A new day is dawning for TradeSmith Daily. Big changes are coming.
If you’ve come to enjoy and appreciate the TradeSmith Daily format, the changes won’t be what you’re used to. But change can be a great thing — especially at the start of an exciting new chapter.
Starting soon, all TradeSmith Daily broadcasts will be written in the Japanese haiku style.
After a great deal of contemplation and experimentation, we have found that the timeless, elegant beauty of the haiku structure is the most efficient way to communicate what is happening day-to-day.
So, for example, instead of explaining in detail what happened with Archegos — the family office blow-up that triggered billions in bank losses — future communications might look like this:
Archegos blew up
Prime brokers are now so sad
Credit Suisse is broke
The haiku structure also lends itself well to macro analysis. For example:
Ten-year yield rises
Tech stock valuations high
Tesla in trouble
And here’s one more to give you the gist:
Date is April first
Joke felt obligatory
Hope it was funny
In all seriousness, the first paragraph was true. Big changes are indeed on deck.
Starting next week, our intrepid CEO, Keith Kaplan, will take over TradeSmith Daily for a short bit.
And then, over time, you’ll be introduced to some new voices — with new content and a style that, while familiar in some ways, will be different from that of TradeSmith’s Chief Research Officer (yours truly).
As for me (Justice), I’m not going anywhere. And in fact, my thoughts, views, and analysis will still appear in the pages of TradeSmith Daily from time to time.
The difference is, I will no longer be writing to you directly each trading day.
At the same time, contributors to the new TradeSmith Daily, including Keith, will check in with me (Justice) routinely, to share my views and the latest on what TradeSmith Decoder is doing.
The change is happening for entirely good reasons.
I’ve greatly enjoyed writing TradeSmith Daily each trading day. The markets are so fascinating; there is always something new, interesting, or important to explain.
Under different circumstances, I could have continued with TradeSmith Daily indefinitely. But I can’t because a broader mission calls.
It’s time to accelerate the mission of making TradeSmith Decoder the single best trading and advisory service available. That means going to a whole new level of capability with respect to depth and breadth of coverage — which in turn requires my stepping away from TradeSmith Daily.
There is no point in false modesty here: TradeSmith Decoder has absolutely crushed it. If you’ve been reading TradeSmith Daily from year-end 2019 onward, you have seen the analysis behind many of our calls, laid out in depth as events unfolded.
But the important thing is, the calls weren’t just editorial commentary. They were actual trading positions, laid out with specific instructions and position sizes, as expressed in the Decoder model portfolio.
- We saw the pandemic coming before most of the world — and talked about it here in TradeSmith Daily, estimating a likelihood of 400,000 American fatalities at a point when everyone thought it was crazy. As a responsive action, TradeSmith Decoder bought a roster of “pandemic puts” — bearish options positions that exploded in value during the March 2020 meltdown — including puts on United Airlines (UAL) 72 hours before airline stocks crashed.
- We exited our long Bitcoin positions heading into the March 2020 meltdown at protective risk point levels that preserved our existing capital — and then took giant-sized new long positions in Bitcoin and silver within days of the March 2020 bottom (all of this is time-stamped in the Decoder archives).
- Over the course of 2020, we saw a dozen triple-digit gainers on meaningful positions held in meaningful size over weeks or months, not fly-by-night trades. We also had multiple equity positions (again held in size, over a period of months) with 500% gains or more.
- Our highest-conviction equity position in 2020 — which we pounded the table on hard enough to break — turned into a ten-bagger (1,000%+ gains) in less than a year. Nor did we just buy once, but added more in various places. (And our conviction in this name remains high — it could easily do 10X more in the next few years.)
- We took sizable partial profits on our ten-bagger and five-bagger positions, and partial profits on Bitcoin too, but didn’t exit completely. Our initial core positions were so large (because of the table-pounding conviction we had at the point of starting the trades) that we still have plenty of core exposure left to keep riding the trend higher. (This is a benefit of high-conviction analysis.)
