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1.  Are StockAlerts scans superior to scans found on other Web sites?

On one occasion, we discovered that when using two of our browsers, our site's pages had several links to ads and sites of other companies that were not placed there by us. These links were "virtual links." That is, they were not really on our Web site. However, they worked like real links if we clicked on them.  The browsers we were using were Firefox and Chrome. When we used Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Safari the links did not appear. That led us to the conclusion that our browsers had been compromised. We uninstalled the browsers, and reinstalled what we wanted.  Please be advised that our site never places ads or links to other company sites on any of our pages except on the Links, Resources, Outside-Help, and Resource Center pages. All other links on our site pertain to our own site and services. We do not sell ad-space to any other firms. If you see a link on one of our pages, put your cursor over it or click on it. If it points to a location away from stockdisciplines.com, then your browser has probably been compromised.  If you are convinced that your browser is not compromised, please let us know so we can determine whether or not the link is really on our site.

3.  Is there anything special about StockAlerts or The Valuator you care to mention? 

The production of The Valuator is much more labor-intensive than any other publication we have.  It is packed with information--most of which is not available anywhere else on the planet.  It cannot simply be downloaded from a data vendor like most of the data on other Web sites.  The real question is "How can The Valuator be so inexpensive?  For The Valuator, a large amount of financial data must be gathered, processed, filtered, and formatted for each issue.  Much of this has to be done manually.  This work, like the data gathering, cannot be automated.  Based on the amount of work required and the uniqueness of the data, The Valuator would be an outstanding bargain at $250 a year.  The lists generated by StockAlerts are also unique, but it does not take as much time and labor to produce them.  However, they are generated daily.  An example of its uniqueness is the information we provide on the Bollinger band squeeze alert.  Other Web sites will provide lists in which the stock price has penetrated a Bollinger band.  That information is nearly meaningless.  On the other hand, the StockAlerts list is made up of stocks that have penetrated a Bollinger band after the Bollinger bands have squeezed together.  That is a critical difference.  An upper or lower band penetration means nothing without the squeeze.  Why?  It's the squeeze that tells us there has been a period of low volatility.  The very basis for such an alert is that price surges often come after a period of low volatility and those surges are often the beginning of a trend (very short-term, short-term, or long-term).  The Bollinger bands are merely a means of detecting the low volatility.  It is the preceding low volatility that gives meaning to the price surge.  The band penetration is how we know there has been a price surge after the all-important band squeeze.  The scanners on other Web sites do not include the squeeze requirement.  It took a huge amount of work to create the search algorithms in StockAlerts.

Perhaps an even better question is how The Valuator and StockAlerts can both be so much less expensive than the average 10-page monthly newsletter.  By posting them on our Web site, we do not have to pay for paper, ink, postage, or envelopes. It also takes time and labor to print and assemble paper publications.  Also, we do not try to get the highest price we could get nor do we try to get the "average going rate."  In fact, we charge far less than others charge for market letters half the size (and with far less information).  We want people to think "Wow, what a bargain!"   

4.  What's the "Promise and Affirmation" all about? 

We have cut prices well below our normal rates, and we are therefore operating on thin margins.  Each order is extremely important to us.  The real problem we face is cheating or stealing.  We base our whole operation on trust.  We can’t afford to get beat up in the marketplace because our customers send free copies of our products to friends.  If people are not honest with us, we will either have to go out of business or significantly increase our prices.  Some people think that because they send a copy of our product to only one friend, it cannot make much difference, but it does.  Every paying customer counts for us.  Our company is not a big conglomerate.  We are a very small but dedicated operation.  We have been producing The Valuator for over 20 years.  Even though we are small, we are not fly-by-night.  You might call the electronic provision of our products an experiment.  It enables us to be more efficient and to pass significant savings on to our customers.  We are trying to do just that, but we need your help to succeed at it.  We must adapt to survive.  We do not want to limit the availability of our publications to printed versions only, but we will if we cannot trust our customers to honor our copyrights.  That would mean customers would no longer be able to use a spreadsheet to sort stocks by various criteria.  If we have to print on paper, our delivery will be slower, and our prices might be more than double what they are now.  Instead of sending free copies to a friend, why not tell the friend how useful the product is and recommend it?  That’s the way the system is supposed to work.  (Please read #s 5 & 6)

5.  Why do you require customers to promise they will not forward or otherwise send your products to another person?  Won’t they do it anyway?

