Episodes

Dan Ferris:               Hello and welcome to the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm Dan Ferris. I'm the editor of Extreme Value and The Ferris Report, both published by Stansberry Research.

Corey McLaughlin:    And I'm Corey McLaughlin, editor of the Stansberry Daily Digest. Today, we talk with our friend and colleague, Greg Diamond, editor of Ten Stock Trader.

Dan Ferris:               Greg is a trader extraordinaire. He had an incredible year in 2022. We're all still talking about it here at Stansberry Research. I can't wait for you to hear this interview in which he told us that he has just as much conviction today as he did in 2022. That's a really exciting thing to hear from him, so let's not delay.

Let's get on with it. He's going to tell us about Gann cycles, and volatility, and all kinds of good stuff. Let's talk with Greg. Let's do it right now. Greg, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure.

Greg Diamond:         It's great to be here, guys.

Dan Ferris:               So, I don't know if you remember this, but you were with us before it, and I wrote down a bunch of dates that you suspected would be very important. Among them –

Greg Diamond:         And that was in January that – [crosstalk]

Dan Ferris:              That was in January. That's exactly right.

Greg Diamond:         Yeah.

Dan Ferris:               And you wrote, let's see, 2/14, February 14, end of March through April 1, June 16 through June 21, and then as we speak, we're getting near 8/25 to September 5, August 25 to September 5. What are all these dates, man?

Greg Diamond:         Yeah. I get that a lot. So, as you guys know, I do things a little bit differently than most traders, investors, analysts, and I look at time cycles and price action. Those are the two catalysts for how I trade, how I invest, how I look at the market, and it's all based upon an old-school trader named W.D. Gann, who I call a master of time analysis. And so, each year, there are certain inflection points that happen, and based upon long-term cycles, based upon short-term cycles, I like to review what those are likely to be.

Now, whenever a lot of people hear, well, "Oh, Gann, you know, it's going to be this major crash, or this major bust, or this major boom, or this major bottom," it's just not how it really works, OK? I'm just looking for inflection points to trade, and then as we go through the year, how the market trades into those inflection points will determine whether it's a big inflection point, or just a pause, or something else. So, like you just mentioned those June time factors, right? So I'm looking up here.

Look up where Nvidia made the tie. That was on June 20, all right, and it hasn't, you know, and then it is starting to pop back up into next week. They have earnings coming out. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you what earnings are going to be. It could be great, and then it pops up, you know, but it's within that window of 8/25, and I didn't know when Nvidia was releasing earnings, you know, back in January, but all these things start to come together when you study time analysis, and it takes a long time to do that, and it's a lot of work.

It's a lot of energy, and another thing that's important is I don't know whether it's going to be a low or a high. We don't deal in guarantees. We deal in probabilities. There is no Holy Grail, but what my strategy allows us to do is narrow those probabilities down, manage our risk, and say, "Hey, this is a really, really good risk/reward opportunity, you know? We're going to go long. We're going to go short with calls, or puts," or whatever it might be.

So, what I find interesting, again, just using Nvidia, which everyone knows of now, you know, it topped on June 20. We're seeing a bottom and a rally. It happens to be right into this, you know, late August, early September time frame or time cycle, rather. So, if that happens to be a high, that is a situation where I'll probably look to buy puts.

Dan Ferris:               OK. Well, let me get my pen out. Do you have the next set of dates for me?

Greg Diamond:         Yeah. Well, again, so we're looking here at the end of August. So, you know, back in January, I mentioned 8/25, so let's call 8/25 to the week of Labor Day, OK?

Dan Ferris:              OK.

Greg Diamond:         And next week, I'm going to – for Ten Stock Trader subscribers, Alliance subscribers, obviously you guys will read it, go over certain scenarios. Is this going to be – and not all tops look the same, and bottoms happen to be easier if there is such a way to describe it, you know? Look what happened just earlier this month, right? We saw this huge move down in late July, early August, and boom, it was a one-day turnaround, and we spike higher.

That is a quintessential bottom type of move. Tops tend to make a little bit more of a process, and now, again, this top doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the top, OK? If you held a gun to my head and said, "Greg, what is this going to look like?" basically, what I'm expecting is if this rally continues into next week, possibly into right after Labor Day, OK?

We may see the Dow top first and semiconductors top last, or reverse that, or semi – or small caps starts topping out first, you know? They had struggled mightily over the last couple of years while semiconductors and Nasdaq and even the industrials have rallied to new all-time highs. So, I'm not going to sit here and tell you exactly how that's going to play out, but when I see those divergences develop, and I've gone over this over the last few weeks with subscribers, and then I see that happen into these time cycles, oh, man, I get really excited, but OK. So, after that, what I find interesting –

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Greg Diamond:         – is right before the election, late October, so let's call it – what's the actual calendar here? Let's see here.

Dan Ferris:              All right.

Greg Diamond:         So, let's call it, and you can write these down. Let's call October 24 to October 29, right?

Dan Ferris:              OK.

Greg Diamond:         If we make a low into that right before the election, I'm probably going to start buying it, and that has nothing to do with my political bias or whatever.

Dan Ferris:              No.

Greg Diamond:         And we all have bias.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         I think that's what's so important about my strategy is I don't get caught up in it. Yes, we all have things that we want to have happen, especially when it comes to politics and especially now with emotions running so high, and the country's so divided. You can get into that till the cows come home. People are going to believe what they want to believe, and then they have certain biases about, well, this person should win and then the stock's going to do this, or this person should win so bonds are going to do that.

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Greg Diamond:         I have to remove all of that. We all have those biases, but what I really love – many things, but especially a time now when emotions are so high, when we have a big election like we do, it just – I tune out all the noise or what I want to have happen and strictly focus on the cycles and the price action, and that allows me to control those emotions and just focus on what I need to do to win.

Dan Ferris:               Yeah. Well stated. We hear similar from every trader who has a system that they've used for years and years. One of the prime benefits is getting the emotions out of it, and God knows we all need to do that. It may be, given that where the biggest risk is your own human nature, that's probably what we all need to do more than anything, is to get the emotions out of our investing and our trading.

