So welcome to the maintainers track talk on open telemetry. Thank you for coming I wish we had a larger room because it looks like there are other people trying to come in My name is Morgan McClain. I'm one of the co-founders open telemetry and like my colleagues here I'm on the governance committee and I'll let them introduce themselves and then we'll get started Yeah, I am Daniel Dyla. I work for Dynatrace. I'm also on the governance committee and I maintain open telemetry JS Hi everyone very happy to be here. I'm Alulita Sharma. I'm on the open telemetry governance committee as well as work on the collector as well as the go library and Again, I'm from Apple and also lead the observability for AML there Hi, my name is Ted. I work at late step and I am also on the governance committee and I mostly heard cats around the specification working group And I forgot to mention I work at Splunk So it's been a big year or two for open telemetry the project has gotten even bigger than it was before it's the impact It's quite considerable. I think we've been coming in various incarnations to do cube cons since I mean open telemetry was announced in 2019 And certainly there was open census and open tracing prior to that like Ted I'm trying to remember like when the first time you would have come to keep probably 2016 2017 something like that Yeah, so like there's been a long journey in these projects to to success But like we're we're really proud of what the community has achieved So we're gonna start by giving people a brief overview of where open telemetry is right now And then the roadmap and then we're gonna dive into the semantic conventions as promised So as I mentioned we were announced in 2019 in mid 2020 Tracing the tracing specification and implementations hit stable in open telemetry That's when the project really started to gain adoption Last year we announced at Kubecon EU that the metric specifications of the second signal type in open telemetry Had reached 1.0 status and then in Kubecon Detroit last year in October We had the announcement that a number of our major languages had achieved their 1.0 implementations and metrics and since then We've seen the adoption of that really grow, but we've achieved a lot more than that as a community There's other data types coming in It's probably pretty well known to this point that logging is being added as a new signal to open telemetry And you can see here on this on this timeline When we started logging and when we started to achieve things like data model stability We're hoping that later this year will achieve 1.0 or stability for logging across all the different components Obviously open source project data TPD, but that's that's where we are with logging And there's also other other things we'd like to talk about including the open telemetry demo Which is a demo environment you can use to test out open telemetry and to Sort of experiment with it it contains about 20 different applications written in different languages and you can use the demo to Go and look at our language instrumentation the collector and basically use it as a sandbox to make changes And see where if you were instrumenting your own services, you can use it as a guide To understand had sort of best practices for open telemetry. So very very useful resource I think that just hit version 1.4 in the last week Which is exciting There's also profiling which has started. We'll get into that in a moment And another thing we wanted to discuss on this timeline is that we now have We're about to have community lambda layers. So if you use Amazon lambda The open telemetry community now has official lambda layers that you can subscribe to and use which is also fantastic. Oh And one last thing there. I almost forgot otlp the open telemetry line protocol or open telemetry protocol It is fully stable now for traces and metrics Achieve stability some time ago for I think the gRPC format and the HTTP proto format that was also achieved recently for HTTP JSON So otlp is completely stable. Not that it's taken any changes for a long time But we now have that sort of stamp of approval on it All right, I promise to talk about logs Logs is very very exciting this year. We have traces. We have metrics and open telemetry logs is the third of many signal types That will be added to the project There's two paths that we're taking an open telemetry to approach logging This is somewhat distinct from how we've done other signal types in the past because logging has a lot of prior art So the most sort of the first phase of this which is not stable now But it's actually relatively mature within the collector is using the otl collector a primary agent to go and tail Logging files to you know human readable flat-text files from disk just like every other logging agent in the world does today The performance of this is actually really impressive. It's just a native part of the collector And it will parse these log files and convert them internally into the open telemetry formats for logs And it's nice because it depends all of the open telemetry resource data and metadata that you would expect those logs And then you can send that data to whatever destination you choose using otlp or any other exporters And so that's great, and that's fairly straightforward It's a great way to take existing applications that write logs and bring those logs into open telemetry without redeploying updating making any changes to your app There's also work being done in parallel That will allow you to capture logs directly from your applications natively in an open telemetry format There are numerous benefits to this probably the most prominent are performance because these logs don't have to be written as human Readable text files to disk they can just be sent in a binary format directly to the open telemetry collector So definitely better performance there There's also benefits in that the the metadata and and sort of structure of your logs is guaranteed to be strongly typed because they're not Just being written as a human readable text file We're taking an interesting approach of this that also deviates somewhat from other signals where the open telemetry SDKs and API's and language Instrumentation of course will have these hooks for logging, but they're not generally meant to be used by end users So I'll give an example for Java for Java a lot of people use log for J to write their logs amongst other logging libraries We don't necessarily want to have open telemetry Sort of compete with that or just sort of offer a sort of confusing second choice So we've actually developed as a logging bridge So if you're in Java for this example and using log for J You would just have log for J export those logs in process to open telemetry which would then Process them and deal with them from there in some languages in the future We may choose to have a developer facing logging API I think C++ is sometimes raised as an example of a language where there Isn't a sort of super native logging API that people already use so in those cases Yeah, we may begin to offer one, but I think in most languages like Java We'll simply adapt to whatever the APIs are that people are already using of course a few feedback on this thoughts on this Please let us know at the end of the session or or in the community All right, we'll go a little quicker through the other items here So we've achieved metric stability as I mentioned and the implementations of metrics across most languages are now 1.0. I think go just hit one point or was about to hit 1.0 But we already achieved that for like Java, Node.js, Python various others There's still a bit of more work on metrics like it is stable But we are of course building more integrations for more technologies for metrics because it's fairly new And we want to provide a nice turnkey experience for people There's also work that needs to be done on implementing exemplars that was explicitly out of scope for 1.0 And we still need to finish the job on that as well as implementations for high resolution histograms Finally for my section profiling is a big sort of a growing topic with put topic within open telemetry I think last year in Valencia This was probably the first time this really started getting discussed seriously