We believe that people are essentially honest and that most cheating occurs when people do not really think about what they are doing.  They do not think of the fact that they are stealing something that is ours in order to give it to a friend.  Only the customer has a right to use our product.  The customer does not own the copyright.  The copy they send to a friend is a stolen copy.  Sending a copy to a friend is similar to going to a magazine rack, paying for a copy of Money mgazine, and then stealing an extra copy to give to a neighbor.  Our requirement that a customer agree to the "Promise and Affirmation" is intended to focus attention on the issue and to cause our customers to commit to being honest with us.  Making such a promise and affirmation will mean something to honest people.  To see our "Notice" about this, click on NOTICE.  This link will provide additional information in the first paragraph.  The rest is a repeat of information here.  (Please read #6 also)

6.  So why do you ask people to e-mail you their promise before they order or with their order? 

If a person orders a product, the product will not be delivered until the promise is received by us.  The promise is an integral part of the form used when paying by credit card.  The order will not even be forwarded for processing if a person refuses to make the promise.  However, some customers will prefer to pay by sending a check through the mail.  If the customer refuses to send the promise with their order, we will have to give a refund.  Therefore, to avoid unnecessary aggravation for the customer, we ask that the promise be sent at the same time or before the order is placed.  If an individual is not going to send us the promise, we might as well find out beforehand.

7.  Compare StockAlerts and The Valuator.

They were both originally conceived as monthly publications.  However, it soon became apparent that the signals generated for the large number of stocks in StockAlerts would be of interest to very short-term traders as well.  Short-term swing traders and day-traders need a constant supply of stocks that are ready to move at any given time.  The Valuator is a research tool that goes far beyond merely finding a stock that is likely to surge.  It gives information about fundamentals that can fuel a long trend, and so on.  Since the moves that shorter-term traders are looking for are not very extended, fundamentals are not quite as important as they are for other investors (however, that does not mean they are unimportant).  It is more critical for them that they scan a much larger universe so they can always have a collection of stocks that are ready for action at any given time.  Unlike The Valuator, StockAlerts does not provide any information on the fundamentals of a company.  As the holding period increases, fundamentals become increasingly important.  That makes The Valuator a very useful screening tool for short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term investors. We decided that The Valuator could, at a reasonable price, meet these needs and that monthly publication would serve the purpose nicely.  The two publications have an overlapping constituency, but they address somewhat different needs.  They both can serve some of the needs of long-term investors (who will want a stock that triggers an alert in StockAlerts because it is ready to move, and that also satisfies elements of their discipline derived through reference to The Valuator) and short-term traders (who want stocks that are ready for action that they locate through StockAlerts but are smart enough not to ignore the fundamentals and other information available in The Valuator). 

8.  What if I am interested in a stock you do not cover?

Because of the labor involved we have decided, at least for now, to keep The Valuator limited to about 500 stocks.  However, we will listen to any ideas for adding new stocks to the list covered by StockAlerts.  We will give serious consideration to any stock you suggest that trades at least 100,000 shares a day, is priced above $10, and trades on a major American exchange.  We will also consider including stocks that are much less expensive but that trade a large number of shares (on an average day).  Think about it.  A stock that trades 100,000 shares a day at $5 is actually trading only about $500,000 a day.  Traders all over the world are scanning stocks for various buy signals.  When there are so few shares traded, competition for those shares at a good price is extremely tough.  That means your trading efficiency will go way down.  You will tend to buy at too high a price and sell for too little.  You need liquidity to get in and out at a good price and to execute trades efficiently.

