There are multiple reasons for volume spikes and you can classify them broadly into two buckets: informed volume vs. liquidity driven volume. Informed volume is price sensitive and happens when you buy and sell because of new information about the stock or market. E.g. the company is doing much better than you expected or vice versa. Earnings events drive informed volume. Company specific events (or market events like FOMC) also drive informed volume. Liquidity driven volume is not price sensitive and happens when you buy and sell for cash or to use cash. For example, every time you get your payroll and a % goes into the market, there is incremental buying/selling. Rebalancing activities, option positioning, and time-of-the-year effects (seasonality) explain those. So using a volume filter is not helpful because you still need to classify what type of volume is occurring. The who is buying part... most professionals think that the marginal buyer of stocks are long only investors like wealth managers and mutual fund managers. Since those types of investors aren't focused on predicting quarterly earnings, and prefer to take a longer term view, they will be the biggest incremental buyer or seller. Hedge funds and other speculators are buying before (and also after depending on the results).
%% Legit?? Frankly I got more out of Michael Marcus , Mike Masters, Mark Weinstein, LBR, IBD Founding Father+ Dave Ramsey . FFTY seldom beats SPY benchmark, but I still got+ get plenty out of IBD-ETFs + their newspaper. Some may hold it against him, but I like the way M Marcus admitted he lost money in all his CA real estate except one property.
I would say that in my opinion Minervini is not a scam and is a good trader but there is no doubt in my mind that he makes ALOT more money and greater returns running a stock market information/education/seminar business than he does trading selling the “trading dream” thru books, monthly subscriptions, expensive seminars, and other various services is his real cash cow in my opinion —not trading
He recently shared in an online video that he's earned 37% a year over his career once he became profitable. The other factoid of interest is that he says he has enough money so he wouldn't have to work for the next 300 years. I'd go with 37%. Championships: he has a large following; he can pump up a name by putting it on a buy list. A number of MPA members claim he frontruns that list and that there's no juice left when they go to buy the names. He not only tirelessly promotes an overprice seminar but actively shares his self-promotion schemes with a huge retinue of lemmings. Buyer beware. I follow another of the Can-Slim gurus, a highly respected one, whose claims can easily be shown to be spurious: 15 factor Can-Slim screens that filter out every one of 10,000 names, or mirroring O'Neil factors like Relative Strength on his platform that achieve no higher than a median RS = 65 when ported into MarketSurge. He promotes these names as the market leaders. Can-Slim is rife with self-promoters. My favorite: academics who strip a few testable rules from Can-Slim and claim outperformance for the strategy. If the strategy actually works, why no successful mutual funds or etfs? Zacks, highly suspect Zacks, at least has fielded two funds that manage not to lag the S&P500 by too embarrassing a deficit. To Mark's credit: he has a bevy of fast cars but only one blond. Also, the only self-proclaimed Buddhist with a private firing range.
Enjoyed reading this thread. I don't have a strong opinion about MM, I do think his principles, even if borrowed largely, hold up. For example, many years I traded and I couldnt "hand on heart" say I actually had an "edge". So I went to work and found one (this sentence is actually years of my life). After I read Van Tharps books on position size and other books by Stan Weinstein... I realised that this is like building an engine. I had aspects sorted, but I lacked some of the other vital parts, position sizing (and also an adaptive approach). I've been trading for years now and have an approach that annualizes a decent amount each year. So what do I tend to want from a strategy and how do I view annualized results? I think if people chase small percentages, then its somewhat a hamster wheel. Im not saying someone who has a strategy of getting small profits and rolling over that edge hundreds or thousands of times cant be profitable. But, the expendature of effort can be HUGE. Which is definitely not what I like to do. So, I make money in bull markets... and I dont make as much in bear markets. I think the big deal for me is "how much do I make in those bull markets in my portfolio" vs "how much effort is put in". As an example: If, during bull markets you were able to increase your portfoilio by 100% or 200% in a bull market... then you can totally afford to relax, if you wanted to during bear markets. I actually love this because its like a holiday period from a "lifestyle" perspective. Yet, you can still maintain a very good annualized compounded growth. So if you had 130%, 40%, 46%, during bull market.. and followed by say 20%, 5%. That would be $100,000 growing to $592,351 = 492.35% Divide that by 5 equals 98% annualized growth. Whilst the above is just an example, my point is... "If the years when the market is fantastic, you can really leverage your money... then you can literally chill out for years and still achieve a decent annualized return". For me, if