Question:

In the Training video “LOOK OVER MY SHOULDER” from 2nd qtr 2010, Ken Wade narrates doing a national search to see what the market is doing. Although he says that the markets will be ranked in priority from top to bottom, he disregards the states that are ranked highest in the STAR tool, and he disregards the TA slider results and proceeds down the list to CA which is 4th on the list. Even though his system is placing Alaska, Texas and Hawaii as a better choice for results using this system, he says that due to his inspection of what is showing with the Green, Yellow and Red circles, that CA is or has more momentum than the states listed above it in the Star Tool. Why is he doing that? And, if CA is the best area to focus on, why isn’t it at the top of the list in the national search results?

Answer:

Since we were doing a special filter in that ‘look over my shoulder’ example (back in early 2010) by making all momentum indicators ‘white’ – the results IGNORED all the momentum indicators. Therefore, the list of STATES were ranked solely on the TAPS scores. This was done at the depths of the ‘great crash’ – all of the TAPS scores at state level were looking poorly. The purpose of the video was to highlight the first signs of positive momentum… not to find investment grade markets.

Remember, if the market is not showing strong upward momentum, I don’t bother to even look at the TAPS score, so in this case, the fact that a few states had higher TAPS scores was irrelevant, none of them had any momentum to speak of, with the possible exception of CA (and that was stretching a bit). None of the states had a strong TAPS score.

Specifically, CA was showing some signs of possible ‘green shoots’ (as they say) and I just wanted to show that to members.