9.  Why use Stops?  Don’t some charting programs also generate stop-losses?

Some can, but not at anywhere near the price nor are they nearly as easy to use.  Also, some do not use the right formula for computing a standard deviation.  There are two basic formulas, and they have different statistical uses.  However, one major charting program we know about (priced at more than $1000) uses the wrong equation for this purpose.  This error will tend to place the stop too close because it assumes the data measured is all the data rather than a sample of the data.  Measuring stock price data over any time period is measuring only a sample of the data that could be measured.  Measuring the tallest man in a room of 30 men does not tell you how tall the tallest man in the city is. In the same way, the largest price spike of a stock over a period of 20 days does not define the largest probable price spike.  There is a specific formula that should be used to draw inferences about probable price spikes based on a sample of pricing data.  Another problem with using charting programs to plot your stops is that every such program we know about requires that its users learn how to use the syntax of the program and how to write the needed equations correctly.  With Stops, all you have to do is enter price and date information.  You do not have to know how to write statistical equations or figure out program syntax.

10.  Why did you stop managing accounts?

For many years we managed accounts for others, targeting annual returns of about 20% and holding most positions more than 6 months.  However, we had also developed a very high return discipline that we had been testing with real money.  A little market history might be helpful here.  The market goes through shifts in "style."  These shifts influence the kinds of investment strategy that will be most successful.  We will spend some time on this answer because new traders and investors might learn something from reading about our attempt to use a high-performance discipline with client accounts, the different performance targets, why a high-performance discipline was not practical, the need for a strict adherence to the rules of a discipline, the tradeoffs required, and why we finally decided to leave the advisory business. 

In short, we decided that leaving the advisory business was necessary to release the full power and profitability of the Disciplined Growth Strategy for the personal accounts of company members.  [Disciplined Growth Strategy is the name we created to refer to our high-return trading discipline.  Even if somebody else uses the same name for a trading discipline, the discipline they are referring to will not be the same because the discipline we use is proprietary and not in the public domain] Managing the accounts of others for a fee (but not using the discipline for our personal accounts) was less attractive financially than giving up the fees and fully implementing the discipline for our personal accounts.  However, there was much more that went into the decision than this.  Let's look at some of the factors that were involved.

Because the high-performance discipline required a different mindset and way of thinking than conventional approaches to investing, we found it difficult to effectively use the discipline in our own accounts while using other strategies for clients.  For us, the mindsets behind the different approaches to managing investments "collided" and "interfered" with each other.  The account management process, the regulatory paperwork, the wide range of investment needs of our clients, and their widely divergent attitudes about "appropriate holding periods" imposed too many constraints and added too much clutter to the trade-decision process.  To do it right, all accounts would have to make the same trades at the same time. 

However, we could not get all our clients to consent to a strict adherence to the discipline.  Although a few clients were ready to implement the discipline, others complained or were prone to confusion whenever trade activity levels increased.  Some even seemed to want to "buy and hold" without implementing any selling discipline at all.  For example, if our algorithms issued a sell signal and we sold a declining stock quickly with only a small loss, some clients became upset and called to advise us (in no uncertain terms) that we should have given the stock more "breathing room."  We concluded from these and other comments that some of our clients would prefer that we "rode" a stock up and down like a roller coaster through several cycles before even thinking about selling.  They would also prefer that we ignore our algorithms when they indicate that a small decline had a very high probability of growing into a larger loss.  While riding a stock up and down through several cycles may be acceptable when you are trying to generate a return of 15% (assuming that none of those down moves become nightmarish), experienced traders know that this lattitude for loss has no place in the execution of any truly high-performance investment discipline.  We could not trade as freely for our clients as the discipline required.  Furthermore, because we needed to manage the personal accounts of members in the same way as we managed client accounts, our members could not come close to achieving for their own accounts the growth potential of a strict adherence to the discipline.   

We even considered the possibility of continuing with only those clients who were fully committed to achieving high performance and who did not care what level of trading activity it required to get there.  The problem with that idea was that the number of candidates was small (most of our clients were retired or nearing retirement) and the risk we would assume was too great relative to the fees we could charge.  If one person became confused because of the trading activity, or if we had a temporary slump that frightened somebody to the point that they contacted the SEC or other regulatory authorities with a complaint, then we would have to take time and energy from our enterprise to explain or defend our methodologies to regulators who are committed to the conventional wisdom that one should buy and hold stocks through their ups and downs and eventually sell them when they are higher.  [While this approach might work sometimes for people who do not have the disciplines and tools to be effective traders, it will not enable a person to achieve returns averaging well over 50% a year.]   

