Performance

“When you’re good at something, you’ll tell everyone. When you’re great at something, they’ll tell you.” Walter Payton – #34 – Hall of Fame running back, Chicago Bears

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Those words echoed loud and clear on Friday. That’s when a subscriber asked us about profit-taking. Since we’re not financial advisors, we can’t give personalized advice. What we can do is accept great feedback. His feedback was “Mapsignals ideas have been great!”

It’s true- our ideas have been great. Specifically, our option trades have been nothing short of spectacular. Mapsignals’ option ideas in 2019 (held until expiration) have crushed it with nearly 90% losing no money:

• Total trades = 36
• Total winners = 30 (83.3%)
• Total losers = 4 (11.1%)
• Total flat = 2 (5.6%)

Those are Walter Payton type stats.

The idea the subscriber asked us about Friday was a bullish bet on Ulta Beauty, Inc. (ULTA). Below is the chart from that pick in late September.

The great thing about Mapsignals Options is not only do you learn our winning process, but you get a look at two great stocks each week (1 stock, and 1 stock option).

Even if you don’t trade options, the methodology is what’s key.

We love being told we’re great… who doesn’t?

We normally downplay, but the stats force us to politely agree.

Bottom line:

Mapsignals Options have been awesome. Our stats resemble the sweetness of NFL Hall of Fame running back Walter Payton.

If you are looking to kick 2020 off with a bang – make sure you are on the right side of the big money.

When I get a song I like, I play it non-stop. Maybe my brain is motivated by repetition – the “big buying in stocks” is a lot like a broken record. But, that’s what great stocks do – they go up over time.

Speaking of broken records, yesterday (11/25/19) Health Care stocks saw the largest day of buying in 7+ years.

We’ve been a broken record about big Health Care buying in our research since late October.

As you can see in the above chart, the first time the big buying shows up, that’s the time to strike.

Now for another broken record, we’re at all-time highs for the major indexes… so, what’s next?

We’ve been here before. We even have a gauge for when it’s a good time to plan for the eventual downdraft. It’s called the Big Money Index. You can see where we stand below – we have a couple of weeks before we get in the red area (assuming we get there).

Believe me, when the index starts to fall, you’ll want to know.

The bottom line: if you’ve been long this year as we have, nice work. Demand is huge for stocks right now and that’s the point of this post. There’s likely a little gas left in the tank.

But, like anything, it won’t last forever. If we were on the sidelines – we’d stay there waiting for a pullback.

WINNING!

Ever wonder what happens when you marry Mapsignals’ superior stock picking skills with options? Juice happens.

MAP does options too- and we crush it. We take mostly long views on stocks and aim to win big. So far so good!

“No way! Options are risky and scary” you may say- and many think that way. But MAP’s expert approach actually reduces risk and shoots for a high win rate percentage. You may wonder what makes us experts in the field. We collectively have decades of experience trading options for the biggest smart-money clients in the world. If that doesn’t do it for you- we literally wrote and taught options courses for Investopedia (link here). And then there’s our stock-picking track record. After all, options are just another way to express an opinion on stocks. And this year is just another example:

Our options trades so far for 2019 breakdown like this (held until expiry):
Total: 12
winners: 10
losers: 1
flat: 1

That means we only lost money 8% of the time. We marry our superior stock picking ability- backed by many years of data, with our expertise on Wall Street as premier options traders. We bring that level of service to our clients in our MAP OPTIONS research.

Below is an example from 2/18/19:

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (BR) was trading at $100.35 at the time. Our options trade was:

Sell 1 BR June 90 Put @ $2, Buy 1 BR June 110 Call for $2

At expiration, BR closed @ 128.72

Markets have blasted higher in 2019. If you plan to beat a ripping market, you’d better have some of the best horses in the race. This year has felt a lot like a horse race for growth stocks. What was once a hated group (Q4 2018) is now leading the pack…and in a big way.

Below is the performance of all Q1 MAP View equity profiles held through 4/12/2019:

Clearly we caught some leaders to have out-performance like this. Below are the 3 horses that were profiled at the beginning of 2019:

Below are the 1 year MAP charts for these. We also want to point out that these stocks are in 3 different sectors: Financials, Discretionary, & Health Care.

One thing we at MAP try and do is find the best stocks out there…the outliers. The 4th quarter of 2018 was a “rough” one for the markets to say the least. We looked back at how our weekly stock profiles performed since, given how volatile the market has been.

The 4th quarter includes the all-time closing high for the S&P 500 (2925.51) made on October 3rd. From then until the end of the quarter the market practically nosedived, falling to a closing low of 2351.10 on Christmas Eve. That was nearly a 20% pullback from peak-to-trough. Since the low we’ve seen a V-shaped recovery for markets. As of yesterday, we are still ~2% below the all-time closing high.

So, how have the MAP stock profiles performed? The below performance assumes initiation as of the profile date and held until yesterday’s close (4/3/19). Here are a couple of facts:

• Avg. Q4 stock profile return = +16.24% vs. avg. SPY (S&P 500 ETF) return = +7.85%
• Avg. December profile return = +33.73% vs. avg. SPY return = +12.70%

Needless to say, there was a large amount of out-performance. There were 3 notable standouts:

1. 10/7/18, INTU (Intuit Inc.) +23.98%
2. 10/28/18, XLNX (Xilinx Inc.) +65.99%
3. 12/23/18, TTD (The Trade Desk, Inc.) +98.14%