But since then we've created a profiling SIG. There's a lot of new community members I think roughly 20 or so people have joined open telemetry really to focus on profiling and so our goal is to be able to capture Application profiling information I think generally under the coverages is usually stack traces or data from P prof or JFR or other existing profiling technologies And include that with an open telemetry and allow that data to be to come in and be processed and gain the same metadata And and have the same export capabilities as all other data that comes through open telemetry and thus be correlatable Later with your traces and metrics and everything else that come through For just a very short background around profiling This is going to be aimed at distributed profiling or often called continuous profiling So this is a extremely low performance impacting way to get profiling data from a distributed system So this is not the kind of profiling where you're instrumenting every single function call that is very valuable But it also comes with a very high performance impact when you do it But if you are running, you know, multiple instances of an application This is very valuable because you can build a snapshot of its performance over time Without really any cost and you can do this in your production environments continuously That's the kind of a profiling that we're aimed at our current status is that we're still working on the draft of the specification It's gonna take some time to close on that and from there, of course throughout later this year and well into next year I imagine we will be working on finalizing that spec and then pushing towards implementation Okay, I guess I'll talk about client instrumentation This is something that as the JS maintainer I get asked about a lot and in the past I've always had to say It's something we're working on but we know there's a lot of moving parts And we haven't had a lot of time and bandwidth and I'm happy to say that now we actually do have time to focus on this So things have actually started moving recently quite quickly I know that there is a rum sig that's been meeting for what the past year or so I think maybe a little bit more than that Which has been working on Setting up the specification for semantic conventions for rum The logs data model, which is finally stable is a huge part of that logs and events are very important for rum And the the data model in particular was super important There's also the the experimental Yeah, experimental event API which he uses the logging data format actually Under the hood we consider them to be sort of the same thing But events are a little bit different in that they are meant to be called by instrumentation So if you're interested in that that's something you should ask the rum sig about Further we also have the web JS SDK sandbox This is not a new web SDK, but it is something where we're using to Explore new JS ideas that are very browser specific Right now the JS SDK is very node focused very focused on the back end It does work in the web, but There are Some feedback that we've gotten that that things could be improved So that's really what we're doing to try to Explore those ideas and what could be changed and improved and then fold them back into the main JS SDK Also, obviously when you talk about clients you have to talk about mobile There's ongoing work in both iOS and Android, but particularly in Android. There's a Large code donation that's been made recently or will be made soon something along those lines. Yeah, sort of right now Where I expect Android to be moving very quickly and then your future here towards a working implementation Okay, another thing that we've been working on a lot recently is Configuration a lot of feedback that we get in open telemetry is that it is confusing to configure particularly with Instrumentation where you're working in multiple languages It can be very difficult to Configure it in a way that is Consistent across multiple languages and multiple teams which may use multiple languages And the collector particularly if you're maintaining a lot of collectors So recently if you've been following the Oteps repository, you may have noticed that the configuration Otep merged This is the first step towards specifying a Configuration file format which will be used across all of the SDKs and eventually I believe also the collector So this is important because it should solve a lot of these problems. It is early days, but That work has been moving along very well Important points with that are that It is structured config so instead of having like Flat environment variables and stuff like that you can have typed configurations It will also have a JSON schema for validation So you'll know when you write your configuration that I've written it correctly if you write it incorrectly You can have a validator that tells you this is where you messed up It will have environment variable substitution, which is important moving over from the existing sort of environment variable heavy configuration style to the new style and also with secrets management and stuff like that and also Op-amp which is our remote configuration protocol. I believe the protocol is more or less done But implementations are underway I don't think the protocol is stable done. It's not like 1.0 or anything, but the work is Largely complete to make it usable And there is also a go implementation, which will be used in the collector and we expect additional implementations coming soon All right. Hi everyone so I wanted to cover integrations that open telemetry has today and Both within the project which are baked in into the project itself, but also outside that is other projects or other teams adding support for open telemetry and And again, this is super important because you know the more integratable open telemetry is in terms of collection environments that are supported and the type of telemetry that is you know, ingestible the more pervasive A standardized technology like open telemetry becomes so with that said again within open telemetry as you can see several streaming protocols such as and and Projects such as Kafka support skywalking Very exciting areas, you know because data at scale we all collect in our environments literally petabytes of data telemetry data and Kafka is very typically used for streaming So Kafka and skywalking are very important areas there for elastic search and fluent bit again very pervasive in the observability world Graphite support Jaeger for tracing open census, you know and again part of our lineage in open Telemetry is open census and open tracing so full compatibility with both of these projects and the Integrations that already exist in the field is super important as you know, it enables Teams who have implemented with open census or open tracing to be easily able to just swap out their Modules and be able to use open telemetry out of the box open metrics, which is the standard as many of you know with Prometheus specifically Guaranteeing interoperability from open telemetry to interoperate between the two protocols Prometheus itself, which is very pervasive in the Kubernetes world as well as with other Implementations where you already have metrics that are being collected Zipkin and of course the W3C trace context, which is very interoperable and fully supported by OTLP On the outside again, these are just some of the integrations that have already happened in the last Couple of years Kubernetes of course out of the box I'm just jumping me out there because Kubernetes is a great example, but and a very large example But container the CRIO docker Jaeger micrometer again docker under the hood runs the open telemetry collector So that's been huge Sorry Jaeger I should say I misspoke Micrometer for Java Quarkus for Java so very popular projects and also Fully integrable next JS in the JavaScript world dot net with quartz net as well as ASP dot net where Microsoft's teams have done a tremendous job with Not only contributing to the project, but also you know other works that they have done within their teams engine X All the flavors of engine X while fly from Red Hat So again, this is an example of some of the integrations have already happened again If