how stocks are determined to be sold or bought?

[Super Stock Picker]

I am a liitle puzzled at how stocks are determined to be sold or bought.

For example, HLB now in all your portfolios dropped almost 50% from its high and it has not been sold.

Now it recovered a little but would it not make sense to have sold it after a 10 -15% drop and by back later?

Also WTN doubled and then continued up to the $11.00 range. Dropped back more then 50% and you are still holding. Please advise why?

[Super Stock Picker]

Hello,

Our system is designed to follow trends and to generate a little volume of transactions. So, we give time to the stocks before buying or selling them.
That helps also not to make back and forth moves during a correction.

Furthermore, our selection of stocks is based on relative filters and so the buy or the sale of a stock depends on the behavior of the rest of the market.

The being said, we have quite a few losing trades in our history. But, we think you can have a better idea of our system performances by looking at the historical charts of the portfolios as these pictures summarize all the good and bad moves we did in the past at glance.

[bryanmcn]

This explains why SSP portfolios often move with the overall markets but with greater volitility. When the markets are moving up, SSP screens for the relative best performers and does great. When the markets move south, the SSP continues to screen for good performers RELATIVE TO THE MARKET. That means that picks might do poorly but still outperform the market. If SSP eliminated the part of their screening that compares to the overall market and simple looked at pure momentum, it might find itself with zero picks in a down market. Pretty hard to be 100% invested if you have nothing to invest in.
However ...
If one of the stocks was called CASH. when the market slid, the result would be zero losses. 
Not likely to happen though.
I remember reading about a mutual fund manager who was hired because of his exceptional trading performance. He ramped up the fund by 80% in the first 6 months. Everyone cheered. Then he went to cash. After a couple of months, the fund was still showing a YTD return of 80% but investors were screeming because he refused to continue to trade. He kept saying .."I'll trade when there's something worth buying and not for the sake of trading."
SSP must trade because thats what we expect. Imagine how we would complain if they sold everything back in June and didn't offer another pick till August.

[Super Stock Picker]

Well, the most important reason, IMO, why we are also so volatile is that we do not sell as fast as we buy. Our selling criteria are more relax than our buying criteria in order to give the chance to the stocks to go through a correction before saying bye bye...

Also, do not forget that we over weight the best performers with our allocation and then we increase our exposure to those stocks. And when they go down for real, we take the hit for sure.

That being said, this big volatility exposure is also what makes the portfolios' returns so high in the long term...

The first day(s) of recovery after a market downturn are usually very good. If you miss those ones because you were out of the market, you also leaving good performances on the table.