Hi, this is Rob Winter, founder and CEO of TradeInformed.com. I've been an investor since the late 80s. I am not a financial professional. Rather my background is engineering. I have been in the computer disk drive business for 26 years. I'm pretty good with programming and really enjoyed automating as much data analysis as possible by writing programs. I have subscribed to countless investment newsletters over the years, and these guys can have some good hot streaks and then run cold. I had great luck with an oil and metals related stocks newsletter for many years until that stuff just stopped working a few years ago. I also had great fun with excellent returns from a growth specialist until the market crashed and aggressive growth stocks outperform in the negative direction as well as positive. (ouch) I knew there must be a better way, and I eventually stumbled on to asset rotation strategies. Essentially asset rotation allows one to move investments to funds that are likely to do the best for current market conditions. Key point is to minimize losses as Warren Buffet famously stressed with his rule one and rule two I'll bet you remember. With asset rotation, one can create a system and test it out using historical data. There are some great books on this topic which I have studied up on: "The Ivy Portfolio", "Dual Momentum Investing", and "Asset Rotation". I highly recommend these books. I got started using a web service to do some backtesting and then I really wanted to get into the details so I built my own backtesting system using Mathematica software. Results were looking really good through downturns especially, and look every bit as good as what was demonstrated in the books. I told one friend and then another about what I was doing and next thing you know I was sending out an update every month. So now here we are trying to live the American dream with a business and full intention to help members succeed in down markets and up, and through all cycles of the economy. Yes we do want to pay bills with your subscription but we want to earn it.

TradeInformed.com exists to help investors to spend less time researching and more time living. We are here to demonstrate a system for good returns with less volatility than buy and hold. Picking stocks or funds that do well when the market is going up is hard enough, but maintaining value during downturns is a significant concern for many investors. The tradeInformed.com algorithm is an investment rotation tool. Currently it is set up to rank stocks or funds based on a proprietary algorithm that utilizes average returns over various time frames, volatility, and undisclosed conditioned technical indicators that aim to avoid losses in a down market and still do well in an up market.

We use market data to test the system over long periods of time and with different portfolios. The idea is to create a system for trading independent of gurus who can go hot and cold with their opinions. We try not to focus on any one investment category such as momentum or value or tech or consumer cyclical or treasuries or bonds. Rather we try to provide the algorithm with many of these sectors and let the algorithm rank the best ones based on available data.

Not all backtesting is created equal. It is very easy to set up a backtest that “looks forward”, ahead of the hypothetical buy/sell date. Any “look forward” makes the backtest extremely unrealistic. You would have to have a time machine to do that real time! We actually have the algorithm use one day delayed data for trade picks to confirm robustness and remove any concerns of "look forward" or even "look current"! Optimizing an algorithm for one list of funds or stocks is dangerous as it can give over-fitted misleading results for that particular list and time period. We do not have a learning algorithm that can fit a curve. We use simple logical features for the ranking system. The way we use some of these features is proprietary only because we do not want to be cloned. We do not re-tweak the algorithm for each portfolio. As a matter of fact, we use the same algorithm for ETFs as we do for Stocks. I will do a blog soon which will help uncover some of the mystery of the "black box". Asset rotation ranking systems that do better than buy and hold are fairly easy to create as demonstrated in great books like "The Ivy Portfolio" but we do the work for you and our proprietary features are proving quite effective. If you want to create your own system that's great-we think alike- and let us know if you have any questions.

The way to use this site is to get familiar with it, and then follow the monthly picks at the 1st trading day of each month. The idea is to rotate allocation for this strategy from last month’s picks to this month’s picks. If no change from last month to this month, then there is no action to take. Once educated on how this all works, all it takes is an hour a month to re-allocate your investments based on the info on the site or the newsletter.

We are not a broker nor an investment advisor. We are not soliciting to buy or sell securities.