you are seeing something that is not integrated and you use it Please feel free to make a proposal on the project and we are happy to work with the teams on the other projects or other Even even other vendors to be able to provide that support So it's very easy you can just file an issue and then you know We typically go through and review those and see what we can support also worth calling out These are the native integrations where these people are starting to use native otlp native open telemetry APIs This is in addition to the hundreds if not thousands of integrations that we have through our contrib repos that make existing technologies Yes hotel and and very good point more and because again if you go into the contrib repos for each of the Languages language libraries. There are literally hundreds of supported APIs which are exist which are fully interoperable with open telemetry and when we say native Instrumentation what we mean is that the instrumentation is actually baked in you don't have to install Some separate package written by somebody who is not the maintainer of the actual open source project Good point good call out And again, if you don't see something here, please just ask You know, we're happy to go and find either find it for you If it's in the contrib repos or take a request The other area that I wanted to call out and this is super interesting to open telemetry as well because this request was made at a community meeting in open telemetry in Detroit in Kubecon and This is really looking at how do you have a common query standardized language? Because as you know many of the vendor implementations as well as other long-standing Implementations have had query languages which are very specific to their implementations and optimizations thereof So this is something that bridges those islands right and being able to actually provide at least a baseline for this Specification was something that came up as a discussion and an end user request From eBay and Netflix at the open telemetry meetings and this was again Something that was deferred by the project to be held in the observability tag as a discussion work group so if you're interested in this discussion as well as these work on Identifying use cases and supporting this long-term Please do join in for this work group and again This has been submitted as a formal work group to the TOC the CNCF TOC And we hope to have an formal work group shortly With that said again Ted you wanted to cover you. Yes. All right, so we're gonna do a section here about the semantic conventions in general but The biggest news on this front is there is another project that has been maintaining a set of semantic conventions What we mean by semantic conventions is the schema of the actual data So you have otlp, which is the protocol But then you want to have a standardized way of describing an HTTP request a database call All of the things your program is doing we want all of that Normalized because that really really helps especially When you get into lots and lots of microservices and also when you get into machine learning and other automated Forms of analysis having regularized data is huge We've been doing our own work on this for a while, but there's been another project elastic common schema that's been around for a long time focus mostly on logging and They came to us with an idea that we could merge these two projects together So rather than having two separate standards that might go their separate ways. We should just have one standard So Alex if you wouldn't mind standing up people give it like a round of applause to like elastic and ECS people You know Merging projects and human stuff is like harder than code and engineering in my opinion. So always appreciate this also like between like open tracing open census ECS Everyone talks with the XKCD comic of like, you know, one more standard I think we may be the only project that's actually like Merged more standards than we've created at this point, which is pretty awesome So as part of this We're gonna make some changes Under the hood in particular right now all the semantic conventions are part of the open telemetry Specification we are going to fork that out into two separate repos so that we have two separate version numbers Two separate sets of maintainers This will make a lot more room for the ECS maintainers to come over and it'll also I think Create a lot more clarity about changes to semantics and data versus changes to like our SDKs and APIs still part of open telemetry though Just a different repo. Yes. So part of open telemetry, but just Separate repos with separate separate maintainers The other thing we have to figure out how to do is integrate all of these semantic conventions luckily Open telemetry only has like a small subset of things that have been defined in ECS ECS has also done a lot of great work on security and sec ops So a lot of great new stuff will be coming to the project as a result of that however Even though our semantic conventions have been in use in production for a very long time They are still technically Experimental if you look at any instrumentation package we provide a most language there zero dot X and We have always had it in our minds that we would do a final pass on all of these things really review them based on user feedback and subject matter experts and Make any final changes to them to ensure that it's really the highest quality instrumentation that we can provide part of that This is good timing with the ECS merger because part of that work is looking at the areas where these two projects overlap and figuring out what the best way forward is there and This is where we really really need feedback from the community Because we are definitely not going to roll out some kind of hard breaking change on this front and Even if we do come up with a better 1.0 that we Marcus stable That's different than what's currently being offered. We would still maintain Versions of our instrumentation with the current instrumentation and perpetuity However, we are still very very nervous about anything That's a change of this magnitude changing the data that's going into people's systems seems bad It seems like you could break dashboards and alerts and other things if someone unwittingly, you know imported a Newer version of the instrumentation without realizing it we can prevent that from happening But we also want to understand what other problems might arise around having old experimental instrumentation that will eventually be fleshed out being replaced with Something that will be stable going forwards in other words We're looking at one final set of changes to make everything perfect, but we are really worried that perfect might be the enemy of good enough Especially in things that are really really widely adopted like HTTP and networking So this is an area where we really really need feedback From the end user community you have any concerns if you can see ways that this would cause problems for you We want to collect all of that If it's the case that with some of these they're so widely deployed Maybe good enough is just good enough and we won't touch them So if you have strong opinions about this, please open an issue in the spec repo or the community repo There's already an issue created discussing HTTP in particular But we don't want to move forward with this without You know The blessing of the community we do think it's a good positive thing to go through these one more time We have seen places where we can really improve them, but Open to limit we really really really value stability and backwards compatibility, so that is why we don't want to do this without feedback So, please let us know also you can tackle me after this talk if you are really concerned about this cool, so There are a lot of semantics is actually going to take a long time to get through all of them if we spent a Total of three months reviewing each domain with the domains that we have that's a year and a half worth of work The ones we are currently working on our HTTP. This is where we need the most feedback We're developing new conventions with rum as Dan mentioned earlier We also have a messaging SIG. There's actually a lot of heavy lifting going on here because Messaging