I’m in my 24th year in this business.
That sounds like a long time.
It doesn’t feel like one.
A few months ago, I had dinner with Mark Chaikin. He’s been doing this for about 60 years.
Sixty!
Suddenly my 24 years don’t sound so impressive.
I have friends like Ralph Acampora and Louise Yamada who can tell me what Wall Street was like in the 1960s.
My friend Jeff Weiss tells hilarious stories about what it was like when options first started trading in the ’70s.
I love those stories.
And, someday, I want to be the veteran trader telling them.
I want to tell young investors what it was like watching Bear Stearns disappear right in front of me.
I want to tell them about when crude oil traded below zero, on 4/20 of all days.
I want to tell them about the Great Financial Crisis, the pandemic rally, meme stocks, crypto, AI, and whatever crazy things happen next.
But there’s only one way I get to tell those stories.
I have to still be here.
Live To Fight Another Day
A few weeks ago, my friend Joe Fahmy invited me to Las Vegas. The pitch was pretty simple.
Come on his podcast, talk about markets, then go see AC/DC at the Raiders’ stadium.
I’d never seen AC/DC. So, yes, obviously.
Joe and I have known each other for a long time.
In fact, Joe was there on one of the most important days of my life, although neither of us knew it at the time.
It was March 2014.
Joe, Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, and I met for happy hour in New York before heading to a charity event.
That night, I met my wife. Now it’s 2026, and we have three kids.
That night feels like yesterday.
That’s the funny thing about time.
Twelve years feels like five minutes after it happens.
And that was really what I kept thinking about during my conversation with Joe.
I don’t necessarily need to win today. I want to keep playing for decades.
There’s a huge difference.
If your goal is to make as much money as possible this month, you can take enormous risks.
You can bet everything on one stock. You can put all your money into one idea.
Maybe you’ll get rich. Maybe you’ll get wiped out.
But if your goal is to still be doing this 20, 30, or 40 years from now, you have to think differently.
You have to manage risk.
You have to live to fight another day.
And you need to understand that sometimes the most important thing you can do is simply stay in the game.
I’m Already Long America
This is also a big reason TrendLabs exists.
Look at my own life.
Between real estate, retirement accounts, college accounts for my kids, ownership in several businesses, a winery in Napa Valley, and a lake house, I’m already making a gigantic bet on America.
I don’t really have a choice.
If America keeps winning over the coming decades, I expect a lot of those assets to do very well.
But I can’t control the economy, interest rates, Washington D.C., or what the S&P 500 does next.
What I can control is how I manage risk. That’s where I want to spend my time.
I don’t want my financial future to depend on the stock market going up every year.
It means executing different strategies that don’t all depend on the exact same thing happening.
That’s a big part of why we built TrendLabs the way we did.
Our two strategies are very different from simply owning the S&P 500. They can do their own thing instead of moving up and down with the stock market every day.
And we’re working on a third strategy built around the same idea.
I don’t need another way to bet that stocks go up. I already have plenty of those bets.
What I want are different ways to make money.
Because my goal isn’t to win one trade. It isn’t to predict what the S&P 500 does next month.
And it definitely isn’t to be the smartest guy on Twitter.
I want longevity.
I want to be sitting at dinner 30 years from now telling some young investor about the insane day in 2020 when the price of a barrel of oil somehow fell below zero.
That’s what Joe and I ended up talking about in Las Vegas.
Markets, investing, risk, business, life, and what you have to do if you want to stay in this game for a very long time.
It’s a much more personal conversation than the things I normally write about here.
And if you’ve been reading my work for a while, I think it will help you understand why I invest the way I do.
You can click here to watch my full conversation with my friend Joe Fahmy.
Oh, AC/DC was pretty damn good, too.
This Week in Everybody’s Wrong
On Monday, we looked at what’s next for the S&P 500.
We don’t know exactly where stocks are going, or when they’re going to get there.
But we do know the Golden Ratio works.
On Tuesday, we observed another fresh milestone for the market.
Energy stocks made new all-time highs, and that hadn’t happened in almost 20 years.
Here’s why this move is just getting started.
On Wednesday, we asked another in our ongoing series of simple questions.
There’s really no need to complicate things like stock charts and price action.
All you need to do is ask yourself, am I hanging out with losers?
On Thursday, we talked about Bitcoin for the first time in a while.
Did you see that $150 billion piled into the world’s first cryptocurrency in less than 24 hours?
Did you know traders have been watching these levels for Bitcoin for generations?
On Friday, we broke down a chart they’re passing around that’s supposed to scare us.
The market is at all-time highs because investors have been buying stocks, but they’re holding less cash.
Yep, that’s the big revelation.
On Saturday, Jason Perz returned for another close look at inflation.
Do you really want to know what’s happening here?
Let’s not overcomplicate it: This is about long-term payback.
Have a great Sunday.
We’ll see you Monday morning…
Stay sharp,
JC Parets, CMT
Founder, TrendLabs