Greg Diamond:         And it's interesting that you say that, and a lot of people say you need to remove the emotion, and that's definitely the right path. I like to say it's controlling your emotions, because we all – we're human. We have emotions.

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Greg Diamond:         It's like, well, I'm going to completely remove all my emotion.

Dan Ferris:              No.    

Greg Diamond:         Well, what, are you a cyborg? Are you a robot?

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Greg Diamond:         No, you're not. You have the emotions, right? Like, I just love it. It's like, all right. I bought a stock, and the next day it's down 80%.

I don't have any emotion. That's B.S. Of course you have the emotion, right? You're like, "What the heck?" right?

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         But being able to control it and say, "All right, I'm down," and I always like to say, "Always focus on what's next," whether it's, "All right, this is the spot where I'm going to add," or, "I'm just going to cut it, and then I'm just going to move on to the next trade, or the next investment," whatever it might be.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Dan Ferris:              Right, and we have –

Corey McLaughlin:    I've found more and more that investing, trading especially – you know more than me, but psychology, a lot of it, more than anything, like, yeah, you can't be an emotionless cyborg. The whole point of managing risk is to handle those emotions, and like, that's a practical way of handling it, I think, is what it is.

Dan Ferris:               And having a strategy helps you do that. It helps you say, "All right, look. I'm focused on my strategy," and there's no Holy Grail, again. So, you have to incorporate risk and losses into that strategy, but once you understand that losses are a part of the game, they don't bother you anymore. I mean, of course they bother you, but it's just, all right, again, and I like to always say, I'm going to focus on what's next, and that's part of the strategy, and that's how it works, and that's how you string some of those traits together, wins and losses, you know? And then if you have a winning strategy, you know, that's going to overtake any losses that you have, and then, you know, you move forward.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, I guess you don't want to be losing, you know, every time. Hell, 100 times in a row.   

Greg Diamond:         Right, but –

Dan Ferris:               [Crosstalk] Then you've got to – then you need to change strategies.

Corey McLaughlin:    You've got to get some ways of – [crosstalk]

Greg Diamond:         Right, because then you've got to change your strategy.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         That's right.  

Dan Ferris:               Right. Yeah, it's magnitude of gains versus magnitude of losses and average returns over time, but I'm reminded of a guest that we had named John Netto, and he's in one of the Market Wizards books. Almost every trader we talk about talks about minimizing emotion and not letting emotion sort of screw up your trading, basically, but he was the one guy who said he tried very much to use emotion in his trading, which it's like, once I read that, we had to get him on the program. Because it's just – we had to get him on the show because when somebody – when a trader says something completely different from every other one, and I'm telling you, traders, and you know this, Greg, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, they all have different strategies.

They all have something different, and yet they all say the same core stuff. Risk management is more important than exits and entries. You're not predicting anything, really. Your strategy tells you when to exit, when to enter and exit, and your risk management, your position sizing, your stop losses, all that stuff is 10 times more important.

They all say the same thing, and they all say similar things about emotions, but that one guy said something different about emotions, but that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about controlling them, and managing them, and acknowledging that they exist, I guess, is what you're saying. They exist. You're not a cyborg, but you have to manage them.

Greg Diamond:         Correct, and I can get on board with what he's talking about, using emotion, and that comes with experience, and for example, last month, huge sell-off. Everyone starts freaking out. You can almost feel it, right? You go on social media, you can feel it.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         Using that type of emotion or maybe other people's emotion or investor's emotions, like, all right. I'm taking the opposite side of this, right? That comes with experience, and that doesn't happen all the time, but I can see where he would say, "This is where I wanted to use emotion." I agree with that.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         But the majority of the time I would say you're kind of in your own zone. I like to say I'm on Greg Diamond Island, like I don't – I just kind of put all the noise outside, and I leave it outside, and I strictly focus on what I'm looking at, what my strategy is telling me, and then I just execute.

Dan Ferris:              Right. Strategy, strategy, execute, execute.

Corey McLaughlin:    All right. Cycles –

Dan Ferris:              It's just – yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. Obviously, we know you deal with cycles. We know you just talked a little bit about that. What do you make of the election cycle that is – maybe explain that a little bit, if anything is significant about it.

Greg Diamond:         Yeah. Well, this is what I'm going to be reviewing or going over in the next – my next event, which is on the 27th, and you can sign up. I'm sure we'll have a link here for you, but I'm going to be going over essentially every – I'm not going to go into everything specifically, but I'm looking at the presidential cycle going all the way back to 1896, right, and how that cycle, which is a very long cycle, obviously. But how that cycle plays into what's happening right now, and again, what the cycle is telling me, that's a very long-term cycle.

I'm also going to talk about short-term cycles, and then how I'm going to be trading that, and I mentioned it a little bit at the start in terms of, look, you know, I had the short-term cycle here coming into late August, early September. If that continues to rally into it, that is a selling opportunity and a chance to buy puts. Again, it can only last for maybe three, two, three weeks. Now, that's the ideal scenario.

There are a couple other scenarios that I will be reviewing next week for subscribers, but again, the election cycle will be – so many people are going to be talking about, or rather, they already are – all this policy versus that policy, what happens if stocks or what happens if the Democrats win versus what happens if the Republicans win. What happens if Congress switches while the president doesn't, or whatever it might be. There's so many different scenarios that could unfold. Here's something that I think your subscribers, or your listeners would like. What if I told you the cycle's already in, and it doesn't matter who wins? That would be kind of crazy, right?

Dan Ferris:              Not to me.

Greg Diamond:         Yeah, I know it wouldn't, Dan. So, I'm not saying that it wouldn't matter politically. I'm saying from the stock market point of view, the fix is already in.

Dan Ferris:               Yeah, I don't think it would matter politically either, but that's a different topic.

Greg Diamond:         No, no, no. I agree with you there. I agree with you there, and I understand what you're saying, but again, that's where, kind of the bias comes into play, but again, for me, if this plays out the way that I think it is, it's not – yeah. It's spectator sport in terms of the politics, but I'm looking at it in terms of the market and what's going to happen, and I'm looking at it from the short and long-term cycles, and that's really it.