includes large asynchronous systems and cues distributed cues of any kind If you're familiar with distributed tracing It really works best when you're talking about synchronous transactions things that look like a tree and When you get into big asynchronous messaging systems, you start to have other patterns that show up, you know things like batch processing things like merge and join that are just a little more complicated than what you would see with a regular old Web transaction so There's a bunch of work being gone going on there to figure out how exactly We want to model that domain So if you're interested in that definitely join that SIG love more feedback and last but not least There's a functions as a service SIG. They're working on not just semantic conventions, but also improving lambda in particular so Trying to get our lambda support to the next level, but I believe we're also targeting other serverless environments Cool on to the community update. Yes So let's go over this pretty fast. This is the CNCF DevStats great resource for open telemetry So the in the blue bars you see our number of contributions to the project I think this counts as like commits and comments and PRs sort of github activity for the project That is growing though though certainly started shooting sort of a stability there in 2021 But still growing slightly, but if you see the red line, I don't know how visible that is but lose the mouse This is the number of contributors to open telemetry per month So we've well across the 900 monthly active contributors to open telemetry. So this is the Remains this I think the second biggest project in the CNCF, which has been for some some time And it's just a very healthy signal of community growth So if you're considering adopting open telemetry know that there's a lot of people engaged on it a lot of people working on it To those who contribute to it like as a community. Thank you very much for your contributions It's really exciting to see like how the challenge of extracting information from services and from infrastructure and everything else Is so motivating to so many people certainly is to me and I think for everyone up here Probably yourself if you're in this room. So thank you As well, we just have a list of some of the major companies that are contributing You know lots of cloud firms of their ability film firms here. That's probably not a surprise But I think what's really changed in the last year year and a half is the ones I put in bold here These are companies that are investing in primarily in open telemetry primarily for their own usage of it rather than for their customers And so if you look at this list now, I think it's over yet well over half are now end users Of open telemetry who are making contributions. This is the top. I think list of top 40 Contributors to open telemetry. So this is very exciting It's no longer just a bunch of vendors of strong commercial interests Although those interests have generally been very aligned with the community It's very exciting to have so many end users and people who benefit from open telemetry and organizations who have to sign paychecks To invest in open telemetry choosing to do so because they're getting value out of it I think that means there's a lot of staying power in this community And it's just very very healthy atmosphere in the community. So we should all be very proud of that Um before we go to get involved all later, was there anything else that you would want to add for this or no? Okay, we're good. Okay, great So if you do want to get involved as Morgan just mentioned we have Over nine, sorry over 900 monthly active contributors, which is huge If you would like to be the 900 and first you're too late, but somewhere in the first 1,000 This is how you can get involved. So if anyone here would like to get involved with the project We are primarily from a development standpoint on the CNCF Slack a lot of the people here are probably already on it If you're not you should be on it. It's a great way to get involved in not just our project But many of the other CNCF projects We're also trying to get better about Following the stack overflow open telemetry tag So if you are not sure how you can get involved from a coding perspective, but you're an enthusiastic or knowledgeable user this would be a huge help for us just to follow that and Help others who are having problems and if you're having your own problems that might be a good way to find solutions And then finally we are on GitHub like everyone else. I think Join a working group on our community repo. You can find a list of the working groups and special interest groups And when they meet typically they meet weekly some of them bi-weekly it changes and That's probably the best way to get involved if you're really serious about about making contributions. I Might add just one thing there I mean slack is a great way to ask questions, but don't be afraid to join the meetings We are a little more than most open source projects I feel kind of like face-to-face on zoom focused. We find that's a great way to resolve Questions that you know are taking time in the GitHub issues, but sometimes I get feedback from people saying like well I'm not like a super. I'm not like a maintainer. I'm not like a Serious contributor. I'm brand new so I don't want to like go to the meeting because I'm not sure if I'm allowed there Definitely, you're loud there. It's great to show up. It's great to ask Basic questions there. We'd love to see your face We are a global community again, you know Sean for example He is joins in from Australia So we do have a pack friendly as well as EU friendly times and so please don't be shy you know there are alternate meetings for different time zones and It is in general if you need a meeting on a specific topic Please just ask for it. The meeting is very supportive. The contributors are very supportive of being below All right with that I think we're done We have two QR codes here if you're interested the first is for general project feedback on open telemetry if you're a user of it The second is the standard testing feedback form for the session. Thank you for coming I think we have a few minutes to tackle live questions So Ted and I can run around with the microphones if people raise their hand to have them ask a question Oh and one last thing We have some maintainers here, please Aaron Jacob, sorry Anthony And and I think Jacob had a request. He is looking for He he's actually a maintainer on the operator for the open telemetry Kubernetes operator And he is looking for other contributors. I think and do you want to add anything else? Yeah Yeah, after this session is done I'll be like hanging around if people have questions about Contribution or questions about the operator in particular So just yeah, come on by cool. All right. Do you have a question? Please raise your hand Ted and I will pass you microphone Do you have any Parts on using the logging signal to collect metrics because I think that's used by Istio and Envoy and I heard about it, but I don't know Is that something So the question I guess everybody heard the question So I don't know if we've any official thoughts on that. I mean logs are often used to Capture metrics that they can be I think generally the preferences use native metric types if you can they tend to be more efficient They go directly into time series databases. If you have existing sources that are emitting logs, though You can metricize those. Yeah in the collector. Yeah, I think In terms of instrumentation, we're providing we want to provide a suite of Tracing logs and metrics out of the box. However There's absolutely nothing one of the advantage of having structured logs that with like a regularized format Is it becomes much more feasible to start generating metrics out of them the harder problem of generating metrics out of traditional, you know Flat file human readable logs is the parsing the fact that they may not be standard across different service types and things like that So that's definitely a thing you can do you can also generate Metrics out of traces and that's actually a pretty common thing that people are doing today Yeah, and that's what I was gonna say is you can generate Metrics both