We have a discipline that has generated about 20% a year for 15 years.  This strategy is designed for intermediate-term investors in utility stocks.  We have another slightly stronger discipline that has averaged about 26% a year and that buys any kind of stock.  Let’s refer to these disciplines as "20% systems" (reflecting their targeted level of performance).  However, the discipline we wanted to use for client accounts (the Disciplined Growth Strategy) was far stronger than either of these "20% systems," but it required a more active and disciplined approach to trading.  If a person makes a half-hearted attempt to use the Disciplined Growth Strategy (if a person does not sell immediately when the model says it’s time to sell, and so on), performance will suffer.  Under those conditions, the performance of the Disciplined Growth Strategy will not be as good as that of our "20% systems." 

An analogy might help you to wrap your mind around the problem.  Assume that the cylinders in the engine of a racing car are similar to the rules of an investment discipline.  Optimum performance of a racing car can not be achieved unless all cylinders are firing correctly.  In the same way, optimum performance cannot be achieved with a high-performance trading discipline unless there is strict adherence to the rules of the discipline.  A high-performance racing car will not perform as well as the average family car if you disconnect the spark plug wires to four of the eight cylinders in its engine.  In the same way, following only a few rules of a high-performance investment discipline will result in relatively poor performance.  Performance will tend to be inferior to that of the 20% systems.  The interdependent rules that comprise a high-performance discipline also function as a kind of glue that gives the discipline its integrity.  Ignoring some of the discipline's rules will weaken or even destroy the discipline's integrity.  In other words, "things will fall apart."  The unwillingness of a significant number of clients to follow the rules of the Disciplined Growth Strategy left us in a quandary.  We either had to give up any hope of using the  Disciplined Growth Strategy for client accounts and return to the use of more conventional investment disciplines, or we had to quit managing accounts and use the much more powerful discipline for our own accounts.  There was another factor at work. 

Wendy Felt had been testing the Disciplined Growth Strategy in her own account with real money for about 5 years.  [Wendy is the daughter of Winton Felt, and co-editor of The Valuator.  She is also a trader.]  Wendy was having fun with her trading.  Also, her trading activities convinced us that consistent returns well above 50% were realistic goals when using our stock-trading discipline (without the use of margin, short-selling, options, currencies, or commodities).  Wendy had been preparing to take over parts of our portfolio management business and planned to use the discipline that she had been using for her own account to manage the accounts of her clients.  However, when she saw the reluctance of clients to implement the rules of the Disciplined Growth Strategy, and concluded that their attitudes could also result in problems with securities regulators, she realized she would have to use a much less powerful discipline in managing client accounts.  That would also interfere with her use of the Disciplined Growth Strategy for her own account.  She weighed the burdens and problems of managing money for others to target returns of maybe 20% to 30% against the freedom she would have from client and regulatory difficulties while trading her own account without restraints and targeting much higher returns.  [We now generally target returns up to 3 times what we could achieve with client accounts]  She decided to choose the latter.  Winton Felt reached similar conclusions from a different perspective.  He decided that working together with Wendy and being able to use the Disciplined Growth Strategy without opposition from clients or any other constraints would not only be more enjoyable but also more profitable.  He decided that working closely with his daughter in a profitable enterprise of mutual interest in which they could stimulate and encourage each other in creative ways was a very attractive alternative to the constraints, burdens, regulatory overhead, and limitations on performance that are part of the investment advisory business.  Simply put, he wanted to have fun playing with his daughter. 

Now let's look at it from a strictly business perspective.  Managing accounts to achieve a return of 20% while collecting a management fee was not as attractive financially to our members as taking the firm out of the portfolio management business, fully implementing the discipline for member accounts, and targeting returns 3 times as great.  While there was no guarantee that we would always hit our performance targets, we had concluded that our discipline made it worth the effort.  It seemed a shame not to even try to implement a discipline that took so many years of research and testing to create.  How many investment advisors even hope to achieve that level of performance?  If they thought they could, wouldn't they simply trade their own accounts?  Why would they work for a fee and put up with all the regulatory hassles?  On the other hand, we know of some traders who consistently achieve these higher performance levels when managing their own money.  We have studied, conducted research, and tested trading systems for many years.  At one point we dedicated at least 8 hours a day (for 3 of those years) to designing and/or testing the profitability of many thousands of disciplines.  We satisfied ourselves (with real trading in a real account) that the Disciplined Growth Strategy could do what it was created to do if it were implemented correctly.  We wanted to share what we learned with clients by employing the discipline in the management of their accounts to achieve performance rarely seen by investors.  We just could not get the level of client consent we needed to implement the discipline effectively. 