Dan Ferris:               Right. It sounds like even if someone could look at it and say, "Well, if Harris wins, then it's going to be this, and if Trump wins, it's going to be that," I feel like even if they were right, whatever happens is you're going to look at it in terms of these time cycles, and it's not going to matter whether it's long, or short, or somewhere in between, or some spread trade. The time cycles are still going to be there. Human nature's not going to change –

Greg Diamond:         Correct.

Dan Ferris:              – because one or another gets elected, right?

Greg Diamond:         The time cycles are still going to be there, and what are those time cycles based off of? They're based off of how humans, or investors in this case, how they react to certain things, what those emotions are, and those emotions really – they go in waves, right? It's not static. There's ebbs and flows. There's longer emotional reactions to some things, and shorter emotional reactions to some things.

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Greg Diamond:         But when you put all those cycles together, it gives you a blueprint almost, and it's not perfect. Again, there's no Holy Grail, but it improves my probabilities of saying, "Hey, look. If we get a low into the election, I don't care who wins. I'm buying it." If we get a high into Labor Day, you know, something might happen, like I'm calling it the early – the October surprise comes early, and that starts spooking investors, and that's what the cycle analysis is telling me. Now, there's cycle inversions and things like that, which I won't get into, but generally speaking, the cycle is going to tell me on a broader perspective, that 10,000-foot level, what to expect, then that's how I'm going to manage my risk.

Dan Ferris:               All right, so we're talking about the cycles, and we're kind of talking around them. I wonder if you could give us a sort of "The Gann for Dummies," you know? Like, "W.D. Gann for Dummies" in five minutes of something. What can you tell? Is there a centurylong cycle inside of which all these other smaller ones? Is there just an annual cycle and lots of shorter ones inside?

Greg Diamond:         You just answered it.

Dan Ferris:              Oh, really?

Greg Diamond:         But I'll go into more specifics. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:              OK.

Greg Diamond:         So, there's a very important 90 – I'll give you all the major – and this isn't – I was in Vegas in last year, and I gave a speech, and someone says, "Well, how can we learn more about Gann?" I'm like, "He's got books on it." He has tons of books that he's published.

I'm not in some secret club. Yes, I'm obsessed with it. I've read everything on him. I study. I do statistical analysis on it.

We have computers now. We can test these cycle theories, and so I would love to know, if he was still alive, what he thought about, "Hey, this is what I said without using computers." It's kind of remarkable, actually, and how you could test it now, and it's really remarkable how he was right, and how he continues to be right. So, that just proves that history rhymes and repeats, and these cycles repeat. Now, how you apply those cycles is where it becomes important, but when do I use the 90-year cycle?

When do I use a 20-year cycle? When do I use a 10-year cycle, but to answer your question, "Gann for Dummies," the most important cycles that he looked at are the 90-year cycle, 60-year cycle, 30, 20, 10, 4, and then the annual cycle, and again, I test all these statistically through a system. I look at them even just manually – so for instance, let's look at that 60-year cycle from 2024. So, how would I analyze that? All right, and it's really simple.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         It's 2024. I go back 60 years. What happened in 1964? And someone might say, "Well, that's really simple. Like, what?" I don't care why.

Why does it work? I don't care why it works. Does it work? Is there a similarity between what happened in the 1964 stock market and what's happening now? Go back and look for yourself. You'll see that there is, OK?

Go back to 1934, the 90-year cycle, see the similarities in the dates. Look at it for yourself. Study this stuff, and you'll be blown way about, you know? Again, it's not perfect. It's not, you know, a 100% correlation, but I go back to 2022 where I probably had my best year ever, at least at Stansberry, certainly, and I nailed that bear crash or that bear market rally, rather, and how did I come up with that months in advance and trade that whole market cycle for an entire year?

I looked what he called a master cycle, which is a 20-year cycle, and I went back. Go back and look at 2002 versus 2022. You'll see unbelievable similarities between the market structure. So, that's kind of the "Gann for Dummies," to start off with.

Dan Ferris:               OK. Well, it seems simple enough, doesn't it? It seems simple enough to just start with 2024 and go back 1 year, 4 years, 10, 20, 30, 60, and 90, doesn't it?

Greg Diamond:         Correct. Now, again, this is where there – and Gann talks about this. I mentioned it briefly earlier. There's things called cycle inversions, and that can be get where things get trippy, and what is a cycle inversion?

Basically, let's use the '64 versus 2024, so if I'm expecting a high in June, but markets are actually trading, so there was a high in 1964, whatever. It was caught in June, but there was a low in 2024, right? The dates are the same, but the price action is the opposite. That's the inversion.

Dan Ferris:              OK.

Greg Diamond:         So, instead of a high, you get a low, so it gets a little tricky. It's not just – because think about it, right? If it was 100% correlated all the time, everyone would be like, "Oh, this is great. I'm going to buy my own island."

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         It's not exactly how it works all the time, so there are nuances to it, but again, that's the general – when you start with Gann analysis, that's what you start with.

Dan Ferris:               You know, as we sit here and speak, I'm putting together the – I guess it'll be the August issue of the Ferris Report, and it's all about the story I'm telling, if it makes it through editing, is all about a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot who – or Mandelbrot, however you're supposed to say it. I don't pronounce French very well, and it's called the (Mis)Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Turbulence, and he studied turbulence, which we call volatility, and of course, fractals are self-similar images among other things where the smallest part of the image is identical, pretty much, to the largest part of the image. And this has a vague whiff of fractalness to it simply because all of these years, if I just write them out, they are in some proportion to one another.

Whether or not that proportion means anything, you know, it probably means nothing, right? I'm not saying it means anything, but this smells familiar to me, I guess, because I've had my head in fractal geometry for a week and a half, and it doesn't surprise me. Like you said, it's amazing that Gann was right in whatever time he lived before computers were used the way they are today, and studying markets since 1896 or whatever. It is amazing, but it doesn't surprise me. One of Mandelbrot's – what he calls his 10 heresies of finance are that markets are the same in all places and all ages, meaning all times, and I think that's what –

Greg Diamond:         I love that.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah. I think that's lost on people.

