Barry Goldwater, CMT

I often use a quote from Senator Barry Goldwater from his 1964 Presidential run. "I'd rather be right than President." Well, he was right - about not being President.

I used that line in a presentation to a San Francisco group a long while back and they grumbled when I merely said "he was right."  I had no dog in that fight so it was not a political statement. However, liberal San Fran apparently was not enamored with "Mr. Conservative," as he was called.

But I digress. The message here for traders is "I'd rather make money than be right."

I am convinced that gold will top 2K and stocks will go into one more cyclical bear market before the next great generational investing period begins. However, holding that view in 2013 clearly proved unprofitable and there is the message. Trader what is happening and not what should happen.

Again, I am convinced it will happen. But while we wait, we might as well exploit what is happening to make some money today.

As a financial journalist, I cannot flip flop in my positions. Nobody would pay to read my stuff and even the tire kickers, you know who you are, would no longer seek out my free offerings. However, traders can change their minds whenever they feel like it - rather whenever the market says to do so.

I was wrong to like Apple after it bonked to 450 but it's not far from there today. Not much damage.

I was wrong to think gold washed out on its first plunge to 1350 but guess what, it is not far from there today. Drawdown agita but only opportunity cost lost.

I was wrong to fight the Dow's trend earlier in the year but I did go with the secondary breakouts. Kicking and screaming and certainly not all in but enough to make some money.

I am alive to fight another day. Perhaps the reputation is besmirched a bit but alive nonetheless. Many a hedgie far smarter and better capitalized than me has blown up completely. Of course, it is not fair that they return with new suckers, er, investors, to do it again - or go into government.

Ben Shalom Godot

Following the script of the 1953 play "Waiting for Godot," the bears continue to wait for the Fed to indicate once and for all that its open ended bond buying program will start to wind down. In the play, Godot never arrived. Worse, we are not even sure he ever existed.

Analysis of the financial markets no longer depends on the psychology of the masses. It does not depend on how corporations are developing new products or effing up the ones they already have. And it does not depend on international capital flows, unemployment and the rest of the dismal inputs that give financial news reporters something to say.

No, it all comes down to how one man thinks and can express himself. Our job as market professionals is to guess what pearls will emerge from his mouth before congress or the news media. Guess right and riches will follow. Guess wrong and you'd better practice your spatula technique.

Guess? Since when did I need an MBA and 27 years experience to guess what one man will do? They don't teach profiling at the NY Institute of Finance. They do suggest not buying only one stock and hoping. Rather, they suggest a basket to remove the risk of any one of them going belly up. 

That's what technical analysis is all about, you know. Figuring out what the masses will do based on what they have done in similar situations in the past and then assigning probabilities on the result all with the goal of making the buy, sell or hold decision. 

Yeah, it was a run-on sentence. Good writing skills don't make you money when you are guessing what the man with the most power in the world, under the deepest scrutiny, will say ahead of every other Tom, Dick and Tracy trying to guess the same thing.

It is nowt a quarter hour to the close. The Fed minutes are out and we find out that half of the board is chicken and the other half is blind. You can figure out which it which. The market sure could not as it jerked around for a solid hour. 

Now we wait for Godot to speak - again.