2017 January Monthly Update

Slack Investor remains IN for US, UK, and Australian index shares.

January 2017 has seen no great plunges, or rises, in the 3 markets that Slack Investor follows. In these crazy times of Trumpenomics, I am naturally nervous – but our stop losses have held for another month.

I am particularly watchful 0f the US market as it is very deep into a bull run. Slack Investor bought in to the US stocks through the ASX listed  SPY – an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that emulates the US top 500 companies. The initial investment was at 98.81 in July 2009 on a monthly Directional Movement Index (DMI) BUY signal. The SPY is 227.53 at the end of January – a 130% increase since the initial buy – a staggering annual average performance rate of over 17%!

The Australian, and UK markets were bought much more recently (2016) and have had modest increases of, respectively, 5.7% and 5.6% .

There are plenty of opinions on where the various markets will be heading in 2017, Slack Investor will admit to being in the first category of investors as described by the American financial academic William Bernstein,

“ There are two kinds of investors, be they large or small: those who don’t know where the market is headed, and those who don’t know that they don’t know. Then again, there is a third type of investor –the investment professional, who indeed knows that he or she doesn’t know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know.”

So, Slack Investor tries to follow objective rules that define his stop losses on a monthly basis knowing the markets will do what they do and he can react accordingly. In the mean time, he can relax for another month!

Normally, I would beseech dear readers to mine further on the Slack investor ASX Index, US Index and UK Index pages for updated details – however, due to technical difficulties, these pages, and the Portfolio page, will not be updated this month – they will be updated for the 2017 February monthly update, early in March.