Greg Diamond:         I love that.

Dan Ferris:               I have people telling me "This CAPE ratio you keep talking about, it doesn't work anymore," because blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "Well, I'm pretty sure human nature hasn't changed since 1929, or 1896," or 18 – I think they started at 1870, that data, and –

Greg Diamond:         Greed and fear.

Dan Ferris:               Yeah, so you know, maybe the numbers are a little different, but the action is crystal clear. It's unmistakable that the CAPE ratio is absolutely in the stratosphere at the top of all the biggest bubbles, like you can't mistake it. The rest of the data is probably not worth much. It probably has no, you know, real predictive value at all, and even CAPE, you know, it's a not a precise timing thing. It's just the tenor of the time. It describes what's going on overall. So, what you're telling me, Greg, makes a lot of sense because you're doing what a lot of traders do, which is you're refusing to pinpoint and be dogmatic and say things very specifically because if you did that, I'd know you were full of B.S., but you're not.

Greg Diamond:         Right. No.

Dan Ferris:               You're saying it's not that precise. It's not a story we tell about the market. It's a story that the market tells us, you know? That's what Mandelbrot found, and I think that's what Gann seems to have found, and that's what you're using. It's what story is the market really telling us? Don't impose your own stuff on it.

Greg Diamond:         I love that, and I say it often, or at least privately, and I'll say it publicly now, because it's true. A lot of people like to say, especially as a technical guy, a cycles guy, a time and price, whatever. Again, this is totally different. I'm like the redheaded stepchild that nobody really pays attention to, which is fine, but I don't try to convince people of what works and why it works. All I know is that it does, and I've been doing this for over 20 years now.

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Greg Diamond:         Right? So, I'm going to present to you the facts. This is what I'm looking at, and this is what I study, and this is what I'm going to do, and this is my track record. If you like it, awesome. Great. I hope I motivate you. I hope you follow me, and well, it's not going be a straight line of happiness, and champagne bottles, and Porsches, but it's success, and if you don't like it, and you're more comfortable with the fundamental, OK, great.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         But what drives me crazy is people who have such a closed mind and say, "No, this is the only way to do things."

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         "And anything other than that just doesn't." They've almost – I'm not going to say brainwashed, but they're just blinded by what else is possible. They don't have an open mind about what is possible. And so, I just – I don't know when. I can't specifically say it.

All right, when I'm just – because I used to be, "No, no, no. You guys have got to look at this. You guys?" Now I'm just like, "Look. This is what I do.

"This is what I've studied. This is what has led me to success, and again, if you like it, awesome. If not, you know, find on someone else, but don't criticize something that you don't know. Don't criticize something that you don't understand, or haven't studied, or haven't traded, or have never invested in simply because it may be a little bit different from what you're used to."

Dan Ferris:               Right, in many ways, more than one way to skin the market cat.

Greg Diamond:         Right.

Dan Ferris:               Yeah. Yep. That's a good point. It just doesn't do you any good. It does you good to decide what your style is, what fits your personality, your way of seeing the world, but it really doesn't do you a lot of good to go around, criticizing other things that work for other people.

I'm sitting here as you're talking, thinking, yeah. I remember the time I heard Stanley Druckenmiller, who's crushed it over time, made billions and billions and billions of dollars, one of the most successful investors ever, and he says, "Well, you know, we look inside the stock market, how the action of different industries, and we look at the macro, and the fed, and all this other stuff," and then he says, "And all the rest is technical analysis." So...

Greg Diamond:         Yep.

Dan Ferris:               You can't tell someone that they haven't made the money they've made, the way they made it, you know what I'm saying? It doesn't pay, so – and I get the same thing. Look, if you want to talk to somebody who's been criticized, talk to a value investor, you know?

Greg Diamond:         Sure. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:              Everybody says it's dead. People are always saying it's dead.

Greg Diamond:         Right.

Dan Ferris:               I just wrote a whole Digest about how it's not fricking dead.

Greg Diamond:         Yep.

Dan Ferris:               You just have to do it, and so yeah. Yeah. I feel you on that one. It's a really good point, and it goes to another point, you know, every now and then I'll write about how your investing is a personal thing, and your trade – whether you're a trader, an investor, a real estate investor, a stock trader, whatever it is, that's up to you.

No one can tell you that. No one can decide that for you, and I'd like your sort of take-it-or-leave-it kind of attitude. You're not trying to proselytize. You're just showing people what you do and how it works, and it does work.

Greg Diamond:         Right.

Dan Ferris:              So...

Greg Diamond:         And go back to Stanley Druckenmiller for a second.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         Some people were probably blown away that he would say that the rest that he uses is technical analysis.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         Well, let's think about what that is, and it kind of goes back to the start of what we were talking about. You look at a chart, and then all it is, is human emotion and decision-making within a stock or a market expressed on a chart. That's what it is. That is the emotion.

Those are the things that are happening, but what about algorithms? Well, who made the algorithms? What was it based off of? All those algorithms are based off of what happened in the past, right?

Dan Ferris:              Yes.

Greg Diamond:         And humans did that. That's the fundamental principle of technical analysis, is that, yes, it's the fundamental understanding of how humans behave expressed on a chart, and then those happen and patterns, and then those patterns repeat or – and/or why.

Dan Ferris:               Right. There's another point in here, too, which is when you said you don't know why it works, you just know that it works, and you know how to work it. You're a racecar driver. You're not an engineer, building engines, right?

Greg Diamond:         That's a great way to put it, though.

Dan Ferris:               You're not a physicist teaching an engineer why the stuff he's doing in the engines works even, you know?

Greg Diamond:         Yeah.

Dan Ferris:               And asking why is wonderful. I have no problem with asking why, but when you say you don't know why, that's good. That means you know what you're doing, and what you're not doing. What you're not doing is at least as important as what you are doing in life, and that's a point worth noting, I think.