- In 2021, the stellar run continues. After making money on the long side of precious metals in 2020, this year we said precious metals looked bearish when most of the financial world was bullish (and profited by being short). We also said the dollar would roar when most were bearish (and the dollar is stomping around like Godzilla now, while racking up large forex position gains in the Decoder portfolio).
Why recap these TradeSmith Decoder victories here?
Partly because I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Letting go of TradeSmith Daily — preparing to put it in someone else’s hands — feels like saying goodbye in some ways.
But the vision I have for TradeSmith Decoder demands that the change be made — because for all that Decoder has done, the story of Decoder’s future growth is only just beginning.
We didn’t just get lucky for 16 months straight, over countless twists and turns, through one of the weirdest and wildest market environments of all time. (2020 will likely be remembered as the strangest trading and investing year of all our lifetimes.)
The success we had was the opposite of a fluke. It was born of the underlying foundation that TradeSmith Decoder rests on — the interlocking series of steps and processes that give Decoder a powerful and repeatable edge, developed over a period of 20-plus years by yours truly — that enabled our result.
Now it’s time to build out the TradeSmith Decoder edge further — to deepen it and broaden it and expand it, making it bigger and stronger and even more powerful. As such, the next chapter for TradeSmith Decoder means the Decoder coverage mandate has to expand.
- It means TradeSmith Decoder has to add depth and breadth on the cryptocurrency side, going far deeper than just Bitcoin and the larger-scale macro aspect of crypto, incorporating granular knowledge of developments in “DeFi” and yield staking and other areas of crypto.
- It means TradeSmith Decoder has to expand its power and reach in terms of small-cap coverage and international markets coverage, so we can find even more five-baggers and ten-to-fifteen baggers of the type we found in the past year.
- It means TradeSmith Decoder has to expand its roster of tutorials and special reports and educational materials, to help turn TradeSmith Decoder subscribers into the equivalent of master traders and world-class investors through knowledge and training as rapidly as possible, so that they can internalize the tools and techniques necessary to fully exploit Decoder recommendations.
- It means TradeSmith Decoder has to deepen the internal links between Decoder strategies and the broader universe of TradeSmith software tools — all of which will require manpower and focus and time-and-energy allocation.
When TradeSmith Decoder was launched at the end of 2019, the goal was to implement a trading approach built on a proprietary methodology — I call it the Consilience Approach — that I’ve been developing and improving for more than 20 years.
The goal was also to deliver market-crushing performance, and unprecedented levels of clarity and explanation, while doing things no research service has ever done.
Sixteen months in, I can say with confidence those goals were met. And so now it is time to raise the bar even higher, and take TradeSmith Decoder to a whole new echelon, while helping those who join us on the Decoder market journey find ways to build life-changing wealth.
So that’s why I’m stepping away from TradeSmith Daily (in terms of the day-to-day). The plausible shot that I have — that we have, as the whole TradeSmith team — to make TradeSmith Decoder into one of the most powerful and profitable advisories and trading services in the history of the world demands that I step away and reallocate towards this goal.
As a TradeSmith Daily reader, you’ll still hear from me on occasion after this. And you’ll get updates on what’s happening with TradeSmith Decoder, too. It just won’t be the same as before, because it’s time to triple down on pouring my energy wholly into TradeSmith Decoder now.
Last but not least, if you still want to hear from me (Justice) daily — and to participate directly in the incredible TradeSmith Decoder journey I just described — you can always join TradeSmith Decoder, and get my thoughts, insights, analysis, and real-time trading and investing ideas every single day.
Thanks again for being a TradeSmith Daily reader.
I may be hanging up my hat as your TradeSmith Daily editor — I’ll write to you again on Monday for the last time in that role — but the TradeSmith Decoder journey is just beginning. As Tank said to Neo in The Matrix: “It’s a very exciting time. We got a lot to do, we gotta get to it.”
