Advice

“To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it.” -Wilson Mizner

💡 Give them time

You know why children are unable to sit still and listen to music?

When you find yourself sitting still and listening to music as an adult, you do so because you become lost in your thoughts. The music stirs emotions, memories, and thoughts you have developed over your years of life. The music transports you through time.

As a child, one does not have the depth of experience to trigger the same emotions or thoughts when listening to music. Instead, kids focus on the present. They hear how the music sounds right this moment. These thoughts differ from what goes through the head of an adult, hence the disinterest in music.

Only once a child reaches a certain depth of experience are they capable of just sitting and listening to music while doing nothing else.

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💡 How I View the Stock Market – August 1st 2023

My last post ended with talk about how the current stock market is looking bullish. My prediction was correct and actually a little too tempered as price action has moved higher than I expected over the last month. My forecast predicted the market would consolidate just above or below $4,450 till the end of July, but instead the S&P currently sits just under $4,600 at $4,576.73. It is impressive how much the market has grown since last October.

As you can see in the chart above, the S&P has several lines of support to fall back upon while continuing this uptrend. MACD, PMO, and AROON are all indicating positively too. It would take a real significant world event to break this trend.

Moving forward, I expect price action to continue hitting resistance at $4,600 for a short period like we’re currently seeing. As trendlines come up to meet price, we should eventually see price action breakout above $4,600 and move higher. I don’t have a firm understanding of areas of resistance above $4,600, so that’ll be a subject to explore further.

If price action breaks below $4,500, there’s the trendline currently at $4,400 that should provide support, but after that the next support does not come till $4,250 or $4,135 as a last resort. Hopefully a retraction of that magnitude would take more time to play out than will occur before my next post.

Overall, I think the market remains healthy. People are spending money. Companies are earning money. Rich people continue to get richer. Everyone is happy. I believe there is less appetite for bullish behavior than there was one month ago, but not by a whole lot. There still remains plenty of money to put into this market to keep it going up.

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💡 How I View the Stock Market – June 22nd 2023

Last time I posted about the stock market I made two predictions:

  1. The market retraction that began in 2022 had ended in November/December.
  2. Price action on the S&P 500 would break out above $4,200 before late summer, but wouldn’t have the legs to go a lot higher.

About a month and a half has passed and my predictions both continue to stand as true.

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💡 How to track Completed On dates on Notion tasks

Nick Gracilla put together some excellent details on how to track Completed On dates when using Notion as a task manager: https://www.nickgracilla.com/posts/automatically-datestamp-completed-tasks-in-notion/

However, it appears Notion has changed slightly since his post was written. Following the instructions in his post word-for-word will lead to an error when you try to insert the formula. To address this situation, I’ve put together a quick set of instructions to begin tracking Completed On dates on Notion tasks:

Required Steps

  1. Make sure you have a ‘Checkbox’ property titled “Done” in your database.
  2. Add the ‘Last edited time’ property to your database and keep it titled as that.
  3. Add a ‘Date’ property to your database and title it “Completed Override”.
  4. Add a ‘Formula’ property to your database and title it “Completed”.
  5. Edit the formula and insert:
prop("Done") ? if(empty(prop("Completed Override")), prop("Last edited time"), prop("Completed Override")) : fromTimestamp(toNumber(""))

Of course, be sure to read Nick Gracilla’s post to understand how this setup works. I’m merely posting about the solution to get it working.

Nick was super nice when I reached out to him on Mastodon and very quick to help me out! Wish I could buy him a beer.

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💡👍 How I View the Stock Market – May 6th 2023

I do not have a strong sense of what I’m doing when it comes to investing in stocks, but I’ve dabbled in the subject, find it interesting, and loosely follow what’s happening to the market. I focus on the S&P 500 while occasionally looking at a specific stock. While I would never advise someone to follow my perspective on the market, I figured I would document my thoughts right now so that I can look back on them in 6-12 months to see how correct my thinking was.

Back in November/December I mentioned to a colleague at work that I thought the market had bottomed. This perspective was based on the information-sphere (internet, media, news, etc.) being over-saturated with negative market outlooks. When I begin to see certain types of doom-titled articles about the market, in the past I’ve found that those moments mark the bottom of the downtrend. There’s no one left to sell and that’s when the buyers resume control of the market. So far my prediction from last year has turned out to be correct.

The S&P has been in an intermediate uptrend since October last year. Indicators have generally been positive and just this week price bounced off the 50 day moving average. People in general still seem quite pessimistic about financial conditions though. I don’t have high hopes of this uptrend extending significantly further in the near future. It will likely take more time for financial attitudes to lighten enough for the market to grow.

While looking at the weekly chart above is interesting, things get even more interesting when looking at the weekly chart for the S&P:

The rosiness of the daily bar chart disappears to some degree when looking at the weekly chart. Price action has been struggling to break above a cloud since the beginning of the year and there’s clearly strong resistance at 4200. However, price action keeps testing that resistance. If it keeps doing what it’s doing now, eventually the price will breakout higher with the next significant resistance being at 4600 and 4200 becoming support. I am optimistic that we will see that happen by late summer, barring any major catastrophic world events.

So that’s the basic summary of what I see when I look at the stock market right now. Just to provide some background, I thought I’d elaborate a bit about the tools I used to stay informed and follow the market:

I do not follow any specific sources of news to inform my investing perspective. I absorb what makes its way to me through Reddit, YouTube, and a couple news email newsletters. For the most part, my investing follows the technical analysis approach which dictates that all of the information I need to know about a stock is represented in it’s price action. It is impossible for me as an amateur, hobbyist, individual investor to know more than what the market already knows. The only way for me to make money is to ride the trends and waves of the market. Given these circumstances, I believe in following the price action of the market and that’s why following price action is the only research I do.

I use a great service called StockCharts.com. It’s a super powerful set of tools that can do much more than I need to do. The service provides excellent charting features and even a mobile app to view my charts on-the-go. I have not found a better way to view detailed, customized bar charts. I don’t think I would want anything to do with investing if StockCharts.com did not exist. I definitely recommend giving it a try.

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