from traces and logs using the collector there are components in the collector for that So if you're speaking about deriving metrics from logs, that's possible today and Expanding but if you control the source, I would stick with the actual core metrics type if you can so you got time for probably two more questions anybody Going once We'll take trivia questions All right. Well, you've been great audience. We got one Sorry, sorry So given that you're working together on the elastic common schema and the thing that I am missing with ECS is a JSON schema to validate against Is that something that's on the map or what you have thought about because currently this yes, yes So right now Sort of like phase one is to get them kind of like locked in And stable In the spec but once we've done that we have to then roll out an implementation and something we've discussed is part of that Making sure we have a validation and like testing harness that we can be using to to ensure that everything Out there is is actually conforming to the spec We think that will make it a lot easier to keep track of this stuff. So yeah, that's that is something that's on a roadmap We could probably do one last question if we see a hand. Yes In terms of backward compatibility, I wonder why open telemetry at least in the metric schema doesn't allow the slash character in the metrics names because That's that was allowed in open sensors, but not allowed in open telemetry. I mean, it's a very low level question But yeah, yeah, Josh sir, it would be the person to answer Josh sir to also works at Google actually would be the person asked I think the the the answer has to do with interoperability with Prometheus, which also does not allow slashes and names And interoperability with that project is a core goal of ours like right from day one But I would talk to Josh and internally because you're Google as well. Yeah, hello Okay, I think We are out of time. Thank you everyone


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So, with that said, everyone, I want to pass on to our next presenter, very, very good friend of mine, Jeff Hirsch. We had him here for so many years. I know Jeff for, I don't know, so many years, maybe 10, 15 years probably. And we always meet each other at all these special events that we host and some of the, a lot of these expos, but he's very well known. If you don't, if you haven't met Jeff or heard about him or you probably do, because he is the founder and chief editor of the stock, the Stock Traders Almanac, which is a very popular book in today's business, in today's world in trading, goes all the way back to his father who came out with that book.  You see him on CNBC. He's on, he's on a lot of the financial stations. And, you know, like I said, we're just happy to have him. Once again, just remember guys, great traders, never stop learning. So, with that said, I'm going to pass it over to him. He's going to talk about why he's the author of why the Dow will hit 38,000. And you could profit from that with his little book, his new book that's out. And he's going to tell you a little bit about the market and feel free to ask any questions. All right. So with that said, Jeff, the stage is all yours. Thanks for coming, Jeff. Check one, two. Is anybody there? We hear you fine. Go ahead, Jeff. Thanks again, fast. Oh, I had the mic thing off. I think it's been like more like 20 years, but that we've known each other. So, I know, I mean, it was back in the late 90s, I think. Let me just make sure I can get this technical stuff. Everyone has to realize.  We all know, just like Melissa just mentioned earlier, sometimes you can't trust everyone's out there. But I think the best thing that everybody could always appreciate when it comes to trading. Jeff, you could agree to this is that it's how long you've been, you know, it's too endorsing you and how long you've been around. And that's always key. So just glad to have you out here again, Jeff. So, yeah, go ahead. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you again for having me. Thanks everybody for joining us. Learning is something we do all the time. We learn from our readers, our subscribers who constantly are asking this question. So feel free to chime in here. If for some reason I'm missing something that's being asked, just holler at me if possible. But now for something completely different. I don't teach trading in these types of classes like FASTO and previous speaker does and a lot of people do. But the things that we put out there are for traders. And I think it's a great way for people to turn, you know, all this profit that you guys make with these, you know, day trading strategies into your retirement nest egg by using the long term strategies that are featured in the Stock Traders Omanak and my newsletter stock at StockTradersOmanak.com, the Omanak Investor. And, you know, just realize that what we're doing here is not one of these $6,000 classes. It's much more reasonable, just basic newsletter. You get stock picks, ETF trades, tactical market timing and specific buy and sell recommendations. And I don't, you don't have to learn how to trade with me. You take your trading knowledge and just apply it. Some of those profits to this. So just a little word from my lawyers. This is for informational purposes only. Past performance is not a guarantee. Future results. Do, you know, do diligence, consult with your advisors and be smart. So today I'm just going to give you a little background in history of the Omanak. And I did not found the Stock Traders Omanak. My illustrious father Yale Hirsch did. He founded it in the year of my birth in 1966. The 52nd edition of the Stock Traders Omanak is out. Whatever books are sold, I have them here. And a free copy comes with a subscription to my newsletter. So I'll give you a little more trip down memory lane. We'll look at my philosophy and the process. We'll talk about the sweet spot of the four year cycle, which is a little bit sour right now, though there is still more of it left. We'll look at my forecast, outlook, update, some current analysis. And of course the best six month switching strategy, not just selling May. You got to buy in October and get yourself sober if you're going to sell in May and go away. And the tactical seasonal rotation strategy that we use, a lot of different sectors, commodities also, but mostly stock sectors and our stock selection process, which continues to outperform the market, even though we've had quite a volatile period right here. So 52 years in the street, there's the first copy of the Stock Traders Omanak back in 1968. When the first edition came out, the fall of 1967, some inscription on there from my folks to whoever returned that to me, friends of theirs. And for what it's worth, the big guy Yale is still kicking at 95. He's living with mom at home, quite the brain that he used to have, but he's still there and has some glimmers there, but we get to see him. So that's good. The current 2019 Omanak, some of the books we've put out there, I think Yale's known for his corning phrases and don't sell stocks on Monday. I think it was a great title. That seasonality has changed a little bit, but there's his book from the eight eighties, the super boom that Fasto mentioned, I am not going to get heavily into that today. I have some more tactical stuff for you, but that's based upon a long-term pattern that Yale discovered back in 1976 for 500% moves in the stock market after war inflation, which came true after Vietnam. And when I put that forecast out in May 2010, at the Dow at about 12th, excuse me, 10,000 folks that I was a little bit nuts. But here we are pushing quite close to that. And then my little book of stock market cycles, which continues to find some support from people, even though it's been out for a better part of 10 years, about eight years, and all the places we get to appear or have our stuff picked up. So the sound died. Is that still working? I'm just looking back at some of the quotes over here. It's not working, huh? Any sound now? Okay, technical difficulties. Sorry about that. So our philosophy is that sort of a take on the George Santana quote, that those who failed to remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and we feel