Gibbons' Trading   ***Track Record*** Futures S&P 500 Twin Bar Trading System 275.1% profit on margin of $80,000 since 11/2007 Timer Digest 2002/2007/2008/2010 Timer of the Year *The only person to win Timer Digest's prestigious stock Timer of the Year honors four times*   About Gibbons' Trading   Gibbons' Trading LLC is a Las Vegas based company engaged in proprietary trading, research, and publishing. The company's managing partner is Michael Gibbons who earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from California State University at Long Beach in economics. For twenty six years, Michael was a broker and trading advisor working for some of the nation's largest investment firms. He was one of the first to use financial futures for hedging risk and also was one of the first to discover and employ stock index arbitrage in the early 1980s. All trading is based upon Michael Gibbons' Twin-Bar Trading System. This method of trading  is based upon what the market is actually doing (it uses daily high/low/close prices as the only data input)- not what some people think it should or will be doing. The Twin-Bar Trading System produces large gains overall because unlike most other trend following systems, it has a non-trending component that protects against most whipsaws in non-trending markets. This means we get very few false signals and we are able to greatly elongate winning trades. Trend following is about surrendering to the now situation in the market. We simply go with the flow and leave our egos at the door. If the market is going up, we are generally long. If the market is going down, we are generally short. What we think a market should or will do is irrelevant. We do what the market is doing. We do not comment on news or anything other than what the market is doing. Economic fundamentals may move the markets over the long term, but those fundamentals are reflected in price action. All fundamental and technical buying and selling is reflected in one thing- price. Price is therefore the major component of the Twin Bar Trading System. Remember, prices predict the future- not investors. Gibbons' Trading clients include large traders, banks, forex dealers, hedge funds, brokers, insurance companies, risk management firms, and many institutional money managers. "We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails." Michael Gibbons The Trend is Your Friend The reality is, most hedge funds make money on the long side of the market. That is, to get and maintain their clientele, they must focus on long only trades. To attract clients, they generally must claim they are fundamentalists, as technical analysis (specifically market timing) is out of favor at the moment. Now trading the long side of the market based on fundamentals (whatever they are), is still premised on the existence of a trend. That is, since the trend is the basis of all profit, the market has to be moving in your direction to make a profit. If you buy at A and sell at B, and the trade was profitable, the market went up-or trended (at least for as long as you were in the trade). Very few people can correctly define trend; I will do that here: it is something that repeats. So funds that trade the long side of the market, still require the existence of a trend to make a profit. Therefore, all those that would deny that they are trend followers are in fact, trend followers. They may not be consciously aware of it, but metaphysically, they are relying on the presence of trends to make money. Their methodologies may not be trend following algorithms, but nonetheless, they are in bed with true trend followers-even if they are not aware of it. The directional movement of a market determines dollar profit. If the S&P 500 goes from 1000 to 1500 and we are long, we make 500 points of profit less fees. The move from 1000 to 1500 was something that repeated-the S&P kept going up. The directional movement was up caused by the presence of a trend. Therefore, any attempt to deny that the trend is the basis of all profit, is a logical contradiction. True trend followers eliminate the rationalizations-they just admit they need trending markets to make money and act accordingly. The Buy and Hold Myth The period of history the buy and hold advocates don’t want you to know about is 1929 to 1954. The highest close for the Dow was 381.17 on 9/3/1929 before the beginning of the great bear market, and it took 25 years to get back to “even” on a nominal basis (not counting inflation). The Dow closed above 381 for the first time on 11/23/1954 after the high in September 1929. No one would have held stocks for 25 years. Buy and hold? Stocks for the long term? It was irrational when it was first promoted and is still irrational. The reason it is irrational is because markets trend both up and down. The trend is the basis of all profit, so you cannot make a profit if you are opposite the trend. If you had bought the S&P 500 ten years ago, you would be down 10% (as of December 2010) not counting inflation- and you would be down over 20% with inflation. Oh yes, I know the academic argument that if you hold your losing trades long enough, history has shown you will make a profit. I can assure you that no investor has the discipline to stay with losing trades for the several 20-30 year bear market periods in market history to get back to even. It just doesn't happen. Buy and hold is a scam promoted by Wall Street for the gullible, and would you believe most people still accept this notion? The reason I make money in the markets is because the vast majority of investors are fools- and my Twin-Bar Trading System capitalizes on their perpetual foolishness. Investors have been in an uptrending market since 1974 and cannot adjust to a downtrend because of their lab-rat conditioning and intellectual inability to check their premises. This year’s historic decline is an expensive lesson for many and it stresses the importance of remaining flexible and not holding any opinions about markets. I have no opinions that I act on- I only act upon Twin-Bar Trading System buy and sell signals. If you do what the market is doing you make a profit- if not, you join the millions of market losers. And, rest assured, if you insist on buying stocks in a downtrend, I will be on the other side of your trade along with my clients most of the time. I’ll take your money and have all of this year. If you are one of the losers, take a long/hard look at yourself in the mirror. If you are not doing what the market is doing, you are letting your ego supersede reality which is the definition of self-delusion. Self-deluded investors lose a lot of money in markets. If you want to stop losing, you first need to start winning. While the Twin-Bar Trading System I use is not a sufficient condition to win, it is a necessary condition. I will continue to provide my clients with the best trend following method in the world and you can take that to the bank. We make money in downtrends because we go short. My Twin-Bar Trading System simply goes with the flow which is the rational thing to do at all times. If you are in the market to make a profit, how can you logically trade without regard to the trend? Are you aware that there is virtually no discussion of trends and what they are by anyone in the investment community? Now, why would that be since the trend is the basis of all profit? The reason that the word trend is anathema is because you will be short about 50% of the time. That’s bad for business on Wall Street. Anything bad for the buy and hold business is not going to get much coverage. You also don’t need analysis and financial news, since trend following models are not based on fundamentals or news events. Eliminate those from the equation, and you have a lot of unemployed people. Again- bad for business. Do you get the concept that is being established here? Forget the buy and hold myth promulgated by Wall Street- the trend is your friend. Take advantage of it.