You’ve no doubt heard the old mantras “stocks for the long haul,” “diversify,” “buy and hold.”

Investment gurus worldwide repeat them daily ad naseum. But are they really wise investment strategies for ALL markets as advertised? Can any piece of advice that’s so simple yet so vague be of use to you as an investor?

Anyone who diversified their portfolios across several stocks, bonds and commodities over the past three years knows that diversification is no foolproof way to profit. The same goes for anyone who decided to buy and hold the S&P index 10 years ago — they’re 20% down even after the recent rally. Many individual stocks and commodities have performed much worse.

During the mania, when the trend was almost always up, virtually anything had a good chance to go higher. Investors ignored real safe-investment advice, because there was always someone lucking into a moon shot during the insanity. The S&P index itself – followed by the NASDAQ and other futures markets – sat at the center of the mania, and simply being in an index back then often outperformed other popular strategies. That’s all over with now.

Our friends over at Elliott Wave International have just released a brand-new ebook to help you sell and fold bad investment advice for forever. EWI’s 33-page Market Myths Exposed eBook takes the 10 most dangerous investment myths head on and exposes the truth about each in a way every investor can understand.

You will uncover important myths about the safety of your bank deposits, earnings reports, investing in bubbles, small stocks, inflation and deflation, speculation and more.

Please learn more about the 33-page Market Myths Exposed eBook, and download your copy now.

Warm holiday regards

December 18, 2009
By Robert Prechter, CMT

The following article is an excerpt from Robert Prechter’s Elliott Wave Theorist.

First they bought into the “stocks for the long run” case and got killed. Then they jumped on the commodity bandwagon and got killed. Many investors are buying back into these very same markets, but others are running to what they perceive as safe “yields” in the municipal bond market. So far this year, individual investors have “poured a record $55 billion” (Bloomberg, 11/12) into muni bond funds, with the pace running $2b. per week in August and September; many other investors are buying munis outright. These must be the people who tell us that they can’t live without “yield” and also cannot imagine their city, county or state government going bust. But as Conquer the Crash warned and as The Elliott Wave Theorist has reiterated, the muni bond market is heading for disaster.

Municipalities have borrowed more than they can repay, they have pension liabilities that they cannot meet (up to a trillion dollars’ worth, according to Moody’s), and tax receipts are falling. The only reason that states haven’t failed yet is the so-called “stimulus package,” which took money from savers, investors and taxpayers—thereby impoverishing the people who live in the various states—and gave it to state governments to spend so they would not have to cease their profligate spending. But political pressures will eventually cut off this gravy train. In the 2010-2017 period, the muni bond market will become awash in defaults. The leap in optimism since March, which has shown up in every financial market, has fueled a retreat in muni bond yields to their lowest level since 1967 and narrowed the spread between muni bond yields and Treasuries.

This rush to buy municipal bonds is occurring right on the cusp of a dramatic decline in their values. While many individuals are loading up right at the peak so they can participate in the next major market disaster, smarter investors, such as insurance companies Allstate and Guardian Life, are getting out. Subscribers to our services, we trust, own not a single municipal IOU. Our recommendation for investors is 100 percent safety, and such a program does not include muni bonds. If you are a recent subscriber, please read the second half of Conquer the Crash as a manual on how to get your finances safe.

Our friends at Elliott Wave International, the world’s largest market forecasting firm, have just updated their free report, How to Use Bar Patterns to Spot Trade Setups. With thousands of downloads, “Bar Patterns” has always been a huge hit with traders. But now it’s been packed with even more ways you can use common bar patterns to spot high-probability trading opportunities: 30 charts across 15 pages!

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn simple new ways to spot valuable trade setups in the charts you view every day.

Download Your Free Bar Patterns Report Now.

We have our own Reversal Bar tutorial. No matter what your trading method a solid knowledge of reversal bar patterns will make you a better trader.

By Robert Folsom

A well-known business magazine recently published a story with this headline:

Stocks: The “Loss” Decade
A disastrous ten years for the stock market ends in just a month. Will the turning of a new decade change investors’ luck?

One sentence from the story itself tells you most of what you need to know: “The ten years since Y2K are on track to produce the worst total returns for investors since the 1930s.”

Of course, no one should really be surprised by a story that says the stock indexes did poorly over the past decade. That’s not news. The facts in the article more or less repeat what our own Elliott Wave Financial Forecast reported last March, complete with this chart:

It’s safe to say that this business magazine article is the first of many the media will run before the year’s end, as part of their “decade wrap-up” stories. And like this story, most or all those like will share the same basic assumption: stock investors did poorly because the stock indexes did poorly.

And that assumption, dear reader, is erroneous. The truth is far uglier.

Here’s what I mean. If you want to know how real stock investors really behave, the major stock indexes are the wrong place to look. Published results from firms like Dalbar and Vanguard consistently show that, over the past 25 years, individual investors and mutual fund shareholders have had average returns that are half (at best) of the annual returns of the broader stock market.

So, for example, in 20 years from Jan. 1, 1989 through Dec. 31, 2008, the S&P 500 showed a 8.35% gain (Dalbar). Over that same period, equity investors showed a 1.87% gain. And if you include the 2.89% inflation rate in those years, investors show a 1.02% loss.

You can shift to a timeframe which excludes the bear market that started in 2007, but it doesn’t change the basic story. From January 1984 though December 2002, the Dalbar data shows that equity investors earned an annual average of 2.6%, vs. the S&P 500’s 12.2% annual average. The annual inflation rate for period was 3.14%.

What’s more, similar studies and surveys also show that most investors are overconfident in the decisions they make. Put another way, they don’t even know that they are their own worst enemy.

It can be different for you. Market prices move in recognizable patterns: Those patterns can also reveal specific price levels that help confirm the direction of the trend, or identify the time to step aside. Respecting the price, pattern and trend is the first step toward discipline, instead of yielding to emotions.

Robert Folsom is a financial writer and editor for Elliott Wave International. He has covered politics, popular culture, economics and the financial markets for two decades, via print, radio and the Internet. Robert earned his degree in political science from Columbia University in 1985.

Today we are looking at a January crude oil contract, but this can be any of the other contract months.

We’ve looked at this market before and were expecting it to go higher. It did not, however, fulfill that promise and with a red weekly “triangle” in place, it appears as though this market is heading down, but is it?

In today’s short video I discover an interesting cycle that I want to share with you. This cycle along with our MACD indicator, daily and weekly “triangles” are beginning to look extremely interesting.

I strongly recommend taking a few minutes out of your day to watch this educational and informative video on crude oil.

All the best,
Adam Hewison
President, INO.com
Co-creator, MarketClub

Well here we are in the month of December and things can get pretty tricky this month. For this reason, I wanted to produce a video that I thought would be helpful to you during this time.

In my new video I show you the exact points that we’re looking at for a major trend change in the S&P 500. I also point out the exact number that will show an exit point, but not a major trend change, in this same index.

As always our videos are free to watch and there is no need to register and we look forward to your comments.

Adam Hewison
President, INO.com
Co-creator, MarketClub