that those study market history are bound to profit from it. But, you know, as my friend, Sam Stubble, I say we've got to use history as a guide, not as gospel. Or as Twain said, history rhymes, it doesn't repeat exactly. So the offer that I have for you today is the Stock Traders Almanac comes for free with our subscription to the newsletter. Again, a much more reasonable rate than a lot of the things that you get offered on here are one of our best deals here is $250 for two years. You get a free Almanac each year. Your code is CTU two year. If you just want to do the one year with us, it's $150. It also comes with a free Stock Traders Almanac, and we'll ship that right out to you. And the newsletter follows along with the book throughout the year, as well as making all sorts of stock and ETF recommendations and, you know, investing and trading ideas. So 50 years of analyzing, researching and testing practically every market trend available. We publish findings annually for 52 years in the Stock Traders Almanac, updated weekly and monthly in our newsletter. And we use this knowledge to construct portfolios. We do have a good base in fundamentals and technical analysis. One of the first things that Yael taught me was price to sales ratio. I know you guys are day traders, but if you want to convert some of that into more solid stocks, you might want to look for some things with good valuations that our accelerating and revenue and earnings growth, and we'll get into that in a bit. We look at market internals and sentiment, you know, advanced declines, new highs to lows, put coal ratios, investors intelligence, bullish and bearish advisors, monetary government policy we've been contending for months that the Fed is the biggest risk to the market and economy, plus other current trends in the economy. And of course, our, you know, foundation, our forte is cycle seasonality and recurring patterns. One of the things that is happening right now in the four year cycle is the sweet spot. You can see here in the, so wait a second, am I having a problem here with this connection? Hillary, see Ted telling me that reconnect didn't work. Thank you, Ted. Getting worried. Excuse me. So you can see highlighted in the orange, the two quarters that are supposed to be the worst part of the four year cycle, Q2 and Q3 didn't quite get that this year. Looks like that's taken back a little bit from Q4, but the three quarter span from Q4 of the mid-term here, which we are right now through Q2 of the pre-election year, which would be June of 2019, is the strongest spot of the, the sweet spot of the four year cycle. You can see the Dow average is about 20%, S&P 21 and NASDAQ 32%. So if we can get through some of these tariff fears and the Fed can come to its senses and take a pause, we could probably rally into year end and, you know, that'll be the Santa Claus rally, which I'll explain to you shortly. And that would be a good sign. And then have a positive first two quarters. And then I think things become a little bit more difficult with the comparisons, corporate comparisons quarter over quarter, but that's a whole long story. Here's our, you know, midterm year, one year pattern. We've got a few things here, you know, the January barometer is one of the things DL created. And then we have the Santa Claus rally, which is the last five days of the year, the first two of the new year, is an indicator and the first five days of the year. These three early year indicators, January indicators are what we call the January trifecta. In a midterm year, when all three are positive, like they were in 18, the history is pretty, pretty bullish. You can see the red line is all years that had a positive January trifecta in the midterm year. This, you know, had our bias a bit bullish, more bullish this year. You can see all years in the black line, kind of modest. And then midterm years, all midterm years in the blue line, usually a more pronounced worst six months didn't get that this year, but everyone forgot when they were declaring Salome is dead that the last part of the worst six months is October. And we've got October phobia and we had that and it's lingering right here. You can see the purple line the current year up through the end of November, you know, we're down right around here. And I think that one of the important things for me technically is none of the indices breached or all three of them didn't breach the early year lows, looked like the S&P intraday touched it yesterday. But you know, it's a triple bottom potentially, we're going to have to clear these November highs before we can get, you know, more supportive and more constructive here. But if we can't get through that, we get some help from the Fed back it off, I think we can finish the year a little bit stronger, but it will be important if we do or don't. And that's one of the indicators that we track. So one of the other midterm year patterns just to dial you into the four-year cycle here is about a 50% gain off the midterm low, 47.4% for the Dow. NASDAQ has an average 70% gain from the midterm low to the pre-election year high. You can see I've highlighted the clusters of October lows, you can see October midterm years does have a tendency to exhibit volatility and weakness and low point, some famous lows in there, 74, 90, 98, and 02. And you can see in the Dow there's also some early year lows, kind of like we had this year, a lot of them in January. But the significance to me here is the cluster of highs in December and on the last training day of the year and the next year in the pre-election year. So a positive look at the four-year cycle, we may be getting this midterm weakness a little bit later than normal, but midterm years are usually a volatile year and we're seeing some of that happen there where presidents try to push through their most unsavory and more difficult policies. We're seeing that with the tariffs and some other things right here, not to mention some of the investigation stuff going on. But if we can get through this, it might be a very typical midterm bottom, perhaps a little bit later in the year, you can see the Dow bottom in December of 74, it's a generational low. So we could get something a little bit like a midterm bottom here if we haven't seen that already. So moving along, our forecast for 2018 was put out in December of 17 next Thursday before Christmas the 20th, I believe it is, will be the day that we put out our 2019 forecast. The T-leaves were telling us a 5% chance last December of a full-blown midterm bear market caused by something doomsday-ish or no impact from tax reform. I don't think we're getting that right here. Some people are declaring we're in a bear market. I don't see that just yet. We'll need a little bit more on the downside to confirm that. Our base case still on track. We'll take a bit to get through an 8% gain for the year, though it's not inconceivable. And best case scenario, clearly not happening. We thought there was a better chance at the end of December with everything looking quite positive where we would get a big boost and hit a bigger number on the Dow and the rest of the market. But that's where we're at right now. Currently, our market at a glance, and this is one of the features of the Stock Quarters Omanak.com and Omanak Investor Newsletter. We put this out every month. I'm not going to go through all of it, but you can see the five disciplines that we look at. Seasonal, psychological, fundamental, technical, monetary policy, seasonally, very bullish time period. We've got a full docket in December with the January effects. Small caps really start to outperform in mid-December. It's no longer the January effect. It's sort of the mid-December effect. We put out our only free lunch on Wall Street. It's a basket of distress. Small microcap stocks making new 52-week lows on the triple-witching Friday. It's a great trading time. You can option those if that's something you trade. There's a lot of them that are usually optionable. And we send it out to subscribers. It's a great little short-term trading strategy we put out there. It's for nimble traders like yourselves. And then, of course, the Santa Claus Rally. Not a trade that starts in Halloween or Thanksgiving or whatever. It's something