prefer this larger figure aspect, during the current bull market... then if the market turns down, I largely go to cash.. (I have one shorting strategy, but its used only twice every decade statistically). So I think the perspective if someone is a "long only" person, personally I dont think that is the full picture. If you are long-only, but you make hundreds of percent (or multiples) when you are long... then you can literally sit in cash because, just like a race car driver... you have "lapped" many people who are chasing those "small profits". I say this because this is an approach I've been doing for several bull and bear markets, and I largely dont participate in bear markets, but my annualized percentages are fairly decent. So just throwing my 10c into the ring, it really depends on "how much" to this equation. Minervini, I have no idea.. but as the original post said, I've heard that Mark Ritchie gets around 40 ish percent, annualized over his last decade or so. Thats not bad if thats consistent (thats $100k to $2.9M in 10 years) And I have heard Mark Minervini say that "Mark Ritchie is like me" so, I would also agree with the original poster that ... Minervini could get in the vicinity of this. However, yes.. the motivation isnt as strong as when he started because he would be getting something from his programs. Anyway, the above is actually the bigger picture of how I trade. I put in a few minutes a day now (the expended energy) and try to capture the bull market. So this is a lifestyle aspect as I hate screens (I've done enough time infront of them) but when I originally developed my strategies, I wanted to get to a point where it gave me the freedom to do other things, whilst still getting large percentages during favourable times. So many "parts" to the trading "engine". I had to learn the hard way, but I have a largely automated system that relies on me doing a few minutes each day (tweaking some price levels) but for me, its that life benefit of "how much" during good times, allows you to sit out.. and kick back, during the times people are literally trying to "win back" their money they allowed to dwindle when the market turned. As one poster mentioned above, people STILL lose money during bull markets... so there is a huge picture we need to be aware of, otherwise we are susceptible of giving it back. My few cents... and enjoyed the read.
I have heard Mark Minervini say he gets very small returns (10% or something) during Bear Markets. I assume that's why he runs the teaching Business, something to do during non-Bull. Markets. Smooth out the Income stream too.
@Darc - You're 100% correct as he does adapt to the market (ie the buy triggers might be the same, but the length of holding/take profit might split in half or even quarter or even smaller. I only touched on that, but an "adaptive" approach, is literally one of the most important aspects. People can come up with some kind of "winning strategy" when the market is blazing. But when its not, many suffer losses, give up or... if they dont understand the mechanics of their own strategy, they abandon it. I've been doing the same thing for years, but almost every aspect of my strategy ramps up or ramps down based on certain feedback from the market.
Mark shoots for 10% returns during bull markets. He considers them more plentiful than 40% returns and prefers to compound them instead of exposing himself to greater market risk while waiting O'Neil size numbers. In early 2024 he was content to take a 10% gain on NVDA, while everyone who followed him into the trade took much larger bites out of the beast. Indisputable fact: he's a far better writer than Wm O'Neil and his approach to Can-Slim can actually be held in mind. I've never gotten to the point where I can hold a Can-Slim pick long enough to see if it works, too many tank 3-4% before they magically elevate 10% ten days later. But now in my third year of Minervini/Can-Slim/MarketSurge I'm exerting all my effort to make it work. So far its helped me with daytrading if you can believe that.
This would really kick ass if we had some idea of what you're doing. Mark Ritchie posted 11 years of audited monthly returns that worked out to 75% a year. Mark Minervini recently dropped that his lifetime record is 37% which tops Peter Lynch's 29%. But Peter Lynch retired after 13 years and Mark is still working. And selling, selling, selling. He's not only selling, but has orchestrated a large host of lemmings that are selling, selling, selling. Peter Lynch's net worth is $450 Mil. Mark says he has enough for the next 300 years, so that's got to be a little higher. Steven Schwarzman who I went to high school with, and who I didn't consider any great shakes intellectually, is worth $51 Bil, so maybe we're all looking at the wrong end of the horse. To Mark's credit, he has many cars. But only one blonde. I can quote passages from Mark's first book that says he lost money during his first six years and that he made his first million in the same period. I suppose we're not to push on this too aggressively. But he never discloses his actual track record even when he cherry picks his Championship trades, so buyer beware. Many signs of him being a great trader; open question whether that's a transferable skill. Obvious Can-Slim picks - aren't the obvious trades what beginners are looking for - are heavily arbitraged by the Can-Slim pros. "If you can see it, so can everyone else." Geez, thanks a lot.