You don't have to know – I was thinking about this in relation to, of all things, love. Why do you love someone? And I think when you're in love with someone, the real answer, the correct answer is, "I don't know, but I really know that I am, because there's 8 billion people in the world, and half of them are the other gender, and not everybody falls in love." Whoever you fall in love with, let's just say, I'm a man. I have a wife who is a female, so we'll stick to that model, and half of them are women.

Greg Diamond:         Careful. Careful.

Dan Ferris:               No, no, no. I'm just saying. I'm just saying there's 8 billion people in the world, and 4 billion of them or so are women, so just don't take this one away from me. That's all I'm saying.

Greg Diamond:         Right.

Dan Ferris:               Like, I don't want any of the others, I just know that I want this one, and she's for me, so it's – not knowing why is OK, and you can be very successful doing what you're doing and not knowing why it works, I think. It's important. It's important to know.

Corey McLaughlin:    Dr. Dan. I like it, Dan. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:              Dr. Dan?

Corey McLaughlin:    Well, in some ways, it's if you don't know the why, it's a little easier as well that way.

Dan Ferris:              Well, sure.

Greg Diamond:         100%.

Corey McLaughlin:    You'd just kind of –

Dan Ferris:              Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         100%.

Corey McLaughlin:    – be going through the process –

Dan Ferris:              That's authority.

Corey McLaughlin:    – and not overthinking too many things, but Greg, I think I'm going to start calling charts –

Dan Ferris:              Yeah, that –

Corey McLaughlin:    – maybe fear and greed, emotional calculators.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    Maybe that's what we should start calling the charts –

Greg Diamond:         Yeah, that a good one.

Corey McLaughlin:    – rather than technical analysis.

Greg Diamond:         I like that. I like that. I like that.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    It's –

Dan Ferris:              Yeah, we've got to think of a good name there. That's good.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. It's one of the things, like, just so you know, I'm not a conventionally trained investor, trader, or whatever it may be, but when I first started getting into this and learning a bit about it, you had the fundamental analysis, which I kind of understood why you want to value a company to begin with like Dan has done forever. But then, OK, great, but you buy this, and the price moves whatever direction it does in three months, six months, and you're like, "Oh, crap. Like, did I make a terrible decision here on this?"

This is me, amateur Corey talking. And then I came across technical analysis, and I don't even know how, really, but I was like, "Oh, wait. There's these kind of price action in the short-term indicators, long-term also, that at least, to me, made a lot of sense."

And there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, as you know, with Gann cycles or different strategies that at least made me comfortable. It made me more comfortable buying and selling and making decisions, whether that was right or wrong, like it at least gave me a nice framework to start with and be like, "OK, even if something goes wrong here in the next three to six months, at least I have a strategy to begin with." So, I think maybe for some people that have never thought about technical analysis before, that could be something, take some – it just gave me like, a little sense of comfort at the beginning when I was starting out.

Greg Diamond:         Yeah, and I make it a point to, what do you call it, educate or just inform. It's not just in my service I'm saying, "Hey, buy this, sell that," just because I told you to, and that's what the charts – I outline in detail definitely every week, if not every day, at least something that I'm looking at in terms of, all right, this is –

I have a whole suite of videos and special reports, and the whole lot, so you know, I go into the depth of technical analysis, and – you go back to your original point, Dan sits down and values a company. Well, how many millions of people around the world are doing the exact same thing in the exact – or maybe not millions, but whatever the number it is, thousands, hundreds of thousands are doing the exact same thing, and what are the chances that all those people come up with the exact same conclusion? It's zero. They're not. They're going to come up with different conclusions about how that market works.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         Well, what does that do? That creates volatility. That creates the emotion, and that's where technical analysis takes over –

Dan Ferris:              Yeah, it's an art.

Greg Diamond:         – or not takes over, but where it's useful.

Dan Ferris:              Yep, and it's –

Greg Diamond:         So I like the way that – and I'm sure I say it all the time. I think I've said it to you guys before, but you know, market wizards Paul Tudor Jones, my boss, my first boss worked for him. He famously said, "I believe price comes first and fundamentals come second," or, "Price comes first and the news or some catalyst event comes afterwards," and that's a difficult concept to grasp for a lot of people, and it was difficult for me.

Like, what is that? What do you mean price comes first? What are you talking about? And basically, what it means is the market's going to discount certain things into the future. It's already going to –

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Greg Diamond:         – get ahead of it.

Dan Ferris:              And what –

Greg Diamond:         And I think that's why technical analysis is so powerful, is it's the collective behavior again, and you can spot these trends, these patterns, the tops, these bottoms, these cycles, and use it to your advantage.

Dan Ferris:               And what I find fascinating about all of these things, now that we're mentioning them all in the same breath, valuation. Value investing, let's just say momentum, Gann cycles, anything else you want to throw in there, these are not sciences in the way that, you know, physics is a science. You talk to a physicist, a knowledgeable physicist, and he'll tell you exactly how the heavenly bodies will move, and they can blast a rocket off and pinpoint it on a spot on the moon or whatever. It's amazing what they can do, and they measure it precisely, and none of these things are like that.

They're all arts, and there's art and a lot of discretion and sort of feel to it, even though you are looking at a lot of data, which is very interesting, I find. So, it's interesting how they're all sort – there's emotion in all of it. There's bias in all of it, right? Hence, as you point out, volatility.

We can't predict these things. You said that before, you're not predicting things. You're just working with the probabilities based on cycles, potential cycle inversions, whatever's happening at a particular time based on market action. You're trying to put the odds in your favor. You're not pinpointing a particular place in time and space the way I described that a physicist might do, and I think that's lost –

Greg Diamond:         Correct.

Dan Ferris:               – on a lot of people. I think, Corey said he was talking about technical analysis, and what I've seen is – and I mean, I saw this myself, too, the very first thing a lot of people try to do when they get – when they decide they're going to become investors, going to become involved with the stock market or commodities or whatever, is they look at price charts and think that there's a way to pinpoint and predict the price movements. And I think that's a typical thing because it's an availability bias, right? When you don't know anything, the only thing that's available to you is the price, so you got the price staring you in the face.

