Major Inflation Coming Your Way On 1 January

Two more days to join our "Trading With Van" / "Trading Gains" services with a fat discount. Read on!

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Off To A Wonderful Start!

As 2023 draws to a close - a truly golden bull market opportunity for those that recognized it for what it was and ignored the Big Money cries of recession - I have been thrilled to see us launch our first hosted services on our Cestrian Stock Symposium platform. (Anyone around here caught saying, "don't be so pretentious, it's just a Slack Workspace" is instantly fired for being a miseryguts disbeliever btw).

What, you may ask, is this Cestrian Stocks Symposium grandeur and why am I making such a big deal of this .... Slack Workspace? [Who said that? Own up!! Security will have you escorted out, dammit].

Well, it's like this.

There are many great analysts and traders in this world who have both the skills and the desire to share their ideas with others; some of them work for Big Money, LLC, but most don't. And for most of history, unless you were born into or otherwise worked for the local Medici, good luck getting your ideas out into the world.

The Internet changed all that. Only distribution stands in the way of getting great investment and trading ideas out in front of others. The almost-zero cost of online distribution means that if you run a small hedge fund - let's say sub $10bn under management - then the challenge of finding and retaining an analyst bench just got easier, because you no longer need to pay a small coterie of top performers more money than, well, yourself some years. Instead you can take advantage of one-to-many online distribution economics to source trade ideas much more cheaply. And by subscribing to many such services you reduce your reliance upon any one analyst - because even rock stars have a bad week, month, quarter or year.

If you run your own money, the same economics and rights of access apply. One-to-many online distribution means you can access similar quality analysis to that previously only available to fund managers. You have to know how to use it; if you want someone to run your money for you it's going to cost a lot more than a few thousand dollars per year; but if you learn how to use it, you can perform wonderfully well. There are few walks of life where small players can outperform large players, but money is one of them. Managing a quantum of capital which doesn't compare to Larry Fink's pile means that you can move in and out of positions without moving markets. Fink and Co cannot.

We have three independent services now running on our Slack Worksp.... sorry, Cestrian Stocks Symposium platform. The business model is simple - we at Cestrian provide an App Store type service where we handle billing and subscriber systems and all that; we take a revenue share as result. The lion's share of your subscription goes to the providers themselves. And what that means - speaking from experience - is that the more subscribers each service wins, the better work they can do because they have more resources with which to operate. This again is the beauty of one-to-many Internet economics.

I'll tell you more about the third service in a few days' time, but for now I want to highlight that the first two to launch see their early-bird pricing expire at the end of the month, just a couple days away. Both services have launched with great success and are growing subscriber counts rapidly. I'm delighted.

• Trading With Van provides technical analysis of the Nasdaq-100 and S&P500 markets. Van himself posts real-money trades that you can follow or otherwise use in your own work. He uses the hedged method which aims to generate profitable opportunities in bull, bear and sideways markets alike. Van trades using futures; the same analysis can be used for index ETFs or options. Launch pricing is $499/yr; on 1 January that rises to $799/yr. You keep your signup price for as long as you remain a subscriber - so you can lock in launch pricing for as long as you stay with the service. You can read more here.

• Trading Gains focuses on ETFs for the most part, and covers US equity indices plus gold, oil, volatility, and the US dollar. Gains personally posts real-money trades and recently launched a simple trade tracker accessible 24/7 in the service. Risk management methods are built into trade ideas, again using the hedged method. Launch pricing is $498/yr; on 1 January that rises to $798/yr. You keep your signup price for as long as you remain a subscriber - so you can lock in launch pricing for as long as you stay with the service. You can read more here.

Have a great New Year folks, and thanks for reading our stuff.

Alex King, CEO, Cestrian Capital Research, Inc - 29 December 2023.