey, these are great value investors. Let me take their universe of ideas, incorporate value as a factor in my investing strategy by making sure that I'm working from a base of ideas that great value investors have already vetted for me, right? I'm a busy guy. I'm running business or businesses. I've got three kids. I can't be studying the markets 24-7. I want to check in maybe once a week. So that's a key part of my strategy to make sure that I'm following the base of ideas of great investors with great track records. I'm sure you're looked into backtesting some of this.
Starting point is 00:06:30 What does the results tell you? Oh, yeah, do a lot of back testing. Over the years, I've found some kind of surprising what people might find counterintuitive results. Just taking the billionaires as a group of investment ideas, one thing that I found surprising is that oftentimes it's better to get into. a stock that a billionaire has bought about six months after they've gotten into the stock, right?
Starting point is 00:06:55 You know, a lot of people, the billionaire filings come out, the 13Fs, right? And they think, oh, my God, Buffett bought this stock. I better get in. Or it might be too late because he bought it, you know, six weeks ago. But it doesn't work that way at all that I've found. Some of the best results I've found is to follow investment ideas of billionaires where there's not good momentum. They're kind of in the red.
Starting point is 00:07:17 and then wait for that momentum to really kick in and get on board some of the longer-term trends after the billionaires have bought. So Richard, I'm just curious. Are you wading certain billionaires, call it Warren Buffett, has a higher weighting than some other billionaire, or are you just looking at the 13Fs and just kind of giving everybody an equal weight? You know, I don't really have a lot of preference for one billionaire over another, as it turns out.
Starting point is 00:07:44 I just want to know that I'm working from a solid base of investment. ideas from the world's greatest investors. After that, I try to keep my personal opinions out of my investing as much as possible. Yes, Warren Buffett is the North Star of investing for a lot of people, right? But overall, I haven't found that Warren Buffett's ideas plus momentum are necessarily better than, say, David Einhorn's ideas plus momentum. So I try to keep personal opinion out of it as much as possible. Again, just make sure I'm working off of a good base of great ideas from great investors and then let my systems do the heavy lifting for me from there. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine
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Starting point is 00:12:34 media. And I think one of the most prevalent theories that we hear and that we also covered on the show is that commodities will perform really well in 2019. I don't know if you agree with this thesis, but you might be able to provide some context to whether or not you agree with this or not. And in any case, which commodity do you think will perform best? I'm not seeing the momentum across commodities that I really would want to see myself before I would have a lot of conviction about the upside opportunity for commodities. Some of the best investors I know are very bullish on commodities. I don't like the second guess. Great investors' thesis, but so far, I'm not seeing a lot of indication across the commodities world that the momentum is there yet. So looking at the Bloomberg
Starting point is 00:13:21 Commodity Index, for example, I still see a solid downtrend, just drawn a trend line between the highs from back in 2008 down to today. That downtrend is still intact. Overall, I'm mildly bullish on gold, although I've been bullish for a while and we've seen a pretty good run up in gold. I see some risks in April for gold. I'm pretty bullish on oil, too. After the big fall, there's still a lot of upside sentiment. But overall, I don't share the same extreme bullishness that some other investors in the
Starting point is 00:13:53 space in the commodity space due right now. Richard, so you're an expert in volatility in understanding what normal looks like in the price movement of various stocks. So something that we haven't talked too much about on the show. We talked about it a little bit, but not a lot, is the VIX. Can you explain how you look at the VIX and why it might be important today? Well, the VIX is tracking the implied volatility. So there's historical volatility, meaning kind of how volatile stocks have been in the past. And then there's implied volatility, which means what investors are anticipating the volatility to be in the pretty near future, Okay, so you take the prices of options that are selling, being traded between investors,
Starting point is 00:14:37 and the prices of those options imply a certain expectation of volatility in the future. So the VIX is what I call anticipatory indicators, so it's kind of anticipating what volatility is likely to be in the future, and it's a measure of how people are betting about the future volatility. That's about 30 days out approximately. I love looking at volatility as an indicator. So I like to look at historical volatility going back about three years. On the S&P 500 right now, it's about 10%. So that means that over the next 12, 18 months,
Starting point is 00:15:12 I need to be okay with the S&P flopping around up or down by about 10%. And that's different than what the VIX is. The VIX is telling me how much volatility I should expect based on how people are betting on options over the next 30 days. The VIX is a powerful indicator. I don't use it a whole lot myself except maybe as a short-term kind of sentiment indicator, but I am very interested in volatility
Starting point is 00:15:35 as a factor in my investing in terms of how I anticipate and how much noise I need to be okay with in an investment over the next 12 to 18 months. Let's continue talking a bit more about volatility. We would really like to talk about options. We haven't really been talking too much about options here on the show. Perhaps before we dig more into it
Starting point is 00:15:55 and talk more about volatility and the impact of options, perhaps you could explain the basic principles of options theory first. Options are what are called derivatives, right? So just the basic idea of put and call options. You own, let's say, a stock like Apple
Starting point is 00:16:14 and it's trading at $170 a share. A call option would allow you to buy Apple at a certain strike price at a certain time in the future. So let's say you, bought a $200 call option that expires in December of 2019 on Apple. That'll give you the right to buy Apple at $200 a share anytime before December of 2019. So if Apple goes up to $300, you can buy it from a person who sold you that call option at $200 a share anytime before December of 2019. So that would be obviously
Starting point is 00:16:53 a very profitable purchase of a call option. And you could buy that call option. And you could buy that call option for inexpensive price right now relative to a $300 resulting price at the end of December. So on the flip side, a put option, you think a stock's going to fall. You can buy a put option that will allow you to sell a stock at a certain strike price before a certain period of time. So options are very powerful. They have a lot of leverage. They can really add a lot of diversity to your investment strategy, but that leverage can
Starting point is 00:17:22 cut both ways. So you have to be very careful with options. as part of your investment strategy. Richard, real quick, one of the reasons we wanted to talk about options is because you include a momentum component in this option strategy. Can you talk to us about that a little bit? I had to come up with an option strategy that used a little bit more of a long-term approach to options investing.
