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Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
Back in 1973, it was the Nifty Fifty and Avon, Polaroid Xerox, and blah, blah, blah. And you know, it's the same nonsense. We had The Magnificent Seven. I said, oh, I've seen this movie before. It's the same thing.
Stan:They just change different actors and costumes. It never changes because human nature never changes. It's the same psychology.
Keith:Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. Buckle up and listen closely to up your average. Alright, Doug. Here we are.
Doug:Hey. We've got an exciting, exciting day for us today.
Keith:If I could, if I can get out of the way and show my bookcase over here, I don't have tons of different books. There's a lot of repeat ones I can give them away. But man, what about secrets and profiting and bull and bear markets? What do think about this book?
Doug:I've had that book for a long time. I don't remember when I bought it. It was early on in my career. And we had the joy of actually meeting Stan a couple months ago, thanks to Mark Minervini. It's
Keith:a privilege to do something you love doing. And I don't know if other industries are as generous with their wisdom as our industry is. People will get like, they'll give one another their trade secrets. They'll give them everything with a generosity that I never expected when I got into the
Doug:We've said this before. I mean, you could put a person's strategy on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or on a website somewhere, and it could be the greatest strategy in the world, but all strategies have times where they just don't do well. And so with confidence, we could tell everybody the secret sauce in how we make our decisions.
Keith:And people just won't do a lot of it, so they just won't do the repetition of it.
Stan:No, it
Doug:takes discipline. It takes blood, sweat, and tears.
Keith:And so with that, we thought, you know, as we're doing Up Your Average and we're presenting you ideas that will step up your lifestyle for you in a variety of different ways, we thought we'd just introduce one of our friends too.
Doug:He's one of the best traders of all time. And to be able to talk with him and learn from him has just been one of the greatest blessings of my last year.
Keith:It's been a lot of fun. And so with no further ado, we want to introduce to you our friend Stan Weinstein. Stan, I thought we would hang out tonight to just kick off and talk about a little bit of market history. And I started my first day of straight commission as a stockbroker was October 1987.
Stan:Perfect timing. Don't they say timing is everything?
Keith:And that was a traumatizing moment. The people that had some gray hair and some wisdom, face was traumatized when they came out of their office. They didn't know what to do. I just thought, well, I might as well go forward and see what happens. But when I look at the history of the market and I'm thinking about the 1960s and the 1970s, when you probably jumped in, I thought maybe if you would talk to us about what the market was like then, and then we can move forward to what we're at today.
Keith:How's that?
Stan:I think that's a great kickoff point. So here we go. First of all, people will say to me, Stan, you wrote that book back in 1987, early 'eighty '8. Is it still valid because the market is now, that's it, but my hair was black. Anyway, the market was, you know, a different animal to a degree because we had specialists and things didn't move quite as rapidly.
Stan:But the truth is supply and demand, there's always gonna be supply and demand that never changes, and human nature, you know, fear and greed never changes also, so they've spent the game up. But it's really still the same thing. And now we'll go back. Like, if you take a look at 1973, which I actually got in the market in 1965, going back a lot of days. But anyway, in 1973, we had the nifty 50 of those days, which was Avon, Polaroid, Xerox.
Stan:And if you wanna be a contrarian, the perfect contrarian view, they called those stocks one decision stocks. You only had to buy them, you never had to sell them. Well, we know what happened to those stocks thereafter with one decision. But it reminded me so much in those days, those one decision stocks eventually crashed. Some of them, like Polaroid, are gone.
Stan:Recently, we had the Magnificent Seven, and these stocks were great. They're good companies, but they're gonna go up forever and ever straight up. Same exact thing. So even though the game has changed and it's much faster, human nature's the same. And the same way that they got those Nifty Fifty stocks, and timing is important, they got You'll see what's happened in recent days.
Stan:Apple's had a little accident as well as, you know, Meta and a few others. It never changes. So I'm not telling everybody out there to be a one or two day trader, but I think you have to have a sense of timing. You can't just buy and hold. If you just buy and hold, you're gonna do the old roller coaster bid up and down.
Stan:So I think it's important that you catch the important intermediate moves that happen every couple of months.
Keith:So so during the 1960s and seventies, the the markets went sideways for quite a while, didn't
Stan:Right. Absolutely. From 1966 to 1982, a grand many years, you were caught between roughly 1,000 on the upside and 600 plus on the downside. But within there, had a lot of you know, that really throws you off. You had a lot of bull and bear markets.
Stan:There was a bear market in 1966, a really bad one in 1969, 'seventy, a generational bear market in 1973, 'seventy four, which was the worst since 1929. You had what you alluded to before, a quickie bear market in 1987, which really scalped the heck out of people. We've had a lot of bull and bear markets. And, again, only the liars are always 100% right, but I'm very proud because it's been documented that we've caught over the last fifty plus years every bull and bear market within 5% of inception, I think we can teach all your viewers here how to do that exact same thing. It's not magic.
