Tuesday – Top Trade Review – Q1 2020

Not much is happening so let’s review our Top Trade Alerts and see how they’re doing.

Top Trade Alerts are trade ideas I feel have an excellent chance of success.  Usually they are news-driven – trades on stocks I expect to make a move in the near future – not just a simple value play.  Nonetheless, we set them up as long-term value trades as we don’t need to make short-term bets to get great short-term results.  However, we do need a few months so we’re not going to look at the most recent trade ideas.  

Since January of 2020 there have been over 60 Top Trade Ideas, not quite one per week.  The secret to the success of our Top Trade Alerts, which historically have an 70%+ win rate, is that we DON’T just pick trades because we feel we have to.  We try to pick one a week but some weeks we pick 3 and some we pick none.  Forcing trades to fulfill arbitrary expectations is the downfall of many market newsletters.  

We don’t make our Top Trade Alerts complicated (and you can sign up here to get them fresh), they are generally “set and forget” trades for the less active traders, who just want to build a good portfolio one trade at a time.   We won’t get this review done all at once but let’s start getting through our trades starting in Jan of 2020 – as it will be interesting to see how we rode out the crash and recovery.  

In the interest of space, I’m just going to reprint the actual trade and the chart, not the commentary, which you can see by following the links.  We’re going to assume no adjustments were made and just see how the positions performed.

Top Trades for Mon, 06 Jan 2020 14:53 – HRB

I guess it would be a good Butterfly candidate but it stays down too long so we generally just play it bullish into April.  March earnings are not likely to be exciting but, for the Earnings Portfolio, let’s play HRB like

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Provided courtesy of Phil’s Stock World.