Once we came to the conclusion that the goal of implementing the discipline for a large number of clients with widely divergent attitudes about investing was not practical, we decided that the best way we could put all that work and knowledge to good use would be to let our members implement the discipline for their own accounts.  We understood the discipline well enough to fully trust it.  The trading activities of members could then be used as resource material for the teaching and training activities of the company.  Our products flow naturally out of our own trading needs and/or experiences.  Even if nobody subscribed to them, we would still produce The Valuator and StockAlerts for our own purposes.  The power of these tools may not be immediately obvious to the casual user (who only wants to be told what to do), but they were designed for traders who prefer to make their own decisions.  We decided that since we produce them anyway, we might as well make them available to subscribers.  Thus our own desire for these resources has resulted in the availability of tools that can, if used correctly, benefit others.  Our visitors, subscribers, and licensees can therefore benefit from our experiences and information while trading as conservatively or as aggressively as they desire.  The members of our company, on the other hand, can benefit from being able to fully implement our disciplines for their own accounts.    

Thus, we finally came to the conclusion that life would be simpler and there would be fewer headaches and less stress for our members if the company focused on providing resources for investor enablement and stopped managing accounts.  Accordingly, with the unanimous agreement of our members, "enablement" became the focus of Stock Disciplines, LLC.  The firm now gives no investment advice.  We never make stock recommendations or any other personal recommendation related to investing.  Dr. Felt had a lengthy conversation with a spokesperson for a securities regulatory authority before leaving the advisory business.  The regulatory spokesperson was asked the following question.  If a person is no longer a registered advisor and does not get fees for managing accounts, if he received a small fee for a market-related subscription (like a market letter), would he be in violation of any regulations if he gave free advice?  The answer was that even if the advice were given free of charge, he would be in violation of securities regulations if he were not a registered investment advisor.  The representative of the regulatory authority said that in this situation, the subscription fee would be interpreted by regulators to be a fee for advice rather than for the subscription.   [Client ability to influence and interfere with our trading procedures by imposing their own individualized suitability constraints is part of the client-advisor relationship and is part of what it means to be a licensed advisor.  It was also a primary incentive for giving up the license.  If we were to get a fee for any service or subscription, giving even free advice would require that we subject our operations and our trading to the fiduciary responsibilities, interference from clients, regulatory constraints, and compliance requirements from which we sought to be free].

 Instead of giving personal recommendations, we simply try to enable others to do a better job for themselves.  That way, we no longer have to indulge securities regulators who are constantly demanding more paperwork (at the time of our withdrawal from the advisory business securities regulators required that each advisory firm have at least one employee whose full-time responsibility is to keep the firm compliant with all the regulations).  

On the personal level, the trading of our members is now their own business and they can do it without clients telling them how to manage their portfolios.  It was difficult for clients to grasp and then act on the fact that it is not finding big winners but avoiding big losers that produces great returns.  This is an oversimplification, but it drives home an important point.  The point is that most people approach investing with unproductive goals and incorrect thinking.  Their perception is that to be a big winner in the market you must learn to pick big movers.  However, the real way to become a winner is to learn about finding setups and the correct timing of entry and exit points.  Changing our company's focus gave us a win-win business model.  On the one hand, if they learn to use them correctly, our customers and visitors can benefit from the use of our tools and information.  On the other hand, our members get to trade the discipline correctly and without interference from clients.  Everybody benefits from this arangement.

11.  You say it is possible to generate 50% net return per year most years.  Top traders at major brokerage houses have tried for years and we keep hearing about them taking huge losses.  I am skeptical.  

