In his annual address to the membership at the MTA Symposium, Executive Director Tom Silveri highlighted the growth and strength of our organization. Now in its 36th year, the MTA has grown to 3,000 market analysts and related professionals in 61 countries. Technicians wondering if membership growth trends will serve as an indicator of stock market activity can begin their research in India, the Middle East, and China, the areas where the MTA is seeing the strongest trends.

Tom reviewed four assessment criteria that he and the staff and Board of Directors use to assess the health of the MTA:

1. Are we growing, and is the leadership mindful of the implications of growth? Membership has been growing about 10 percent a year in the recent past. Even in the recent bear market, 9 percent growth has been maintained.
   The strongest growth has been from outside the US. The international growth rate has

On April 21st, I had the opportunity to meet with Gil Morales. How a former cartoonist for the Stanford University newspaper became a protégé of William O’Neil (of CAN SLIM fame) and developed into one of the greatest stock traders of his generation is a tale of perseverance, discipline, and a bit of luck. 

Morales grew up into what he calls a “working class, self-employed, entrepreneurial environment.” Morales’ father operated a scaffold contracting company. His uncles and Grandfather were in a variety of self-owned and operated business including a liquor store and a mannequin manufacturer. Morales grew up in the gang-infested area of East Los Angeles, and his family eventually had to move to Whittier to shield Morales from the gangs. However, the gangs eventually moved into Whittier as well. Growing up, Morales always knew that he wanted to be self-employed but he didn’t know where the opportunity would lie.

His first

It has been a couple of months since we have written about interest rates, certainly one of the fastest moving markets in the last few months. In that intervening period . . .

• Treasury bond and note futures completed a meteoric rise to record levels with their biggest monthly ranges this century in November and December.
• Interest rate futures then tumbled from the peak in January with the biggest monthly range to the downside this century.
• The Federal Reserve dropped the Fed funds rate to 0-0.25 percent, leaving little room to use interest rates to attempt to shake the economic recession.
• The Treasury has announced plans for huge bond auctions in February with more to come to finance the various bailout and economic stimulus programs.
• Buyers bought bonds paying virtually no interest just for security reasons in the past, but how long can the government continue to attract buyers for its paper without a better

Social networking web sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become very popular in recent years. It seems difficult to make money if you spend your day on these types of sites, but www.TraderPlanet.com combines the social networking concept with the idea that traders like to do things that can be profitable.

Hundreds of contributors, pros and novices, post market ideas to TraderPlanet.com and many offer detailed and timely market analysis. Some of the contributors are MTA members with long and successful track records. Many are easily recognizable names. And this is probably the first thing that visitors to TraderPlanet.com realize: They can make money simply by reading the posts., It is rare to find sites like this where the majority of the information is useful, so TraderPlanet immediately earns a bookmark in my web browser. TraderPlanet also has a classy look and large audience. For the technician looking to succeed

University endowment funds have delivered extraordinary investment results in the decades leading up to the 2008 bear market. The Yale University endowment returned 16.62% a year from 1985 to 2008, significantly outpacing the S&P 500 which delivered an annualized gain of 11.98% over that same timeframe. Harvard University grew its endowment by more than 15% a year over that span. (The book points out that endowment fiscal years end on June 30th, so the steep losses incurred in the second half of 2008 are not represented in these returns.)

Faber and Richardson use these returns as the basis of an in-depth study of how endowments are managed and how individual investors can duplicate this investment style. They begin by identifying several characteristics of endowments:

1. They are tax exempt allowing them to make investment decisions free