The year 2016 is now in the books. As market participants, it is our job to prepare for the coming quarter. We don’t care much for year end targets. Those are just a marketing gimmick for wall street sell side firms. The media irresponsibly parades these historically wrong sell side analysts around on the tv and radio and have all sorts of gimmicky specials. We don’t have time for that. We’re here to make money in the market. So rather than making a list of the “Top 10” this or that, or blatantly making up a number to put as an S&P500 target for a year from now, I thought it would add value to walk you through my entire process as I prepare for the first quarter of 2017.

We’re going to go step by step on how I analyze markets. First we’ll start with the major US Indexes, both long-term and short-term. Then we’ll move on to the US Sectors relative to the rest of the market followed by the US Sectors and sub-sectors on an absolute basis. Next we’ll look at the globally to see if international markets are confirming what we’re seeing in the US or if they are diverging. In order to finish up our macro analysis, we’ll then take a deep dive into commodities, currencies and interest rate markets. Once we have put the entire world into context with respect macro money flow, we can then narrow it down to the individual stock level. There are a lot of names that have hit the upside objectives that we gave them in the Summer. But there are just as many names that have not hit our upside targets and also some new stocks that are just now perking up.

This is JC’s Playbook to Profit In Q1: [Read more…]