that Yale discovered and invented in 1972. It's the last five traded days of the year, the first two of the new year. And when Santa fails to call, bears may come to Broad and Wall. So we'll be watching that week, the last part of the year, the first couple days of the new year, very carefully. So ecologically, bullish sentiment has come off a bit. Fundamental things are still quite firm. The economy is still chugging along quite nicely. Some of the corporate stuff has been, they've lowered some expectations. But for the most part, we still have low unemployment and decent economic growth. Technically, you all know that we're quite challenged trying to reclaim some of the moving averages, trying to find support here. Thankfully and constructively, we have not breached those early year lows. Monetary policy, as I said, fed biggest risk. It's not really inconceivable for them to pause and evaluate things, but we shall see. We'll find out next week. Our December strategy calendar. Some things for traders on here. The bulls, the happy bulls, are historically positive trading days for the S&P 500, days where the S&P has been up more than 60% of the time in the last 21 years. Bearish is the reverse of that. You can see there's other trading highlights around triple-witching, which is very strong in December versus other triple-witching. That's the third Friday of March, June, September, and December, where index futures and options all expire on that same day. Trading around Christmas is bullish. There's a couple ideas there, and then all of the different economic releases for you to keep your eye out. Plus on top, our sector seasonalities that are in play. We've got a nice trade that we just put out in oil in the newsletter on the XLE, the oil stocks, not the commodity. There's a few other ones that are in play here, quite a few, and then some others that are winding up. Oil and also copper comes into play right here, and that's something we'll be looking at considering both of those have come down quite a bit. There's a couple of stocks that we trade in copper, and you probably see one of those on my list when I get to it in a few. The Santa Claus rally. Not what everyone says it is. It is the last five trading days of the year and the first two of the new year. It is not a trading strategy. It is an indicator. Normally, at this time of year, there's an average 1.3% gain in the S&P 500. As most regular retail investors and a lot of people take a break, get with family, and do other things over the holidays, the week between Christmas and New Year's, I myself will be visiting family, which is often what I do do at that point, but this leaves the pros, traders, and such there to gobble up any bargain stocks that have been hit with tax loss selling, and generally a bullish bias here in years when we haven't had a Santa Claus rally have either been flat or down, but usually there's a time later in the year where you can buy stocks at a better price. You can see here since 1994, we've had a negative Santa Claus rally is flat. 2000, we had the bear. 2005 was flat. 2008, we had a bear. 2015 was flat, and we had a mini bear in 2016 that bottomed on February 11th. So that's the little crash course in the Santa Claus rally. And here's the only free lunch on Wall Street. This is the history going back to say four. Back in the old days, there was a saying that stocks making new 52-week lows on December 15th. On the New York Stock Exchange outperformed the composite index itself by February 15th, a two-month trade. We found, running this over the years, that it was better to wait for the tax loss selling to a bait, and we tried different times, and we found the best time to do it is pick stocks from the list on triple witching Friday and December. You had a lot of volume, a lot of action, and it also gives us the weekend to lean through the list and knock out any glaring oddities, things that are very thinly traded, and we try to get a list together that's that's tradable. And we put those stocks out over the weekend to our subscribers so they can get into them before the open on Monday. You can see historically the our picks have beaten the you know composite by about 9% versus you know gain of 11.9% versus 3%. Let me just check back over here make sure everything's good okay. So I'm just toggling back between my screens to the see what's in the chat over there. So, sell in May, go away, the best six months switching strategy, best and worst six months that Yale created devised in 1986. The only you know strategy black box system that's been proven, this gentleman named David Aronson who put out a book in 08 was our best investment book of the year in the Almanac called Evidence based technical analysis. And he and his colleague Timothy Masters at Baruch College did a test, put 6000 plus black box algo trading systems through the scientific method disproving the null hypothesis to see whether they the results were you know the result the returns were the result of chance, or if there was any predictive power they all failed when they took the best six months buying October 31st selling April 30th versus buying April 30th and selling October 31st. At the close of course, since we put it out in 86 so from 87 forward they found that unlike the other 6000 the best six months switching strategy had predictive power and was not the result of chance. So we like to look at different time frames to confirm that different patterns and cycles are relevant or you know sound. So here we have a picture of the Dow Jones industrial one-year seasonal pattern. The red line is 1901 to 1949. The green line is 1988 to 2017 after 87 crash a systemic change to the market and then 1950 to 2017. So you can see back in the old days when this was a farming society when the you know the planting season begins you see the market take off from May through September to getting into harvest time where all the cash was coming to the economy. And since the military industrial complex the service economy kicked in we have this pattern with stock scope relatively nowhere from May through October with increased volatility just like we had this year in October. We got a little bit more right here in November and December too but so that's just a confirm of the best six months pattern visually and let's look at some of the numbers here. So the only going back to 1950 the average gain of the Dow in the best months November to April is seven and a half percent and the worst months it's point six percent May through October and taking a one-time ten thousand dollar investment. This is where you can put some of your trading profits to work over the long haul and do this for many years and build yourself a little bit of a nest egg where you take some of those profits off the table and put them to work. So investing in ten thousand dollars at one time back in 1950 in the best months gives you a gain of over a million dollars and the worst months a gain of only a thousand dollars. Now add in our technical timing trigger MACD something that Cy Harding did a bunch of research on using Jerry Appel's MACD and I use the 8.17.9 for the buy and the 12.26.9 for the sell the faster shorter one for the buy because bottoms tend to be more of an event whereas tops are a process take a little bit longer we use the slower longer MACD for the top and we start looking for our buy signal in after October 1st and ourselves after April 1 so adding in just that simple timing indicator increases the average gain to 9.1% for the best six months minus 0.8 for the worst months and it almost triples the results of that hypothetical ten grand at one time in 1950 to nearly three million and turns the slight gain in the worst months to a loss of over six thousand dollars. We just had our buy signal on October 31st and we're a little bit of a draw down right here but I think it was a good buy point and it was a healthy signal where we came below the zero line for those of you that know your MACD. Richard lost about a half the talk well I hope they're recording this um great thanks Eric and Richard I apologize but you're welcome to call me and again if anybody wants my slides you can email me at jeff.hersh at hershork.com let me ask you to even type that in for you jeff.hersh at