All these things and more are for the talking heads, shills, and entertainers. For a trader, there is no reason to speculate about them. Be agnostic. There is only one way to find out what will happen — live long enough and see — but it makes no difference in your trading.

Trading is about one thing only — finding the investment with a high risk-adjusted expected return (RAER). Someone could argue that knowing a million other things might help you better estimate RAER. That might be true, I don’t know, but that’s not relevant, since you do not know these other things — you have to estimate them too. You end up trading on an estimate that’s based on speculations about the future, which are inaccurate and are necessarily colored by your desires and fears.

Instead of pretending to know what you do not, make peace with the reality that any RAER calculation you make is an estimate, and attempt to make it the best possible estimate by using the only hard data you have — current price action. That in itself is a difficult task. You do not need to make your life even more difficult by attempting to predict irrelevant things.

My newsletters have not been performing as well as I know that they should be. I’ve been working hard in an attempt to patch up my algorithm, but so far with no success. Besides the recommendations themselves, there are other issues with the newsletter — the commentary is non-existent, the website should be better, and so on. Also, I have had much less time to work on the newsletter and the website than I had when I launched them back in 2008.

I want to produce high quality investment newsletters. Right now, that is not possible. Because of this, I am (hopefully) temporarily discontinuing the newsletters. In the interim, I plan to work through the issues with my algorithm and to rethink other aspects of the newsletters. I do not have any guesstimates about when I will relaunch the newsletter.

I thank everyone who has supported me through the years, especially the people who have written with comments, suggestions, and testimonials; who have recommended my newsletters to their friends; and who have generously donated.

Especially now, as I am rethinking various aspects of the newsletters, please continue to feel free to contact me with comments and suggestions.

Thank you!
-Alex

P.S. Since I will not be giving any new recommendations at least for some time, I suggest that you move your funds to a risk-free asset. For the TSP newsletter, that’s the G Fund; for the ETF newsletter, that’s a money market fund.