You figure, "Well, that must be the most important data point, so I'm going to focus on that," and there must be a way to predict it because a lot of people are getting rich out here, and they must be predicting, you know? You just make all the usual sort of first level, false assumptions, and away you go, and I've talked to a few people who have made a similar progression as I have, and they start from trying to do that, and eventually they make their way to analyzing businesses and wanting to be a long-term investor, and some of them go kind of the way you have, or the way that our market wizard guests, like Jason Shapiro and some of the others, just a lot of the traders we've interviewed, and they say, "Well, I'm not going to pinpoint anything, but I am going to do like you're doing, put the odds in my favor by having a system that works that I understand and can use and reiterate."

Every day you can go into the market. You have a set of analytical tools that you use, you know, and you gave us the "For Dummies" version of these cycles, 90, 60, 30, 20, 10, 4, 1, and away you go, and I'm sure there's a lot more to it, of course, now. You don't write whole books to say, "Yeah, 90, 60, 30, 20, 10." Yeah, so it's interesting to contemplate the art of it all is all, I guess is all I'm saying.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. I think it's probably important to delineate between trading too, and like, the portfolio that you want to have for a long-term investing, like –

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         And that's interesting you mention that, Corey, because in my personal portfolios, there are stocks that I just don't trade. I just buy them, and I never sell them because they've paid a dividend through multiple bear markets, and I just don't touch them because they're good businesses, and they pay their investors back. I'm not going to try to trade that, you know what I mean? You're talking about building wealth over a long term. My grandfather was amazing at just buying these businesses. He thought I was crazy for getting into the trading business, but he retired so early because he did what you guys do, what a lot of people do, is recognize good businesses, keep buying them, holding on to them, getting paid good dividends, and having that, 30-, 40-, 50-year approach.

So, I do a little bit of both. Now, in the short term, I like it because I can, again, improve the probabilities of, "Hey, this is where I'm going to," like 2022, 2023. This is where we're going to add to those long-term investments, those really good businesses that are at a value or at a discount, but then also in the short term, trade it and add alpha to what I do.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, and it's fun, the short-term trading too, right?

Greg Diamond:         Most of the time.

Corey McLaughlin:    I imagine the election season. Well, it can be fun, right? It can be.

Greg Diamond:         Well, I've been saying it for a few weeks now. I haven't been this excited since 2022 in terms of the market inflection point that I'm anticipating. Again, no guarantees, no Holy Grail, but the probabilities are very, very high that this is going to be an exceptional trading season from September until the end of the year.

Dan Ferris:               OK, and just to be clear, the big excitement for you begins with this first inflection point that we're calling, like, late August, early September?

Greg Diamond:         Correct.

Dan Ferris:               Yeah. That's cool, Greg. I didn't know that. I didn't know that you were as excited now as you were in 2022 because God, you just ripped it in 2020.

You tore it apart in 2022, like nobody in our company could touch you. You were just like, "Whoa. Have you heard about what Greg is doing over there?" And it was like that, so that, telling me that, now I'm really paying attention. Now, I'm really –

Greg Diamond:         Well, that's what – so let's be honest. As a trainer, as a long options trader, as a time and price trader, volatility is where I'm going to shine. Like, early in this year, 2024 for the most part has been kind of boring. Last week, obviously, or the last couple of weeks were a little more exciting in terms of volatility, but for the most part, it's just kind of been a buy-and-hold market, which is fine, but again, when I think volatility is going to start ramping up, and when I say "volatility," I just don't mean a big crash. I mean moves in both directions.

Dan Ferris:              Yes.

Greg Diamond:         Yeah, so that's what I get excited about, and then 2022 was that. We had big moves down. We had this huge – short squeezes. It was a wonderful trading environment. I know not all investors liked it, especially if you're buy and holding and watch everything going down 30%, 40%, or whatever it was, but those are the environments where my style of trading is going to do well.

Dan Ferris:               That's interesting. I mentioned it, the issue that I'm working on for The Ferris Report, and I agree that higher volatility is likely in the next – in the near future, and I was just – the simple observation that really kind of put things together for me was when Mandelbrot said, "Volatility clusters," right? It tends to cluster.

Greg Diamond:         I like that term.

Dan Ferris:               Yeah. So, we had this tick up, and at first, I found some research that said that the spike in the VIX that we had recently, I forget the date. Was it the 12th, maybe, when it went up to 65? They said, "Well, no. It didn't really go to 65 because there was a mispriced option that was screwing up the calculation."

But now I'm seeing that, you know, they're like, "No. It really did go to 65." Whatever it was, it was a spike, and then it reverted in record time. It's never reverted like that, or maybe it's reverted like, a handful of times in many, many years. I forget the exact statistic.

Corey McLaughlin:    I think it's like, four or five times in the last, like, 30 years, something like that.

Dan Ferris:               Yeah. Yeah, so it was a really record spike, one of the biggest spikes, and then a record reversion, and like you say, the volatility goes both ways, so that spike up was followed by what we ought to be classifying as a spike down. So, it's –

Greg Diamond:         Yeah. So, what I like –

Dan Ferris:              The volatility is still with us.

Greg Diamond:         Yeah, and if I'm right about what happens, I don't think that's going to go away.

Dan Ferris:              I agree.

Greg Diamond:         I think that's what I'm excited about. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:               It's funny, isn't it, Greg? We're winding up on the same page, and as investors, we're nothing alike. You and I have done this before, I think.

Greg Diamond:         Right. Yeah, yeah.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah, we overlap sometimes like that.

Greg Diamond:         And let's think about – I usually don't like to get into the why, but –

Dan Ferris:              No.

Greg Diamond:         – for argument's sake, or out of podcast's sake –

Dan Ferris:              For fun's sake.

