Frequently Asked Questions

This Q&A is intended to resolve problems and concerns about the contents of this site that may arise after you’ve read the Visitor Guide. If you haven’t read that first, we strongly recommend that you do, or much of this page may not be very meaningful to you.

Q: I used to visit this site when it had the old format. What’s new here?

A: The improvements are mainly with respect to navigating around the site more efficiently. The Data & Charts button, for instance, takes you directly to a tabbed workbook of all charts and data tables. The tables themselves are now in HTML format, rather than images. That jargon may not mean much to you, but the bottom line is that the tables load much faster; and, depending on your browser, you may be able to cut-and-paste the data elsewhere for your own additional analyses.

Visitors to the site also asked for “back issues” of the weekly updates. The site wasn’t set up for that sort of thing before, but now you can “look back” if you wish in a couple of ways. The Weekly Reports are now in web log format. That means that they are archived for easy retrieval, if you should choose to do so.

And, finally, if you really like our relative trend analysis™ approach, you can subscribe to our premium service and have not only the S&P/TSX Composite stock data delivered to you electronically every week, but the trend data for at least 1500 more companies as well — from both the TSX and Venture exchanges. See the Premium Service page for more details.

Q: How do I decide when to buy and sell?

A: That’s your job! In all seriousness, we believe that every investor should do his or her own due diligence for every buy or sell decision. There are no magical “no brainer” approaches, when your hard-earned money is involved. What we hope we’re providing here is a quick and easy way to see how each stock or index is performing relative to all others. The ones with strong, consistent trends should be worth a look in terms of other factors that you personally like to consider.

Depending on whether you prefer a fundamental approach to investing (where you examine corporate financial records and try to assess the competance of  the management team, etc.) or a technical analysis approach (where you look for buy and sell signals from charts, assorted technical indicators, etc.), you should apply those tactcs to the promising candidates that you find here.

We believe that every investor’s strategy can and should be suited to their personal style and goals. Those who subscribe to “black box” approaches where they pay to have someone generate buy and sell signals for them (using a methodology that is never disclosed) usually pay far too much and end up regretting it anyway. If the black box really worked, they wouldn’t need to sell it to you, because they would have retiired to an island paradise by now.

Our goal is simply to be one layer in your investment or trading plan.

Q: Why do you let competing investment newsletters and services  advertise here?

Two reasons...

1. It’s flattering that they would pay Google to advertise here, even though that selection process is partially automated through Google’s advertising algorithms.
2. We encourage all investors to use multiple sources of information to make  profitable investment decisions. You may or may not find anything worthwhile in checking out the advertisers you see listed here, but it can’t hurt  to check out a few of them now and then.

Q: Who are you and what is your expertise in all this stuff?

A: That’s probably the best question in this Q&A session! Thank’s for asking.

I’m Charles P. Whaley, PhD. My doctorate is in cognitive and quantitative psychology. That mouthful says that I studied memory and thought processes and learned to build mathematical and algorithmic (computer-based) models to represent them.

My interest in applying some of that to investing came a bit later. When I wasn’t occupied with my day job, I studied all that I could find on both fundamental and technical-analytic approaches to trading equities and derivatives, and successfully completed the Canadian Securities Course and the Canadian Options Course to prove to myself that I had indeed mastered that content.

The first of those courses is (or was then) the fundamental requirement to be a stock broker (excuse me... investment representative). The second is the basic requirement to get registered with a brokerage firm to accept derivatives orders and offer advice on the same.

The relative trend analysis™ approach I developed grew out of my dissatisfaction with all technical analysis methods I studied and tried to apply. I was most impressed by the trend following approaches, as opposed to those that pick tops and bottoms, but I found them limited too.

If you use any of the online financial sites or technical analysis software to view trends via moving averages, they’re typically based on price. That’s fine if you’re only looking a one stock at a time, but you can’t compare trends across stocks efectively that way. With relative trend analysis you can. See the Visitor Guide for more detail.

I think I’ve developed a methodology that is downright beautiful in it’s simplicity, yet more powerful than any other method I’ve mastered and tested before. It’s not intended to be a stand-alone system, but it’s a great resource to complement your own idiosyncratic approach to investing.

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