Do not fight the Market. Part 1.

This is a sage advice, but hard to follow. Why? I asked. Because the average man or woman does not have the knowledge and the expertise to do all the things you need to do to succeed and make money from investing. So, you follow expert advice. And sooner or later, expert advice turns out to be wrong. The person who pays for the mistake is the Investor.

Let me follow the investment saga of Weiss Research. The organization had assembled an impressive staff of technicians and traders and Mr Weiss, a great salesman.

The idea was that the study of cycles has yielded a method that could forecast ups and downs and that combined with stop loss prices could protect profits.

Larry Edelson was the cycle guru, who could forecast cycles and give advice. Larry figured (his cycles told him) that economic troubles would force the Stock Market to collapse to DOW 9,500, the FED would keep printing and gold prices would soar. We were to be out of stocks and into holding gold and silver and mining shares.

It did not happen that way. The DOW refused to collapse and short selling produced a whopping loss. Gold rose then corrected (beginning in September 2011) and we were urged to hold our long term positions. Then gold stabilized, but gold and silver miner stocks continued to fall.