Starting point is 00:17:44 So I like to use options where I have good upside momentum. And then what I found, Stig, is that about eight to ten months out, so an eight to ten month expiration date from when you buy the option is kind of the best target expiration period that I've found using my indicator. So a good example stig of my approach to options investing at this point is dollar general, a stock that we were talking about earlier that several billionaires are interested in, corrected along with a lot of the rest of the market in December, but only fell into the yellow zone in my system. Now, the yellow zone means that you've fallen a little bit more than halfway from the recent high down to what I call the red zone. In Dollar General, that was about
Starting point is 00:18:30 18 percent below its high. So that's where the red zone would start in my system. Now, Dollar General fell about 15 percent. So it hadn't turned red. It was in the yellow zone. But then it started going back up and it turned green again. So it went from yellow to green. That's a great indicator of more upside momentum in a good stock like Dollar General. And so at that point in time, when it turned from yellow to green in that momentum reasserted itself, I'd be looking for a call option in Dollar General that was about, that would be like October of 2019. Buy a call option on Dollar General at about the strike price that it was trading for at that time, which was about $106 a share. Use the leverage of options to make a conservative but high odds bet using the leverage of options so you don't
Starting point is 00:19:17 have to invest a lot of money. But, you know, and today Dollar General is already up at about $120 dollars a share. So that would be quite a profitable trade at this point. So it's a little different approach than what a lot of people do with options. Again, I'm trying to use momentum, take advantage of longer term trends, and that's kind of the option strategy that I've evolved. I guess of all the questions really that we have prepared for you today here, Richard, I was most excited about this one here. Recently did a podcast episode about billionaire Stanley Drachimeller, you know, the famous headspine manager. He's probably best known for speculating with George. Soros against the British pound and literally breaking the Bank of England for one billion dollars.
Starting point is 00:19:57 One thing that surprised me a little whenever we covered him was that he's recently said, and I think this interview was back from December 2018, that he found the price signals much harder to read. And he mentioned six to seven years because of algorithm trading. Do you encounter some of the same challenges whenever you are reading the price signals? I'd say yes and no. On the one hand, Yes, there has been some whipsaw, especially over the last 12 months, the V-shaped bottom that we saw going into December with those big falls where basically all the losses have been recouped by now. Those are tough situations for anybody to follow, especially if you're using a momentum strategy. And I haven't found a lot of disruption in those opportunities in the markets. And there's just always different sectors of the markets, different market capitalization levels, commodities versus stocks.