Greg Diamond:         – the market doesn't – yeah. The market doesn't like uncertainty, and election causes uncertainty for the most part. Now, sometimes the market will discount that and say, "You know what? This is like a landslide," or whatever it might be, but this is a whole new game.

The election season has been insane just in terms of, you know, getting shot and Biden dropping out, and her, whatever, right? So, there's all these different things that are causing this uncertainty, and people are betting or trading around that, causing that volatility, and that's not going to change. And then you can have, you know, a shift in Congress or whatever it might be, and again, broadly speaking, that probably won't matter in the long term, but in the short term, that uncertainty is causing an emotional reaction among investors and among – and we saw it in the VIX, and we're going to see it again.

Dan Ferris:               And there are other dynamics, too, I think, that can be thrown in the, you know, the why bucket, and one of them, I believe, is passive. I think those flows are completely mindless, and they can flow in different directions, and they flowed in one direction for a long time, and I think they can cause outflows in other directions. I'm constantly reminded of March 2020, when Vanguard said 1% of its clients abandoned equities entirely. I'm like, "What the hell does 2% look like if you're down 34% in a month?" you know what I'm saying?

Greg Diamond:         Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:               So, I think there are a lot of dynamics here, just a falling number of equities, falling volumes over time that we've seen – these things can kind of add up and all come together the way the cycles can come together, these fundamental, underlying factors can come together and compound one another, the way the cycles can come together in time. So yeah, there are reasons, I think, to be concerned and to expect more volatility.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, and then if you're me, and you're looking at macro a lot, you throw in these couple of recession signals that have traditionally worked in the past that have already flashed, and you're like, "OK, what's next here?" You put these things together, and that's what I was trying to say before. Like, you know, if you have a particular view on the economy, or the world, or the market, and then you marry the technicals with that, I think that's like, a powerful thing.

Greg Diamond:         Well, that's what Stanley Druckenmiller is a genius at. That's his bread and butter, and he has the macro outlook. He's global, global macro, and then he adds the technical piece, and there's a reason why he's the best.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    All right, if I could just link up with him real quick, I'll go do that.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah. That's right.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Dan Ferris:               And yeah, and a lot of people do that, too, and have achieved similar results, so there must be something special going on there. Either that, or it's just random and he got lucky. I don't know. I mean...

Corey McLaughlin:    Right. Totally.          

Dan Ferris:               But yeah, lucky for decades and decades and decades. I think over time, the luck kind of changes to skill, but –

Greg Diamond:         Well, that's a good point, Dan, because if you think about the time cycles, and you think about the technical analysis, sure, some people can get it right for a month or two or whatever, but can you do it year in and year out? Do you have that system in place where you're going to be – and this is what I pride myself on, if you want to call it that, is that whether it's 2022 bear market, or 2023, or whatever you want to call 2024, regardless of whether it's a bull or a bear. My strategy could make money, and I've shown that. 2020, with the COVID crash, 2021 with the recovery, 2022, the low in 2023, the rally or whatever it might be, and again, that's based on these time cycles and technical analysis and showing how the strategy works, what I think is important, because it's not a one-off fluke, you know what I mean?

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Greg Diamond:         I'm not drawing trend lines and saying, "Hey, I got this one right," you know what I mean?

Dan Ferris:               Yeah, right. You're demonstrating. It's an ongoing demonstration of the idea, which we don't – we're talking about politics and things. You get a lot of ideas in politics where the ongoing demonstration shows that it's an absolute disaster and no one should ever say it again.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Dan Ferris:               And yet what are they doing? They're saying it again and again and again and again. Kamala Harris is talking about price controls. And we just put out a presentation for the purpose of attracting new subscribers to The Ferris Report based on this book that I have somewhere right nearby called 40 Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, so the demonstration.

If Greg Diamond was 4,000 years old, and he was demonstrating price controls, he'd be saying, "See? Doesn't work. See? Doesn't work," but you're not 4,000 years old.

Greg Diamond:         And now they're saying, "Let's try it."

Dan Ferris:               Yeah, that's right, and you're demonstrating how Gann cycles do work, and you can make money with them, which is good.

Greg Diamond:         Right.

Dan Ferris:              It's good to have – the rubber has to meet the road, right?

Greg Diamond:         Right, yeah.

Dan Ferris:              And it does. All right, well –

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, but don't worry, Dan. It'll all pay for itself they also say, so it's all –

Dan Ferris:               Yeah. I know. They say magic words, magic incantations, intone the proper political incantation and get the votes, and the fact that none of it is true, we'll work it out later, but it's time for the final question. You've answered it before, and by all means, if you've already answered it, feel free to repeat yourself. Just tell us your answer again.

That's fine. The question is the same for every guest, no matter what the topic, even if it's nonfinancial. Very simply, Greg, can you tell us – if you could leave us, the listener – leave our listener with a single idea today, what would it be? What would you like that idea to be?

Greg Diamond:         Well, I usually say manage your risk, and that's a pretty simple one, but I'm going to switch things up, and I'm going to say – well, I'm going to say manage your risk, but also be prepared for volatility, because I really believe that it's what we just saw and what's about to happen could last for quite some time. And I'm not just talking about, yes, I'm really excited about – because I only really focus on – I look at every year as a 12-inning baseball game, and I trade each inning, each month. So, I don't like to get too far ahead of myself, but if I'm right about what happens, it's going to be a volatile next few months and probably next few years. So, that's kind of where my general – and that's exciting. As a trader, I'm very excited about that, so for me, that means opportunity. So, prepare for volatility. That's my last – that's my answer.

Dan Ferris:               All right, excellent. Excellent answer. Once again, you and I are on the same page. Listen, Greg. Thanks for being here. It's always a pleasure to talk with you, man. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Greg Diamond:         Likewise, gents. Thanks for having me on.

                               [Music plays]

Dan Ferris:               As you heard today, Greg Diamond says a historic trading opportunity could arrive just days from now. In fact, tomorrow, Tuesday, August 27, he's posting his full blueprint for exactly where he predicts stocks are going next, free of charge, and how to position yourself to potentially double your money. We don't say that lightly. You could've doubled your money 10 different times during the 2020 election year by using Greg's recommendation. In short, a rare event on September 9 could upend the Harris/Trump election.

