Victor Sperandeo Trader Vic Interview

Transcript:
Victor, thanks. It’s great to sit down. Two people that are Dallas-based. Maybe I’ll even start just by saying that there are a lot of people that have been on Real Vision lately that are talking purely about the markets and kind of a broad sense, bull market, bear market, credit bubble, not credit bubble, whereas maybe you have some kind of more nuanced views. But if we take a step back, maybe somebody watching the interview would say that we could possibly be from different investing generations. But I think from what I know about you, we might look at markets the same way. So here maybe 10 years or so into a monetary experiment, just generally, what do you think about markets now and where we are maybe in the market cycle, the economic cycle, et cetera? 

OK, well these two integrated parts to everything you do in Wall Street, and that’s the fundamental and the technical, simple. There’s also the psychological and the emotional side of it, but–
Sentiment. 

–just for the point of your question, we’re in a bear market. It’s 100%. Now why do I say that? Perhaps a background to people listening would be important, because it’s a very solid statement, so I want to give you the background. Now I started on Wall Street in ’66, and I started trading in ’68. Now I’ve probably read 3 plus 1,000 books. One of the books was a book by a fellow named William Gordon, who is the CEO of Indicated Digest. Now that’s before your time. They were a major force in the technical end of the business in the ’60s. And they took the 10 major indicators at the time– now they had odd lot theory, things that nobody even knows what that means. And they traced that back to 1900, 10 different indicators, and then many permutations of those indicators. 

So the one that came in first was the simplicity of using a 200-day moving average, trading days, and when the price– whether you use S&P, the Dow was popular at the time– closes below that, and the moving average is sloping downwards, it’s night and day if it’s sloping upwards, think down. Sloping down, which you sell, and then you would buy in the reverse. That concept, from 1900 to 1966– book came out in ’68– yielded 18 and 1/2 percent compounded. I took it forward. We have a trading staff research firm, and we have three PhD math professors, et cetera. And we ran it forward, and they were similar. 

Now the second best technical indicator was Dow theory. Came in at 18%. Again, similar results. Compounded at 18%. Now the one thing that I did that Bill Gordon didn’t do, was that using real money as such, when you sold, you put the money in 1-year bills. He didn’t add that dimension, so mine, perhaps, was a little less than the 18 and 1/2%, because I added to it by getting yield when I was in cash. So now these two indicators gave bear market signals, one in October, the 200-day moving average was the first, and then later in early December, Dow theory confirm. So you’re in a bear market, and as far as I’m concerned, unless something changes– now nothing is infallible– but I lean very heavily that these are accurate. 

The other part would be the fundamentals. Now, you heard the expression that the market is predicted 14 out of the last 10 recessions, and a lot of people use that.