Stan:It's, again, using good common sense and a good game plan.
Keith:So you got in in 'sixty five, and a bear market came out in 'sixty six. How did you gain the wisdom to get it right then? Who was helping you? How did you see things differently than everybody else?
Stan:That's a good question. First of all, I gotta tell you, I was a rookie in '66, and although I did see the bear market, trust me, I wasn't as sharp as I was ten and fifteen years later. But the reality is, if you took a look, there was a divergence in 1966 between the advance decline line, it almost always happens, and the Dow Jones Industrials. Then it broke down from a top. And these are the kind of things that I talk about in my book.
Stan:In every top, it's been the same thing. Let's go back just to recent vintage here. Everybody, you know, thinks like, Oh, this latest bear market just came from nowhere. But that wasn't true. If you take a look, the I know you guys are sharp and sore.
Stan:Majority of stocks were topping out in November and December before we even got into the new year here, and that's why I have, in each issue, what I call my S and P and secondary surveys, which is just a simple way of categorizing what percentage of the stocks are healthy in stages one and two, and which ones are unhealthy, I have to go to the hospital in stages three and four. And if you take a look at a really good bull market, at least 70% or more of the stocks should be in the healthy category. And if you take a look, my surveys were having trouble getting above 50% as we moved into the new year here. And then when you made that phony all time high in the S and P, which I think was either February 18 or nineteenth, that could be off by a day, it made a new all time high. Meanwhile, not only did most of the other averages not go on to new highs, which was a clear cut warning, but in addition, these surveys were, if I remember, my S and P survey was 50%.
Stan:My secondary survey, which is smaller stocks, was under 45%. It doesn't get easier than that. And sometimes people get annoyed when I use this analogy, but I don't know if you guys play blackjack, if anybody who plays blackjack, you know that if you have 11 and the dealer has a six, it's the best hand you can have. And obviously, you may lose that one hand, but it's been statistically shown, if you keep doubling down on that hand, you're gonna end up a winner over a long period of time. Well, it's the same thing in the market.
Stan:When you have the advanced decline line topped out on November 29 and you had this phony high in mid February, when you had my S and Ps and secondary surveys acting so poorly. This has been the top of every market over the last fifty plus years. So when you learn the game, I'm not gonna tell you it's perfect, but it's really kinda obvious. Let
Keith:me go back to history real quick before we get to today. And so when I got in the markets in the 80s, there really wasn't much influence from the mutual fund industry. But with the introduction of 401ks and the mass amount of monies that have gone in there, the mutual fund industry has told people that you can't time the market. Found this, let me share a screen with you real quick. I found this on the Internet today, and I thought it was really interesting.
Keith:I don't know if you've seen this before, Stan, where they said it's time in the market, not timing the market.
Stan:Yeah. You know, first of all, it's like though you know, there's an old cliche, those that can do, those that can teach. You know, there are so many cliches that are true like that. It's the same thing that so many people really can time the market. So so many brokers, and I'm putting all brokers down because some of them are short, but so many brokers and so many mutual fund people tell you, oh, there's no way you can time the market, so just buy and hold and you'll be fine over time.
Stan:That's just a lazy man's way of thinking. If you take a look and just see over the last couple of years, you don't even have to go back to the sixties and seventies, if you just look at the last couple of years, if you did no more than avoided the bear market of February to 02/2003, avoided, which we did, the bear market of 02/2007 into 02/2008, and then if you're, in the recent months, avoided the big drubbing we recently had, if you did nothing more, forget about even what you made on the buy side, because most people, you know, that's why they say, Don't confuse brains in a bull market. In a bull market, we all do well. In a bear market, people end up giving back what they want in the bull market. So if you just don't lose in a bear market and forget that we can even do well in a bull market, you can do so much better than the nonsense about just buy and hold and don't try to time the market.
Keith:I was hoping my son Caleb would join us tonight, and the hypothetical I wanted to throw out to him and get your take on it was, he's 22. Suppose he builds his $4.00 1 ks to a quarter of a million by the time he's 32. If we're talking about financial planning, everybody talks about all these important things. Might he do better in his four zero one k by paying attention to this, as well as all the other financial planning junk?
Stan:I I think there's no doubt. And, you know, this is what I find so frustrating, but actually, in a way, it's good. Because if everybody really got the game, let's be honest, who do we sell our bad stocks to? So the reality is that when I was young and foolish, I used to go on a seminar circuit and proselytize, you know, why everybody should use technical analysis. I think it's good that probably no more, it's more than when I started out.