It could be lights out for one of the candidates and open what Greg is calling the biggest moneymaking opportunity of his career. In fact, when Hillary lost in 2016, Greg had the most profitable 24 hours of trading in his life. If he's correct about September 9, this upcoming event could double your money over and over as it unfolds, as Greg has already shown 37 different times at our firm without touching a single stock. Regardless of your politics, and regardless of whether you like this election, I urge you to get a free copy of Greg's blueprint at www.august27warning.com.

A surprise event could change the political landscape overnight and bring absolute chaos to the stock market. Go to www.august27warning.com for the full details from Greg. Remember, this is the man who called the 2022 crash a day before it began, and once predicted the exact share price of Tesla for a 197 percent gain in 13 days, so don't miss his newest prediction. If you want to get ready for volatility, like Greg suggested, go to www.august27warning.com to at least skim his evidence and get a free copy of his blueprint, august27warning.com [music]. Well, Greg's a friend of ours and a colleague, so of course we love talking with him. That kind of almost goes without saying but boy, he put me in a philosophical mood today, which I didn't expect –

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Greg Diamond:         – with all his cycles and things. I really enjoyed that.

Corey McLaughlin:    Emotions love cycles.

Dan Ferris:              Yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    I wasn't expecting that either as much. I was expecting the cycles part, and, to a degree, managing your emotions, but –

Dan Ferris:              Right. Yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    Of course. That's what this is. It's investing, trading. People are trying to make money, and that is inherently emotional, and what, because you're looking for some sort of – you're looking for something. Whatever it is, I don't know.

Dan Ferris:              Right.

Corey McLaughlin:    That could be different things, but –

Dan Ferris:              Yeah, right. We're all looking for something, yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    We're all trying to figure that out, and I think having a strategy like he does where you're able to – and I said this before, we're able to put dates to decisions, and he gets into a lot more of it in Ten Stock Trader, you know, the buy and sell levels, and targets, and you know, when he would get out of certain things. That's all part of the strategy and helps you have a plan to trade when things go crazy and are unpredictable, as they inevitably are, so...

Dan Ferris:               Yeah. Actually, that's a great point, isn't it? Like, probably the best advice you can give somebody who's pursuing a good, long-term strategy. They say, "Oh, wait a minute. Everything's going haywire. What do I do?"

And I'm like, "You stick to your strategy. That is what you do. That is the primary thing that everyone should do, you know?" I mean, gosh. We talked to Hari Krishnan on that one time.

He has a book called The Second Leg Down. Well, if you want to trade the second leg down of a bear market, that's like, a whole separate decision, but overall, the thing that you know you should do is be like Greg and stick to your strategy all the time. And if it doesn't work, then you know, that's a separate conversation, too, but let's – taking for granted that your strategy works, you're confident of that, and you can demonstrate that over a long term. Just stick to it.

Corey McLaughlin:    Right.

Dan Ferris:              That's a great point.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Dan Ferris:              I'm glad you went there.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, and I agree, I mean, obviously about volatility coming up. It's hard to believe – or I find it hard to believe that that spike we saw the beginning of August is that's it. Like, there's – and it's going to go back to where the kind of complacent market that you've had for the last year or so. I just find it difficult to believe, with the unemployment numbers keep going up, mainly, if you look at it from the job market perspective. And an election, you know, just in the end, of course in the longer run, none of that matters as long as you could keep creating dollars and lending them into existence and whatnot, and so that's not going to change.

Dan Ferris:              Oh, sure.

Corey McLaughlin:    But the whole political conversation adds a whole degree of emotion to the next couple of months, I think. It already is, you know, and from a trading perspective, if you're into it, have at it.

Dan Ferris:               Yeah. Well said, and on that note, that's another really fun interview, I have to say, and that's another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. We do provide a transcript for every episode.

Just go to www.investorhour.com. Click on the episode you want. Scroll all the way down. Click on the word, "Transcript," and enjoy. If you liked this episode and know anybody else who might like it, tell them to check it out on their podcast app or at investorhour.com, please, and also do me a favor.

Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and while you're there, help us grow with a rate and a review. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Our handle is @investorhour. On Twitter, our handle is @investor_hour.

Have a guest you want us to interview? Drop us a note at [email protected] or call our listener feedback line, 800-381-2357. Tell us what's on your mind and hear your voice on the show. For my cohost, Corey McLaughlin, till next week, I'm Dan Ferris. Thanks for listening.

Announcer:              Thank you for listening to this episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. To access today's notes and receive notice of upcoming episodes, go to investorhour.com and enter your e-mail. Have a question for Dan? Send him an e-mail, [email protected].

This broadcast is for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered personalized investment advice. Trading stocks and all other financial instruments involves risk. You should not make any investment decision based solely on what you hear. Stansberry Investor Hour is produced by Stansberry Research and is copyrighted by the Stansberry Radio Network. Opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Stansberry Research, its parent company, or affiliates.

You should not treat any opinion expressed on this program as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of opinion. Neither Stansberry Research nor its parent company or affiliates warrant the completeness or accuracy of the information expressed on its program, and it should not be relied upon as such. Stansberry Research, its affiliates and subsidiaries, are not under any obligation to update or correct any information provided on the program. The statements and opinions expressed on this program are subject to change without notice.

No part of the contributor's compensation from Stansberry Research is related to the specific opinions they express. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Stansberry Research does not guarantee any specific outcome or profit. You should be aware of the real risk of loss in following any strategy or investment discussed on this program.

Strategies or investments discussed may fluctuate in price or value. Investors may get back less than invested. Investments or strategies mentioned on this program may not be suitable for you. This material does not take into account your particular investment objectives, financial situation, or needs, and is not intended as a recommendation that is appropriate for you. You must make an independent decision regarding investments or strategies mentioned on this program. Before acting on information on the program, you should consider whether it is suitable for your particular circumstances and strongly consider seeking advice from your own financial or investment advisor.

[End of Audio]