This post How to (Legally) Rob the Market Blind appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
The house always wins.
But if you’re smart enough, you can beat the casinos (and the markets) at their own game. Today, I’m going to show you how.
In the book Bringing Down the House, the MIT Blackjack team used card counting to gain a statistical advantage over the casinos, making profitable runs every single year.
The great minds behind one of the most successful blackjack runs in history prove you don’t have to pull an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist to skim cash from Las Vegas. In fact, it only takes the slightest edge to rob a casino blind.
Experts estimate that counting cards gives you about a 1% edge over the house. That’s miniscule. But in the long run, it can add up to a fortune.
Of course, casinos don’t like card counters. They add more decks to make it harder to keep track of all the cards.
But technology changes everything, as quant trader Jonas Elmerraji explains.
“For a computer, more decks aren’t a problem. If you could bring a computer to the blackjack table with you, you’d beat the pants off the casino,” Jonas says. “That’s why the iPhone Card Counter app is now illegal to use in casinos in Nevada.”
With gambling, the house has a statistical edge. It’s how they make money. If you play any casino game long enough with no technological assistance, you’ll lose. But throw an algorithm into the mix and you can rake in the chips.
Now imagine if you took this concept and applied it to the stock market…
That’s similar to the approach Jonas is taking with his algorithmic system.
In blackjack, players are looking for the best times to bet big so they can walk away from the table with huge winnings.
Just like there are certain hands at the blackjack table when you’re more likely to win, there are certain times of the year when you’re more likely to book gains in certain stocks.
(You’ve already seen the results.)
With his never-before-seen proprietary trading system, Jonas has created a way to visualize the strongest times to own stocks year after year.
“From a statistical standpoint, I wanted to pinpoint when the wind is at investors’ backs,” Jonas says.
It’s common knowledge that the stock market has a long-term persistent uptrend. Plenty of academic research has been done on the subject. We can see that the primary trend in the market is still up over the last 20 years.
Where things get interesting is what the less obvious data show us.
For instance, you know the adage sell in May and go away? Jonas confirmed this with his statistical analysis of the S&P. The big index stalls out on May 2, and it stays sideways stalled until October 1. This isn’t new information – there have been plenty of academic studies that show that the market dips in the summer months.
The difference here is that you don’t need to spend months crunching data or digging through financial research journals to …read more
Source:: Daily Reckoning feed
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