Starting point is 00:20:50 there's always opportunities in the market, and I think you just have to find the ones that are still working well today. I think a lot of the algorithmic traders are more focused on shorter term investing, and that's partly why I kind of shy away from shorter term, even swing trading investing, because there's so many people in that space, there's so much computing power in that space that I don't think I can really compete with as a part-time investor. So that's why I like to focus on a little bit of the middle part of a trend. And I haven't seen a whole lot of disruption in my indicators for that kind of time horizon. We might get excited about short-term moves, but really, given their lifestyles and what they're trying to accomplish
Starting point is 00:21:33 in the markets, trying to capture that big chunk in the middle, I find to be a more effective long-term strategy. So, Richard, when you say catch the middle, are you talking about a year to three years? What do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, let's take the S&P 500 coming out of the 2009 bottom, just as an example. So I think it famously bottomed at like 666 in around March of 2009. Now, it didn't turn green in my system until the S&P 500 was above 900. So it had already risen about 40% by the time it turned green. But then it didn't turn red again until about 2017, a seven-year run of capturing the gains of almost 100% in the S&P 500 from about 2010. through 2017. So those are the kinds of trends I'm looking to capture. I want to stay out of the
Starting point is 00:22:23 big drawdowns because they're too psychologically painful for me. And then I want to get on board long-term trends with good momentum. If you can get on something where you've coming out of a strong bottom like we had in 2009 with the S&P 500, ride that up. Those are the sweet spots that I'm really trying to capture. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure
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Starting point is 00:25:52 risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income Funds Perspectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. And I think it's a nice segue into the next question here about the price signals. You already talked about time horizon, you know, the short term, medium term, long term. Do you see different price signals that are easy or harder to read, say if you go from an asset class like gold to energy, to stocks, to treasuries? Is something harder to read than others. I don't. So I'm willing to consider investments in different asset classes as long as I can get on those 12 to 60 month trends. So I have found overall that sometimes if an asset class is very
Starting point is 00:26:40 low volatility, like say treasury bonds, for example, there won't be enough momentum to really help me get on board those long-term trends. And conversely, if very high volatility asset classes, like say junior gold mining stocks or, you know, speculative biotech stocks, those can sometimes be very hard to read their trends as well because there's just too much volatility, too much uncertainty for most investors to put up with. All of my work is really informed by behavioral finance, behavioral psychology. And let me just mention while I'm on this topic,
Starting point is 00:27:14 a fantastic book that I came across recently called The Behavioral Investor by a Dr. Daniel Crosby. He's actually a clinical psychologist who ended up going into finance about 20 years ago and has been working in the finance space using his clinical psychology background to help, you know, in this case, mostly professional investors like RIAs understand investor psychology better. But he's written a very accessible book for the lay investor, let's say, to really understand kind of the psychology of investing and where we get tripped up by our own psychology. And I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a fantastic kind of compilation of all the different mistakes we make as investors, along with some concrete advice about how to
Starting point is 00:28:00 rethink your investing strategy so that you don't get tripped up by the common pitfalls that have been tripping up investors for, frankly, thousands of years, right? Everybody needs to really understand investor psychology. A lot of my work is informed by how do I help a broad swath of successful people become successful investors by basically getting out of their own way. That's been an inspiration to me. I think this book, The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby, is the best resource that I've come across at this point to really understand the impact of psychology on decision making and investing. Richard, love the book recommendation for people listening. We'll be sure to have a link to that in our show notes so that you can quickly find that after listening to
Starting point is 00:28:44 the show. So before we wrap things up here, I just want to personally, thank you for always making time to come on our show. I'm a huge, huge fan of what you do. You know, it's really funny because Stig and I always are using your platform to help our argument when we're talking about value investing. I know that might sound strange for a lot of people, but in value investing, the big mistake, in my personal opinion, is that people sometimes catch falling knives or they have to deal with the pain of a value pick for a year or a year and a half before it finally bottoms and then starts coming back to what they find its value to be because they're doing a lot of fundamental analysis looking at the financials and things like that.
Starting point is 00:29:26 But with your platform, it's helped me a lot and I know it's helped Stig a lot to we're finding these value picks and then we're confirming it with momentum indicators. And I know on our mastermind discussions, there are many times where I'll find something that looks great from a fundamental standpoint. I'm looking at the financials. I think I'm going to get a really fat yield out of it. it, but then I see that the momentum indicators are still red. And so I hold off on that pick until that changes or that transitions. And so I just want to give you an opportunity to tell
Starting point is 00:29:57 people about your platform because we just get so much value out of it. So can you talk to our audience or just tell our audience a little bit more about Trade Smith? Well, I appreciate that a lot, guys. And it's very interesting to me that you as value investors appreciate the kind of extra layers that my products bring to your investing. I think as value investors, you've probably experienced what's called the value trap, right? A stock looks valuable, but it just keeps going down, right? And again, it all goes back to psychology. How do you make sure that you're making investments that are in your psychological tolerances? That's where momentum can be a huge help to value investors to help supplement value investments with great timing, and that's what my work basically does.
Starting point is 00:30:44 I've talked about my green, yellow, and red zone. I just call that the Stock State Indicator. We've got indicators. We help people decide how much to invest. We've got an incredible tool called the Risk Rebalancer that can take a whole portfolio of stocks and an amount of money and tell you how much money to put in each one of those so that you're taking equal risk based on volatility across all those investments. It's a really powerful tool.
Starting point is 00:31:06 Fantastic, Richard. And I would also like to give a quick handoff. The completely free report, harnessing market volatility to discover great new stock ideas. You can download that for free as well. And that is at tradsmithideas.com slash TIP. And we'll make sure to link to Tradesmithideas.com slash TIP in the show notes too. Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show. And we hope you can bring you on again.
Starting point is 00:31:32 Thank you, guys. Great to talk to you as always. And absolutely, anytime. Just give me a call. That was all that Preston and I have for this week's episode of The Investors Podcast. You see each other again next week. Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com.
Starting point is 00:31:52 To get your questions played on the show, go to AsktheInvesters.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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