On the one hand you have "hot shots" with new MBAs and bright ideas about how to trade.  They risk their firm's money, not their own.  They are young and in a hurry to make a name for themselves.  In order to make it "big," they leverage their firm's money.  Their thinking is that if they are right, they want the most "bang for the buck" they can get.  They are sure they are right.  However, leverage is a two-edged sword.  It is a little known fact that 80% of those who play the futures markets lose all their money.  That's because most of those traders use huge amounts of leverage.  The overuse of leverage can be like playing the slot machines in Las Vegas.  It is possible to do well for a time, but if you play long enough, you will lose it all.  Most newcomers with inflated perceptions of the effectiveness of their approach do not focus enough on risks and loss.  They are focused on opportunities and gain.  That is a big mistake.   

On the other hand, you have somebody who is not in a hurry.  He spends several years doing little else but test thousands of strategies with real data on thousands of stocks over a wide variety of market conditions covering many years.  The point of his research is not to find the strategy that got the best return.  That would be "curve fitting."  That means he would end up finding the strategy that happened to generate the best return under specific conditions for a specific stock.  Such a strategy might be a poor performer under other conditions and with a different stock.  Instead, the goal is to find the strategy out of many thousands of strategies that works best with most stocks under most market conditions most of the time.  Such a strategy may not be the best to use for a particular stock at a particular time.  At various times the market favors blue chips, small caps, dividend payers, growth stocks, value stocks, utilities, or whatever.  The key is to find the characteristics of a strategy that works very well most of the time regardless of the market's prevailing bias.  We will not go into the design details of the research, but we will give an example of one of its elements.  To find the best strategy out of, say, 1000 strategies, you might start by applying each strategy to each of 5000 stocks over a period of 20 years.  Take one strategy as an example.  You might compute the total return of the strategy for each one of the 5000 stocks over a 20 year period.  Then you might add the returns of the strategy for all 5000 stocks to get the net total return in dollars of the strategy for a "portfolio" consisting of 5000 stocks (with the same amount of money initially invested in each stock).  You would repeat the procedure for each of the 1000 strategies and then rank the strategies according to their performance (revealed by the dollar value of the 5000-stock portfolio after using each of the strategies for 20 years).  The strategy that achieved the greatest gain in dollars would be the strategy that generally performed best most of the time for most stocks (it is not quite as simple as stated, but it will do to illustrate the point).  That does not mean the strategy will perform best for any particular stock in the future.  Once you have tested 50,000 strategies or more using this approach, it is then necessary to find the common elements of the best performing strategies.  

Statistical procedures were used to assure "robustness" of the findings.  For example, would a slight change in any parameter or variable cause a significant change in performance?  A robust strategy does not fall apart with small changes.  The work required by the design of the study ranged from 8 to 16 hours a day for three years.  This is definitely not the approach of a person in a hurry to make a name for himself by gambling with his firm's money.  It satisfies the ego to find the big winners.  However, all our research told us that finding big winners is not the right goal for those who want to be winners.  The real trick is to avoid big losses.  For example, in one study a major stock (IBM) declined over 70% in just a few years.  One of our better strategies managed to make a large annual profit on the same stock during those declining years without selling short or using margin.  All the strategy did was buy and sell without the use of leverage.  The stock could hardly be called a big winner, but the strategy definitely was.  Avoiding loss is not as ego-satisfying as finding a stock that doubles quickly.  However, finding big winners is something of a gamble.  You do not have much control over how far or how quickly a stock will rise.  However, you can control how much you lose.  That is something that is defined by your discipline.  If you want to be a gun-slinger, be sure you are using the money of someone who needs a tax write-off.  If you want to be a real winner, you must exercise a discipline of controlled losses.

We have given only a superficial description of some of the things we did to develop only one aspect of the technical side of our discipline.  We have said nothing at all about the fundamental component of our strategy.  The fundamentals we consider important to our strategy are incorporated in The Valuator, a publication we have developed over many years.  We began that part of our research over 20 years ago.    

The traders that are always in the news are generally not the most successful traders.  In fact, they are usually in the news because they have caused some major problems for their companies.  There are many traders who regularly gain 50% or more in the market.  However, most of them prefer to remain out of the spotlight.

