First a few words about transporting your shopping. If you have a car, then obviously you will have more alternatives, being able to travel further and carry home more on each trip. If you’re dependent on public transport, then you’re limited to buying what you can carry. You will also find yourself making more trips to the shops, with buying groceries becoming an almost weekly exercise. You may spend more time shopping, but you will not usually buy things you don’t need either. If you have to carry your shopping by hand, it may be a good idea to take your daypack with you to the shops and put heavy or soft things in it. It is easier to carry that on your back than in shopping bags.
What some people like to do is to do a large grocery shopping trip and then use a cab to take them and their shopping home in relative comfort. Most supermarkets have payphones or courtesy phones to cab companies in-store. The drivers often help to carry the shopping to your door. This is less hassle, saves you time, is more convenient (than waiting for a bus in the rain) and almost fun. The fare depends on how far it is to your home from the shop, how long it takes given the traffic and the company you use. It should work out to about £4 for a distance of less than a mile if using a mini-cab. This same logic applies to just about anything you buy, especially in London. Buying something small enough to fit in a cab and taking it home is often quicker and cheaper than having it delivered to your home at a later stage.
Transporting your Shopping
The Wedge Formation
Rising wedge formations are created when the following conditions take place:
The stock market (or other markets or individual investments) rises in price. Trend lines drawn that reflect support lines rise at a constant angle.
Trend lines that reflect resistance, where prices turn down, can be drawn at a constant angle as well, but the angle of rise is less than the angle of the support trendline. The result is a converging channel.
Trading volume decreases as the formation develops. This is an important condition because declining volume during uptrends suggests a reduction in buying pressures.
The pattern tells us that although buying pressures are remaining fairly constant, sellers are acting with increasing urgency.
What is actually taking place during the formation of the wedge? Buyers, perhaps to some extent influenced by the rising trendline itself, are buying with consistency and the angle of the supporting trendline remains constant. However, although buying pressures are holding firm, selling pressures are increasing; the descending resistance trendline indicates that selling is coming in earlier in comparison to new buying levels. Sellers are settling for diminishing amounts of profit relative to new buying levels; selling becoming more urgent with each minor market cycle. With net demand and supply relationships weakening, buying and selling pressures converge. The likely resolution is a downside break from the formation.
Please respect the phrase “likely resolution.” Rising wedge formations, which carry bearish implications, usually provide accurate notice that rising price patterns soon will reverse to the downside. Sometimes, however, patterns resolve positively. Positive outcomes are most likely when wedges develop in an area of heavy resistance, a zone in which there has been heavy trading in the past. From time to time, the overhead supply of stocks that creates resistance simply slows but does not permanently impede gains in the market. When the resistance is overcome, stocks burst upward as investors become aware that a bullish breakout is taking place.
The Concept of Synergy
Synergy is defined as the mutually cooperating action of separate substances that together produce an effect greater than that of any component taken alone. The combined effect is greater than the sum of the two pars taken separately.
In spite of all the research that takes place regarding the movement of stock prices, in spite of all the data available to investors, and in spite of all the charts produced by all the computers traders use, the simple fact remains that there are no “perfect” stock market indicator-d probably not even any near-perfect indicators. Every so often, some indicator becomes popular, usually after only two or three successful predictions. For example, based on a just a few major market cycles that took place after World War II, it was assumed that bear markets “must” take place when dividend yields for stocks decline to below 3% or when price/eamings ratio: rise to 21 or 22. These parameters, which indicated the bear markets of 1966, 1969 and 1970, for example, were again approached during the mid-1990s. However, the time around, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index did not see its bull market end until the year 2000, by which time its price/eamings ratio had risen to 46 and its dividens yield had declined to just a touch above 1%.
In any event, even if a perfect indicator were discovered, sooner or later its com ponents would become known, with its effectiveness dissipating as investors begar to follow it en masse. (Where would the sellers come from if every investor became a simultaneous buyer?) The simple fact is that, at best, market forecasting is a matter not of perfection, but of probabilities. A realistic set of goals is to be right more often than wrong, to develop the emotional willingness and technical ability to recognize quickly when we are wrong and to take appropriate action, even if that means accepting a stock market loss. (Generally, the best losses in the stock marke are the losses quickly taken.)
Successful investors are not in the stock market at all times. They assess the probabilities of success as carefully as possible and take positions only when the odds an in their favor. One way to improve the odds is to employ the concept of synergy: The likelihood of a successful trade improves considerably if there are multiple indica tions in favor of the stock market action you are contemplating.
How do synergistic indicators compound the favorable probabilities? Well suppose that there are a number of uncorrelated stock market indicators, each of which tends to be correct 60% of the time and incorrect 40% of the time. That probably about as good a batting average as you are likely to see in a stock mar ket timing indicator. (The indicators should be dissimilar to each other in their construction and concept. Otherwise, they might, in reality, simply be the Sam indicator in disguise.)
You normally trade on one indicator that produces a buy signal, which opt to follow. The probabilities of a successful trade are GOo/-actually, pretty decent for stock market trade, particularly if you have an effective exit strategy.
Instead, you change your strategy and begin to maintain two unrelated market indicators, each of which has a 60% success rate. You initiate a plan by which you will take positions only when both indicators produce confirming signals to support your contemplated market action. What effect is this likely to have on the odds of successful trade? The probability of a profitable trade rises from 60% to 84%. If you maintained three indicators, each of which has a 60% accuracy rate, takin positions only when all three suggest similar action, the odds of a successful trad rise even more, this time to 93.6%.
It follows, then, that you should make serious attempts to confirm buy signals with multiple indicators whenever possible and to look for confirming as well as non confirming indications before taking positions. I shall be emphasizing this concept as we move along.