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The Birth of Ralph Acampora’s Brainchild; ARGoN

This journey started back in October 2022. After three years of no traveling and four years not having been to the US, it was finally possible to have…

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This journey started back in October 2022. After three years of no traveling and four years not having been to the US, it was finally possible to have an in-person event again, or at least partially.

StockCharts.com has been hosting its bi-annual conference, "ChartCon," since ####. My first attendance was in 2014, shortly after Relative Rotation Graphs were introduced on the site. At that time, it was still an all-in-person event.

In 2016 ChartCon switched to a hybrid format where attendees were able to attend online with a small group on-site where all presenters would also be to deliver their talks. Due to the Corona Pandemic, it was not possible to have a conference in 2020, but as soon as things settled down and the world opened up again, the team at StockCharts got to work and put together ChartCon 2022.

Among the elite group of speakers was Ralph Acampora, the Godfather of Technical Analysis, who needs no further introduction for those of you who haven't seen the documentary about Ralph's barn. Please do yourself a favor and watch it here on StockCharts Television.

After two intensive days of putting together a great conference, all of us got together for drinks and a bit of dinner, and of course, a chat.

I ended up in a setting with Ralph Acampora, his nephew Jay Woods (pictured above), and a few others when an engaging conversation emerged.

You have to know that Ralph and I go back more than 30 years now. The first time I met him was in 1992 at the IFTA conference in Dublin, Ireland. Ever since, it's "Hey, big guy, how are you doing?" every time we meet.

The discussion revolved around old vs. new and how computers had taken over trading and order execution. Jay was chipping in from his experience as an NYSE floor governor, and I came in from my experience with institutional investors as I was working on trading floors of investment banks. It was a bit of picking and making fun of "the old guy" in a friendly setting.

As the chat continued, the debate turned to "outperformance" and how institutional investors nowadays are ruled by benchmarks. They need to beat them, but they are not allowed to diverge too much because that means too much risk in the portfolio, and that's not allowed by the guidelines of the mandate, etc., etc.

Then Ralph began telling a story about his experience in the time he was working with Prudential Securities.

Ralph talks

At PruSec, I not only had to deal with institutional clients but also to drop into the firm's local retail investor's offices. In other words, I was always interacting with clients that had completely different investment objectives. For me, personally and professionally, this was not only challenging but was a very rewarding experience.   

Sometime in 1995, during a retail office visit, I presented the audience with my assessment of those sectors and stocks that were outperforming the stock market (S&P 500). And it was during dinner that two investors came up to me seeking a more detailed explanation of exactly what I meant by "performance". I then took out my pad and explained in more detail exactly what comparative relative strength is and how it is calculated.

I took the current price of General Motors and divided it by the current price of the S&P 500, which was the ratio. I stated that professional portfolio managers had to "beat the market." In other words, the ideal trend of this ratio, which I sketched on the pad, should be moving up on a chart, indicating that your individual stock/sector was outperforming the market; a neutral trend in this ratio meant that the sector or stock was "even with the market." And lastly, a downward trend in this ratio meant that your stock/sector was "underperforming the market."

One of these two investors then said: "Wait a minute, if my stock is up 25% and the S&P 500 is up 30%, you would then say that this is bad news because I am not beating the market? Who cares what the S&P 500 is doing? I am making a profit. And that's what is most important to me as an individual investor."  

And the second investor chimed in, saying: "I have another example that doesn't sound quite right to me. Let's say my stock is down 25% and the S&P 500 is down 30 %; you would then tell me that this is good news because I am outperforming the stock market. Are you crazy? I am losing a ton of money – who cares what the S&P 500 is doing?

Honestly, I never looked at comparative relative strength through the eyes of an individual investor before. Now I had a problem, which set of glasses would I use when looking at comparative relative strength – it is quite obvious that institutional investors need to beat the market in order to stay in business, while individual investors seek only to make a profit.

When I returned to my office in New York City, I could not get this conflict out of my mind. So, I started scribbling lines on paper in order to make sense of the true meaning of performance. It took time, but eventually, I realized that there are actually nine versions of price trends versus comparative relative strength trends. And this is what I came up with.

Explaining Something Without Pen and Paper

Then Ralph started drawing in the air, explaining how he viewed relative performance against price performance. Essentially showing the grid as we know it from the game noughts and crosses.

Over the years, I shared these nine combinations with my students and some of my institutional investors but never wrote about it in any of my formal technical reports.

Later I started to do a weekly review of these nine combinations for all thirty Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks. Again, I didn't publish these results, but they were very interesting, especially at turning points in the overall stock market.

Relative Strength, Grids, and Visualization

Ralph told us that he had shared his results with some of his colleagues in the industry, but none seemed too interested.

Can you believe it? Relative, strength, grids, and visualization. Clearly, that got me interested.

After Ralph finished his explanation, Jay and I started talking about how that approach could be "computerized" and made more "quantitative." Of course, we also made the odd joke that having a computer do all the work would allow Ralph to enjoy his Merlot on Sunday evening.

We also needed to get a good name for this "thing"; Ralph's Nine, The Nine of Acampora, Acampora's Nine, Ralph's 9 Grid or R9G, and many more were thrown up in the air, but none really kept floating.

As the discussion and the evening drew to an end, I promised Ralph to write something about it (this article) and see if I could prototype the 9-grid so we could do more research.

