Trend Analysis

Here’s one: the country is becoming more divided in opinion as to how we should be governed, and has been since the '50s. It’s a trend. It didn’t happen all at once; it happened gradually over time.

You can see it in the index-number’d sets of opinion polls demonstrating how people feel about the government, what’s considered fair, how resources are allocated. We’ve been leaking this way for a long time. Will we keep going? Growing further apart as a nation? The trend would say so.

Wanna do the same analysis with stocks? Well, trend analysis works great, historically, in stock-picking. For a while. If you’d looked at the trend with Sears for whatever metric you want…foot traffic, revenues, mind share…you’d have thought that, by today, Sears would be Amazon instead of bankrupt. The trend was totally its friend in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s. And then bad things happened.

So trends are kinda your friend. Until they’re not. Like Loki, sorta.