Stan:When I started out as a broker in another lifetime, I had to say BS, like, Oh, I use technicals and fundamentals, and I synthesize them together because people didn't believe it. They thought that technicals were Nancy Reagan astrology and all that stuff. Today, it's become really much more accepted. But still, I find it interesting that if a person is following fundamentals and they lose, they don't say, Oh, there's nothing to fundamental analysis. They'll just buy at 50.
Stan:When it drops to 40, they'll average down. But if you buy a stock and it's good technical pattern and it doesn't work, they'll say, That's it. I knew there's nothing to technical analysis. So it's really fine that we knock so many people out of the wayside, and we only have bright guys like you following it that really, you know, stay with the technicals and know that I honestly believe that we can be right 75 to 80% of the time. But like I said, only the lie is always right.
Stan:I whereas I read I'll never forget when I started out this marketer another lifetime ago, one of the first books I read was Nicholas Darvish's How I Made 2,000,000 in a Minute and a Half, whatever it was. Anyway, the reality is when I wrote my book, which I never saw in other books, I put in a chapter about things that I lost in, how I remember writing to the effect, even though it was many days ago, how handling a losing position is what will really make you a winner in the stock market. Because, like I said, anybody can, you know, jump and show you they're winning lottery tickets. But when you can handle a losing position, and we're all gonna have losing positions, and that's why you have to learn to use stop losses, etcetera, The market can be your friend, and that's what we gotta learn. The trend is your friend.
Keith:I've had this idea for probably thirty years, Stan, that education teaches us to get 90% or something like that, And we're bad if we get a 60%. So learning to trade and be wrong a lot is really a psychological and emotional thing. I think that's what you were alluding to there.
Stan:100%. And that's why so many, as I said before, these phrases and cliches are really true. There's one that I always come back to that perfection is the antithesis of the good. The reality is that, Hey, we just have to be good. You don't have to be perfect.
Stan:In fact, I'm convinced I've shown this over and over again that if you Forget that we can be right more than 50% of the time, but if you're only right 50% of the time and you let your good profits run, and at the same time, the 50% you're wrong, you take quick losses, you'll still, at the end of the year, just need a creative accountant. But I think that we can be right easily 75%, eighty % of the time. So, you know, let the fundamentalists think they should just buy and hold forever, you know, and we'll sell our losing stocks.
Keith:Can I show you a historical graph here and get your take on it? You may not be able to see the picture as clearly, but I can probably explain what it's representing here. This is a historical graph of the S and P 500 from 1880 until 2019. And each of these lines here are the ten year rolling performance of the index. And so why I thought this was important, if somebody was, say, 70 and they were buy and hold and they jumped in this thing about 1966, they would probably run out of money if they followed the buy and hold.
Keith:So I was just wondering if you could kinda point out
Stan:That's fascinating chart that you see there. And I agree with you. First, your point is valid. And then let's be honest, even
Keith:when
Stan:you go through a few bad months, you know, people start reaching for the Maalox. But when you take a look, when you go through, like, you look through, like, thousand and seven, '2 thousand and '8 until we turned in February, that's a lot of days when you are talking about two plus years, and that's why most people that do try buy and hold get disgusted, and they end up selling at the bottom because they can't take it anymore. I think it's absolutely critical, and you certainly have learned it. It's so critical. Like I say, I don't wanna make you into a buy on Monday, sell on Wednesday trader, but that you do have a sense of timing and know when, again, to use the analogy of cards, when the market and the deck is rich, then we really go for it.
Stan:And when the deck is not rich, which right now the deck is not rich, we have little needles in the haystack that I can show people are still okay. But in general, the market was very rich throughout after we turned bullish there, after that bottom in late twenty twenty two, going into November October, November of '20 '20 '4, then we really go for it. Now, hey, you gotta be more careful.
Keith:So with that chart I just showed, it kinda has mountains and valleys. And I think what you're describing to our listeners is that actually their returns could more stabilize over time because they're not gonna get all those rides down.
Stan:Absolutely. And on top of that, they will also sleep better at night.
Keith:That that 02/2008 market is when I quit buy and hold, Stan. I went through a bout of depression and everybody's telling us everything, right? They're telling us, know, thing, yeah, it's gonna turn and the banks when the banks go to pennies on the dollars?
Stan:Yeah. That is a good point. That's another case where I really believe that when we go through bad, you can learn, and that can make you a winner. The losers go through life repeating this it's like the whole thing repeating the same mistake over and over again and blaming their broker or blaming their their wife or somebody else, rather than just learning from mistakes. None of us were put here with a roadmap how we should do it and to be perfect, but if along the way, that's what the journey is all about, if you can learn and say, hey, and that's why I told you, even though I bought that ÂŁ66 market, I wasn't nearly the same market player that I am today.
