We Give Machines Too Much Credit When It Comes To Investing...and Why is Everyone so Angry?

If anger was a stock we would be at 20 plus year highs. Anger is trending. It is breaking out to new highs daily.

Today, Bloomberg released a ‘Pessimist’s Guide to 2017‘. It must be nice to make $2 billion a year and have your journalists pontificate about the future of misery we have in store for us.

Please do not get sucked in.

One reason anger is breaking out is Donald Trump. He is infuriating. He is a time suck. I refuse to be further sucked in beyond my normal news intake which was very low coming into 2016. I will fight this onslaught by smiling and sharing and being nicer to people.

I will not blame Facebook or Twitter though it is easier than ever to pontificate about it on Facebook and Twitter. I will vote with my digital time and my own pocketbook. It is how we each can vote everyday. I will NOT buy into the digital addiction theory. I love my digital time but it is up to me to harness it better.

I confused politics with the stock market in 2016. The stock market does not care about politics.

I reached peak anger 2016 a few weeks ago and the only thing I could think of doing was to stop tweeting. In hindsight, as I deleted 100,000 plus tweets over 10 years (yes I saved them first). I likely overstayed my welcome 8-10 months.

It was an expensive 2016 for me in opportunity lost. I will not get back the time I allowed to get sucked out of me.

This blog has always been about one thing…’finding trends, riding them and getting off’.

In looking back I can only blame myself. I was dead ready and set on the biggest trade of the year December of 2015 and January of 2016 and somehow let it go. It’s a reminder that my blog is what makes me money, not my stream of consciousness.

The year 2016 should have been an epic one for me as a trend follower. I have spent the last few weeks reading my posts from late last 2015 and early 2016 to see what I did most wrong.

Going into 2016 the stars were aligned for me. I was in a great spot when the January melt down happened as I was high in cash. I follow all the right people and had the right ideas in front of me. I shared them here on this blog.

On December 22 2015, I started to nibble on oil and wanted to get to 15 percent exposure. I never got past 10 percent and flipped out of it way too soon.

On January 6th I gave my annual ‘guesses’. I had it pretty much nailed if that had been my last post of the year. I would be gloating today not doing a mea culpa.

On January 31, fear was in the air and I wrote about it and was prepared for what was next.

I needed no machines to get these three major trade ideas and trends right. It should have been a magical financial 2016 and I blew it.

I have no idea what 2017 holds but I will shares some guesses in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, try not to get sucked into the anger vortex.