I’ve written previously that the bottom and retest, in January and March, were the best buying opportunities, albeit stomach-churning; that’s been proven wrong. I also thought that last month’s pullback was a strong opportunity for fresh capital, and that looks wrong, as well, at this point. It’s a matter of timing, somewhat appropriate given the system being updated, and a matter of time FRAME as well. Managing a portfolio with years of performance as the measuring stick, which is what I’m attempting with my model updates and commentary, is an easy thing to evaluate, but it takes lots of time.

I certainly missed on calling the lows – by about 3 to 5 percent. In a short-timer’s dictionary, that’s disastrous. If you’re a short-timer, you probably should stop reading the Timing model updates, and focus on Aggressive or Rotational for ideas.

In the time frame that I use to look at timing the U.S. stock market, it’s too early to tell how good or bad those statements were, and the worst that can be said is that they missed the bottom. How badly they missed depends on the next several MONTHS, possibly YEARS, of price action. If the market recovers strongly over the next year-plus, it would have been a small miss and overall a nice call to deploy capital over the last few months; if the market goes down further, then it will look as bad a call in the long term as it does now in the short term. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I also don’t tend to focus on individual “calls” or picks when examining a system outcome, because the performance of a system over multiple years is determined by many different decisions, of which some will be good, some will be bad, some will be very good, and some will be very bad. The systems are backtested over more than a decade for a reason. This is why my systems are generally updated only once a month, with wrap-ups of all four systems every six months or so.

If this is too slow or boring for you, there are plenty of other market writers available to read. I’ve built and tested systems that move more quickly, but I have neither the time nor inclination to trade or track them.

In regards to the Timing model portfolio, it will continue to follow its mechanical signals. You can read the most recent update at The Rempel Report.

If you’d like to become of member of The Rempel Report, you can register here. At The Rempel Report, I track model portfolios for four different mechanical trading systems, as well as my personal portfolio, and disclose all results (good and bad) at regular intervals. Members receive email notification of new posts and can contribute to the site through comments. Registration is still free!