After I returned to my farm near Amsterdam and Ralph to his in Minnesota, I started brainstorming this, and emails started flying. Since October 19 (nice date ), about 25 Emails have been sent, and two video calls have been held.

Eye Balling vs. Bits&Bytes

One of the first things we ran into was the fact that Ralph is/was eye-balling these trends rather than using some hard-coded formula to determine the trend. Clearly, the computer needs a few rules to determine when a trend is moving up, down, or sideways.

In modern technical analysis, there are many ways to accomplish such an assessment. To keep things simple, we opted to use the classic dual-moving average approach. A short and a long MA, and we require the Short MA AND the Close to be above the Long Ma for an Uptrend. A downtrend requires the short MA AND the close to be below the long MA. Any other combination is labeled as sideways.

So far, so good.

But when I started to crank out some results and we started comparing notes. My "computerized" results were nowhere near his master's visual observations. And although I was expecting some discrepancies, this was way off.

It wasn't until I started quizzing Ralph on how he was labeling the buckets on the grid that I realized he started counting in the top-left corner of the grid and then going row by row. This meant that the X-axis, which holds the price trend, was flipped upside down... So I had to be the bearer of bad news and bring the message:

Ralph, computers don't like that

Once I stylized the grid going from down, to sideways, to up on both scales, things started to make more sense.

A Sticky name

Meanwhile, the brainstorming on a good name continued. After realizing that Ralph is way more handsome than George and definitely way smarter, we decided to ditch the movie associations, and eventually, we came up with the following acronym:

"Acampora's Relative Grid of Nine - ARGoN"

The next problem I faced was the fact that the StockCharts system does not allow (yet, we are working on it), the level of custom coding that is needed to achieve the necessary results. So, I coded up this approach in the software of our friends down under at Optuma.com and used the scatter-plot visualization to create the nine-grid. With a bit of tweaking, I managed to get the ticker symbols plotted in the various buckets (there's a limit to how many symbols can show up in the same bucket, but for now, it's enough to show the idea).

In a live implementation, it is even possible to make the symbols move through the buckets over time and see how they move as a group.

Things could have ended here, as this in itself is a very simple but very effective display of relative vs. price trends. And as Ralph does this only for the DJ Industrial stocks, he can do it within two glasses of his beloved Merlot every Sunday night.

Bigger Index = More Difficult

When you would try to do this for larger indexes like the S&P 500, this would be much more difficult, if not impossible. Ralph would need at least two bottles of Merlot every weekend, which could cause unwanted side effects...

So here comes the computer and some help from Mathew Verdouw at Optuma.com, who kindly has set up a page on https://app.optuma.com/argon where you can see ARGON for a few larger universes like the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and FTSE 100, ASX 200.


We'd like to emphasize that this is very much a showcase setup to get the idea behind ARGoN and is nowhere near a finished product. People may want to experiment with their own trend measures, their own investment horizons, etc.

A Use Case For Market Breadth

Finally, Ralph told us that he got a great sense of market breadth by looking at the distribution of the symbols on the grid. His rough estimate was that when more than 50% of the stocks, count > 15 in the case of DJI, are in the upper echelon of the market, in this case, the DJ Industrials, is in an uptrend.

Obviously, it all depends on the investment horizon and the definition of a trend that is used. Everybody can tailor that to their own liking. Longer term, shorter term, different metrics for trend measurement, etc., etc.

When creating a "breadth indicator," you need the historical data for all the rankings, and you need to be able to count/summarize/etc. these values over time. Optuma's custom breadth builder allows you to do that.

The charts below show a few variations of ARGON breadth.

1.      Daily price chart with ARGON breadth on daily data

2.      Weekly price chart with ARGON breadth on weekly data

3.      Daily price chart with ARGON breadth on weekly data.

With this, Ralph's brainchild ARGoN is now live and shared with the industry in which he has been instrumental for many analysts.

There is much more research that can be done to fine-tune the parameters and find use cases. You are encouraged to take this approach and tailor it to your own needs and ideas. The only thing we ask is to respect Ralph's idea and keep the acronym ARGoN as a reference to his work.

Julius de Kempenaer & Ralph Acampora

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super…

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.

(Left) President Joe Biden delivers remarks on canceling student debt at Culver City Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, Calif., on Feb. 21, 2024. (Right) Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign event at Big League Dreams Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nev., on Jan. 27, 2024. (Mario Tama/Getty Images; David Becker/Getty Images)

With Nikki Haley’s withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses—the earliest both parties’ races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.

The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees’ weaknesses.

Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area—aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).

Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Mr. Biden can’t afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.

When Mr. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he’d repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden’s open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.

High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, “In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal.” The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease, and crime.

There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America’s largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71 percent for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He’ll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.

Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms, and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.

The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries, and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there’s a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.

More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.

St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee’s John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62 percent Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85 percent Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.

Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.

In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America’s “systemic racism” was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.

2020 was “the year America went crazy,” I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. A year in which young New York Times (NYT) staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven NYT publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.

Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences—barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C.—is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.

Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party’s popular vote fall from 61 percent to 43 percent.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 23:20

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The…

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.

Doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Washington in a file image. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”

Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”

The agency searched for such data and did not find any.

The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.

“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.

The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.

The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.

There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.

President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.

President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.

“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.

Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.

By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.

The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.

“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.

This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”

The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.

A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.

Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 22:10

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate…

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.

(Shutterstock)

A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.

Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels

Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.

In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.

According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.

But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.

When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”

The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.

It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”

The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.

1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID

COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 12:50

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