Tips & Insights

The more money you trade the more diversification you should consider. We currently send alerts on about 18 ETF’s, stocks and Crypto.

When I managed money professionally, I only needed about 20 holdings. Anything more than that can be very inefficient. If this doesn’t make sense, be sure to watch my 10 minute explainer video HERE. For example:

If you have a 401k, $5,000 in a brokerage account like Schwab and $5,000 in a Crypto account, you might want to follow our alerts on the VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) for the 401k and pick one stock and one Crypto to follow for the other two accounts.

If you only had a $20k crypto account, you might want to follow two or three of the cryptos we send alerts on etc.

I think you get the point but, let me revisit the 401k for a second. The S&P 500 is naturally a very diversified place if you’re mirroring it with an ETF so, when it comes to your 401k you might want to be all in on a BUY alert with your 401k providers S&P 500 ETF (they are all very similar since they are all attempting to mirror the actual S&P 500) and all out on a SELL alert where you’d keep your money in a cash or Money Market sub-account.

And, just the same with your 401k, you might want to be all in or all out on the selected alerts you follow.

The reality is that you WILL lose on your trades. In fact, more often than not, your trades will be losing trades.

The good news is a 2.5% loss by acting on a sell signal may very well have prevented a 10%, 20% or 30% loss had you simply chose to hold the investment.

You might have 6 buy and sell alerts in a row that were all losses totalling 8%. But the next 25% winning trade may very well be next!

So be patient and know that probability and process is in your corner.

I used to tell my son money is like a woman; if you chase her, she’ll run away.

If you’re late to the trade, simply wait for the next signal. All of our criteria is based on 4-hour time frames (Heikin Ashi candles) with the exception of ETF alerts.

All alerts are sent out upon the completion of that time frame (at the close of the candle). This happens even if the criteria was met in the first minutes of the candle.

This is important to know because if a “Buy” alert was sent for a stock or crypto in the morning and you’re seeing it that evening you’re probably too late.

If the alert was on an ETF, you will likely still benefit because those alerts are set up on weekly candles which may only trigger two to six time per year.

If you do miss a trade, don’t worry, the typical stock or crypto will have about 20 or 30 alerts over the course of a year 

UGRU Stocks™ is a great way to save money because the alternative is a what? A mutual fund? A professional Investment Advisor? Let’s think about that.

Let’s assume you have $50,000 and have a professional manage your money for 1.25% (which could be as high as 4.5%, ask me how and I’d be happy to share).

If they manage your account for a 10% average return over 30 years your $50,000 will grow to $872,470.11 (this assumes you added nothing to the beginning balance and you took nothing out).

But, when we account for fees of 1.25%, you’re not experiencing 10%, you’re experiencing 8.75%. So, the ending balance is actually $619,224.28.

The fee is 1.25%, yes. But, when calculated in dollars it brings this idea of cost into focus because its easier for us to do simple math and see that we’re paying $253,245.83 (the difference of $872k and $619k). And, they may still put the cost of actual trading spreads or fees on you.

Forget about paying the additional trading fees a professional is likely to shoulder you with and we can see that you have actually paid $703.46 per month on average during the time you had that person manage your money.

So, at $59 per month, UGRU Stocks™ offers incredible cost savings. But you can still have more fees than necessary if you’re not paying attention.

A Webull account will be far more expensive to trade stock than a Schwab account. And, there are far better choices than Coinbase or Uphold to trade crypto for cost. 

Feel free to check out my write up on the best platform for trading HERE.

Or, if you would like to evaluate your 401k to save fees I’d be happy to meet HERE.

An interesting experiment was performed pitting humans and rats. Each were given an option to press two buttons (one red and one green). Each button would light up randomly, but the green button was programmed to light up 80% of the time.

If the button was pushed and it subsequently lit up, a reward was given. If the choice was incorrect there was a shock administered.

Eventually, the rat learned that there was a better chance in defaulting to the green button 100% of the time, even though it would get shocked two times out of ten.

Determined not to be outdone by a rat, the human searched for a pattern (unsuccessfully).

The story is an interesting lesson in human behavior that can serve us well but, in the real world there exists something the human (or rat) did not have access to and that was data. If you have the right data, patterns do emerge.

Now, I’m not saying that it guarantees winning choices all the time but, it does put probability in your corner.

If a rat benefited from probability, chances are you can too when you put a process like UGRU Stocks™ behind your actions!

This is something I often tell my clients because it’s so true.

If you want to win at investing it will require a bit of your time but it doesn’t mean you have to make it a full-time job.

You should expect to spend a few minutes per week acting on an alert.

UGRU Stocks™ can reduce the time you take to manage your investments to just a handful of minutes per month; less time than you spend listening to the expert explain why they failed to beat the S&P 500.

Last tip learned to expect to spend a handful of minutes each month playing an active role with UGRU Stocks™.

This was an important one because frustration sets in when expectations aren’t met. 

So I wanted you to expect that your financial success includes your effort (small as that may be with Trade Trax).

It’s ok to be in cash and before I dive into that tip, I’d like to share my first major win in 2008/2009 as a professional Investment Advisor. 

Before that win I had an awful experience at the turn of the millennium. I had been a Financial Advisor for about four years by the time January of 2000 hit.

That year looked like it might be a good year seeing as we crossed the feared Y2K hurdle.

But, the year ended negative and so did 2001 and then even worse in 2002.

It was like Chinese water torture!

I’m ashamed to look back and see I even BS’d my clients by telling them “it’s only a loss if you sell”. I honestly believed that (it’s what I was taught by my mentors).

That experience led me to break out of being a product salesman like so many other “Financial Advisors” and focus on the real mechanics of market movements. 

As you know by watching the UGRU Stocks™ explainer video there was certain criteria that screamed of highly probable downturns for 2008/2009.

So, in December 2007, I moved my clients to cash and cash equivalents. But that’s not the end of the story. 

Midway through 2008, the markets seemed unaffected by the data and I started getting a few clients that were inquiring about my decision.

But, I stuck to my guns explaining that cash is an asset class and since they were paying me to manage their money, I felt that was the best place at the time. 

Now, you have to understand what I was up against. Most financial professionals subscribe to Modern Portfolio Theory that has overwhelmingly led to the notion of keeping a “balanced portfolio”.

I have very strong opinions about this that I wrote about in Chapters 9 and 10 in my most recent book. You can check that out HERE.

Anyway, why did this whole Modern Portfolio Theory matter? Well, those clients talked to other advisors who claimed I was cheating them because I was charging to keep their money in cash.

The way I saw it was that if I saved you $500,000 in losses then I deserved to continue to charge my fees as a money manager, even if managing your money means being in cash for a while.

You be the judge on that one. But, I will say I did lose a few clients and the subsequent market losses they experienced had some serious implications for the retirement they were trying to enjoy.

Many times we over complicate things like how we might approach using the UGRU Stocks™ alerts.

For example, we might try to take all the alerts and try to allocate 5% of our money into each and try to balance that act.  

You can see how that would become overwhelming, right?

Of course, the alerts are yours to act on any way you want but, if it were me I’d pick what I want to follow (how many depends on how much money you have) and simply be all in or all out based on the alert.

Like my clients learned, being in cash can be a good thing!