The Experience Trap
Does Experience Cure Bad Habits? The ITM Plan is built on a simple reality: markets are made up of people, not companies. And while companies change, human behaviour repeats in remarkably predictable patterns. Ever lost your car keys? Even when we know an impulse didn’t work out last time, we tend to do the exact […]
Why SPY?
| The Great ETF Explosion | Currently there are over 5,000 US-listed ETFs trading across the major US exchanges – more than twice as many as there are companies listed on the NYSE. What started out as a way of capturing the large market movement has morphed into thousands of ‘baskets of stocks’ capturing different […]
The Greed Index
| The VIX’s Missing Twin | The Greed Index? OK, that was just a joke. There isn’t one – or at least, there is no widely recognised market equivalent to the VIX devoted specifically to greed. The VIX is routinely called Wall Street’s Fear Index. Yet fear and greed are supposed to be the two […]
Discipline? Or Denial?
| Numbers I don’t need to see | Not looking at my account is one of my strategies for dealing with down days. Not because I am ignoring the market or too afraid to look at it; it’s because I don’t want to translate a, say, 1% drop into actual dollar figures. Why I don’t […]
Market Pessimists
| The Eeyore Effect | We’ve had some heart-stopping days recently when market drops tested our confidence in the ITM strategy. Because I’m in Australia everything happens overnight – so the first thing every morning I reach for my iPad to see where things landed. And some days it has not been a good way […]
AI: One Click. Seven Layers.
Why one layer pulled down the Nasdaq-100. Last week we looked at the Nasdaq and discovered that QQQ isn’t the Nasdaq. This week, we are going one layer deeper – because “technology” isn’t one investment either. Technology isn’t one sector. It is a supply chain. Let’s follow a single request through the technology stack. You […]