Stan:That's what the journey is all about. We all can learn along the way. And the most important thing is just don't listen to all the nonsense that you see put out on TV, you know, with all the financial programs, with all due respect.
Keith:Doug and I have been just mesmerized by the financial services industry and how generous people are. And the question that comes to my mind is, at this season in life, you're really generous with your time. What motivates you to hang out with us and help people think differently about this?
Stan:Well, first of all, you know, many a day ago when I got out of college, I really thought about being a teacher. Okay? Happily, I made a few bucks more doing this than teaching, but I really do. I'm not gonna lie and say, Oh, I'm the YMCA, I'm turning the money away, which it buys the guys cars and the trips. But the reality is, at this point in my life, at this part of my legacy, I love how many letters, and even in some cases, conversations I've had when I used to be on the seminar circuit, where people have told me, Stan, you changed my life.
Stan:You know? That really, for me, just makes me feel good. So like I said, I'm not here for free, and later on we can tell the people how they can join. But the reality is that I definitely get psychic value out of it. And that's why, even at my tender age of 83, in my head, I think the calendar's wrong, and I'm really 63.
Keith:So what you do keeps you young, man, is what you're saying.
Stan:Absolutely. I always kid around my wife. I say, When the highlight of your day is just sitting on the couch, and then here in Florida, we have what they call early bird specials, where you can a cheap lunch or an early dinner at 04:30 in the afternoon. I say, when the highlight of your day is an early bird special, you're finished.
Keith:So when people are talking to us about doing business with us, we tell them there's five ideas that we really think highly of. We think you need to think differently. You need to buy wisdom. You need to like what you do. Live adventurously and generosity wins.
Keith:And I see all those attributes in you, like the wisdom you have, you sell it to somebody who wants to buy it, but really, don't even know how much you could price it for that it wouldn't be a deal to somebody that's really wanting to learn.
Stan:It's true. I think it's a win win situation because I know that I'm helping a lot of people. And like I said, it's a win on my end too, because I'm not for free.
Keith:And yet at the ripe age, at 83, you not only like what you do, it sounds like you love what you do.
Stan:Absolutely. This is another cliche, but I said, this is why they've become verities. I had read recently where somebody said something to the effect, I may get it wrong slightly, that do something that you really love and you're passionate about, and you'll never work a day in your life.
Keith:So from '66 until well, basically, 2026, you've been doing that for quite a while then, right?
Stan:That's a lot of days at a lot of bullet bear markets.
Doug:Hey, I think this has been great.
Keith:You've given like in a concise amount of time, Stan, you've been generous with your time. I think what you've given our friends that'll watch this is a, is just enough of a hook to get them either to take a look at your book. And again, it looks, it's the same sand, just different color hair here. And we encourage you to go online and get a copy of that. Reach out to us.
Keith:We'll have a bumper at the end of this, how you can reach out and subscribe to Stan's service. We just are just really humbled by your generosity.
Stan:And I'll even tell anybody that's truly, truly interested if they'd like to get a free one time copy so they can see if it works for them, either contact you guys or you'll show them at the end, they can call or email us, and we'll send it off. Then, hey, if they come in, great. If not, they're still terrific people, but they should all remember what I used to have, when I had the tape, the professional tapering, which I retired many years ago, at the top of each issue, said, the tape tells all, And I really honestly believe that.
Keith:I love it. Thanks again for your generosity and your time tonight, Stan. I hope you have a great evening.
Stan:And God bless you guys.
Keith:And you too. Thank you. Doug, how fun was that?
Doug:That was a good time.
Keith:I don't even I'm kind of speechless. I just think the generosity of people just continually blows me away.
Doug:Stan is going after it. I mean, he is a creative guy. He's on a mission, has a great business running, and we'd love to tell you a little more about it.
Keith:But he's not interested in getting a early dinner special.
Doug:He's looking
Keith:to helping more people all the time. Well, can access him via our trading for you, which we are clients of his. But you can also access him if you want to go even deeper and pursue his efforts on your own energy level. This is it. His business Global Trend Alert, market great, Stan Weinstein Consulting.
Keith:The individual access is 2,500 a quarter. If you've got an institution or friends that are in the business, it's going to cost you about six times that at 15,000 a quarter. And he's gonna talk about stage two winners and stage four losers clearly and explain that to you and help you do it. If you have a curiosity or if you wanna take up Stan with his offer, just give us a system to call on that number. And I think you'll enjoy at least giving it a try whether you choose to go long term or not.
Keith:That is up to you. Alright. Thanks for hanging out with us again tonight.