If you are skeptical, fine.  Continue to invest the way you always have.  It is our opinion that to be highly successful in the market long-term, it is necessary to have a discipline and to believe in that discipline.  If you do not believe in your discipline, you will second-guess it.  If you do not trust your discipline enough not to second-guess it, you do not really have a discipline.  A person who is skeptical about the efficacy of his discipline will not be among the consistent winners in the stock market, though he might occasionally be a winner by accident.

We have no need or even the slightest desire to prove that such returns are possible.  Even audited performance reports would not "prove" anything to the doubters, and those who believe it can be done do not need proof.  The doubters would only say "That was then, bet they couldn't do it now."  We view our performance as our own business and it is a private matter.  We intend to keep it that way.  Besides, it is to our advantage to have a lot of people in the market thinking, investing, and trading in conventional ways.  Believers are the ones who are most likely one day to become our competitors in the market.  Even so, we are convinced that there will always be enough sheep in the market to provide all the shearers with an adequate supply of wool.

12.  How do you teach?

Visitors learn by poking around this site.  Each section has information.  Even this page is a teaching tool.  Some ideas conveyed in "Market Review" transfer to individual stocks.  For example, most of the indicators can be applied to stocks.  Learning how to read them for the market is transferable knowledge.  An example of how to use R.C. Allen's system is on the same page.  The procedures and rules used here apply to all triple moving average systems.  We illustrate the procedures with the Dow but this is knowledge that is transferable to individual stocks.  We also use tutorials to teach.  Please bear in mind that this site is new.  We think of the 25 or so tutorials listed at the time of this writing as only the beginning.  We expect to have many more tutorials posted over time.  Studying and thinking about what is said in the tutorials can be extremely useful.  For example, our discussion of the CCI is, in our opinion, one of the best available.  Other sites may display the CCI, but most don't say much about how to use it.  Some of our tutorials emphasize the thinking process.  The particular stock used to illustrate a concept is not really important.  It's the process of analysis used in approaching a situation that is important. 

13.  What is a simple way to place a shortcut to your Web site on my desktop?

Look at our URL in your browser.  Notice that just to the left of our URL is a small picture.  In Internet Explorer it is usually an 'e' but it may be some other picture.  Click on this small image and drag it to your desktop.  This creates a shortcut to our Web site on your desktop.  

If you cannot see your desktop, your screen image is probably maximized.  In the top right-hand corner, you will probably see .  Click on the overlapping squares in the center.  A single square will now appear.  Move your cursor to the right edge of your screen.  It will change to an arrow.  Press your mouse button and drag the edge of your screen image to the left.  Your desktop should become visible.  If not, repeat the process on the screen image that has become visible.  Eventually, you'll get to your desktop.  Once you can see your desktop, click on the image at the bottom of your screen that represents our Web site.  Now you can perform the procedure described in the first paragraph.  The top right-hand corner of your screen image has been changed to .  If you want to maximize it again, click on the square.

Another way for Windows users is to click with your right mouse button on the desktop and select "New" then "Shortcut."  In the window that appears type "http://www.stockdisciplines.com" without the quotes and click "Next."  Type a name for the shortcut in the window.  For example, you could simply type the word "Stocks" (without the quotes) and then click on "Finish." 

14.  Why do you have California time posted on the "Market Review" page?

The S&P500 chart below the time shows New York time on the time scale because that is the location of the New York Stock Exchange.  All our site editing takes place on the West Coast (California).  For us, the market closes at 1 p.m.  We often, if not usually, complete our updates by about 5:00 in the afternoon West Coast time (sometimes a little sooner and sometimes a little later).  However, unforeseen circumstances may interfere with our achieving that goal.  The "clock" gives a reference for people in Europe, Asia, and in other time zones.  If people in those regions know what time it is for us, they can better estimate the time when the next update will be completed.  We use US Naval Observatory Master Clock time because we want accuracy.  We thought that providing a clock accurate enough that people could use it to set their own clocks and watches would be a nice amenity for our visitors.  

When we mention time with reference to editing or updating activities, we use Pacific time, because that is where those activities take place.  If we mention time with reference to market activity, we use New York time because that is where market activities take place.  New York time is three hours later than California time (6 a.m. in California is 9 a.m. in New york).