SYNOPSIS

Pop quiz: Is Donald Trump (a) senile, (b) psychotic, (c) paranoid, (d) delusional, (e) dumb as a fence post, or (f) all of the above? Well, I do have a PhD in Psychology, and I’m going with “all of the above”. Thankfully, though, that doesn’t seem to matter to the stock markets. Investors assume that he’s too deranged to do any real harm (so far). Mind you the “smart money” (i.e. institutional investors) have been dumping North American equities in August, and moving into safer securities. Maybe they know something that we don’t? (More on that below.)

Day by Day… The S&P 500 had an adequate week with a 1% gain, while the S&P/TSX Composite Index drifted lower again with a fractional loss by Friday. No doubt, the cramped timeframe to resolve NAFTA issues may have played a role. Back to the bargaining table next Wednesday.

PTP… Our PTP APAR score gained a bunch more points from 369% last week. Meanwhile, the S&P/TSX Composite and S&P 500 APARs both retreated.

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Investor Confidence… The August 2018 results for the State Street Investor Confidence Index (SSICI) arrived last week. The Global Investor Confidence Index decreased to 94.3, down 7.4 points from July’s revised reading of 101.7. Most of this rather large monthly decline is institutional investors dumping North American stocks.

As usual we provide more detail on the regional ICI’s in the complete Investor Confidence section of TrendWatch Weekly.

PTA Perspective… Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Investing & Beta
While we prefer a top-down approach to investing, there’s no reason (with the right tactics) that you can’t be just as successful working bottom-up. One popular and generally available stock metric that can potentially improve your success rate either way is beta (β). If you’re new to the concept, we walk you through it; and this may be a worthwhile refresher for those who vaguely understand it, but don’t use it. We also make some useful comparisons with our own relative trend analysis™ (RTA) .