they get that right there you go um the MACD numbers Linda uh are 879 for the buy and 12269 for the sell and you can see some images of this stuff on my website if you go through there's also a free trial if um you guys want to uh um you know kick the tires a little bit free seven day trial if you're going to try to read one of the articles but looking here at the um record of the best and worst six months sell in May since 09 I mean we had uh that generational low in 09 and then we had a pretty strong worst six months so I like to keep a record of if things are still working so granted we've had a few um decent worst six months over the past uh what 10 years or so um and uh some mediocre if not kind of lame uh best six months namely uh 2017 um but since October 09 the best months are still outperforming uh the worst months but several fold nine about nine percent to you know 2.3 or 8.2.3 8.7 214 and uh NASDAQ 10.4 to 4.3 last year uh NASDAQ was down um in the worst months and um we're still waiting for it to be up uh this year so so our strategy one of the keys one of the one thing of when everybody asks me what's the one thing you teach people uh about trading it's sell your losers quickly and short sell them you know those gain those losses cut them short and let your winners ride um you can you can monitor those wins and we like to with the smaller stocks that we pick or any of the stocks we pick we'll sell half on a double and take our um you know initial best month's table or you can sort of take a little bit off as you're going up maybe up 40 percent sell 20 up another 40 sell another 20 percent for the kind of stocks that we pick so we do sell some things in May but we don't go away we get rid of losers under performers and we look to go short some stocks or long some industries that do well in the worst months like utilities and defensive positions you'll see some of that um once I move forward here uh as I said we use MACD and other technical tools um it's kind of a risk on risk off thing we get more aggressive in the best months and uh more conservative in the worst months you can use options as I've mentioned and leverage um you know one of the examples um from a good friend of my John Person who I used to do the commodity almanac with uh just a good worst six months sell trade we I was down with him uh working on the um commodity almanac and he was uh looking at the Russell 2000 going up and the um advanced the client going down so we put on a vertical bull call spread for the uh TZX if memory serves the the the triple triple short um uh small cap index and uh um I think it was he was trading about 14 to 15 he bought a 16 sold an 18 for the this was in April for the May expiration of course a Russell cracked came down he covered that I think it was like a 70 80 gain a little trade like that so that's one of the ways to take your trading strategies and your you know options trades if you use that um to capitalize on the the underlying teams we put out there in some of the stocks we recommend here's our tactical uh switching strategy we have um when we put it out there the after the closing on 31st we said we'd be taking uh either the average closing price uh of the next trading day November 1st or uh the buy limit which was whichever was better so we ended up doing a little bit better than the um uh the price uh I think was the buy we got them all there at the buy limit and um yeah we're off a little bit this was updated a few days ago but uh we we hold this without a stop because it's our seasonal trade and we don't want to get whipsawed out and any this kind of volatility right here around this time of year so uh we're comfortable with where we are and I think the market's trying to find some support so we'll be sticking with that now it really works you can ask our subscribers one of our uh the loyal subscribers Richard Canfield um who continues to renew uh has been trading the uh best eight months switching strategy for Nasdaq Nasdaq has the best eight months um goes from October excuse me November to June and you can see uh he initially took about uh I guess a million and a half dollars out of his IRA and has been trading the QQQs using our signals um when people were complaining about uh um there being no action uh he's there pulling in a 17 percent return um using our October buy signal or a June sell signal uh and then back in 2015 um he was pretty uh pretty patient and was able to you know lock in 11 percent return um on just uh one simple trade using our October buy and our June sell so um that's how it's done and that's why we're talking about taking your trading profits and turning them into a retirement Nasdaq by patiently sticking to some of these systems our tactical seasonal sector rotations calendar based upon the um seasonal patterns of the different stock sectors we also uh layer in some of the the you know more defined and more reliable commodity season allies I mentioned copper before uh and you'll see some of the stocks that will trade there the the copper ETF is um you know the one that trades the commodities not really it's pretty thin the other one the COPX that's the stocks isn't bad but we like southern copper and also global brass and copper holdings and um you'll end up seeing those on the newsletter one of them is still on the list so you can see there's a cluster of bullish sectors in um October you see oil as I mentioned the XOI that's the oil stock index which is the XL ETF gets going here in mid-December there's a few shorts on the list uh that you know are most consistent and one of the one of the more pronounced long and shorts is the material sector whoops hold on a second um and I'll show you that a second but this that that that list is from page 92 of the stock traders almanac we've also got a couple of charts on 94 90 96 to show you that our our sector uh seasonality calendar we look at highly correlated ETFs and stocks um current market conditions we look for trade setups and as I said the material sector is a perfect example here is the uh pattern since 1990 going through year end 2017 of the material sector um that's as far back as the data is goes these days so you can see from May through October very pronounced uh worst month bearish period and then from October through um you know mid-May you have this bullish period um pretty clear on this chart one of the more pronounced ones and just using a similar comparison the um performance and the of sector rotation meaning going long the best and short the worst or long the bullish months and short the bearish months gives you a 14 percent return since 1990 versus 5.8 of buy and hold that means just owning the sector all the way through and that same 10 000 um you know hypothetical investment example uh starting in 1990 turns into gains almost 400 grand versus just under 50 grand for buy and hold so just an idea of how uh sector rotation can be uh improved returns here's a look at the materials chart um just updated so you can see the kind of went sideways for a while but man it got slammed in the October carnage and um I think we got out about early in mid-October I think we logged about four or five percent on this but there was a lot to be had here in the downside even right out of the block said you traded that you probably could have shorted this a couple of times if you were you know knowing that the seasonality existed and um we're tracking it and looking for some of the technical weakness like breaking through this doji right here I'm not exactly sure what your styles are but um I think you could probably implement them there here's a look at the uh you know the sectors that we have with the buying spree yes got banged up on a couple things here that stopped out of our uh technology trade but we're getting back into it um you know these things do happen that's where we put stops on some of these our auto sell is about 10 percent above the average return historical return you saw that other chart you can see we've been holding on to healthcare and biotech for a bit because um you know we think that's a a good future there um especially healthcare has been a great winner biotech's a little bit sketchy right now but I think that can come around and you can see some of the um uh defensive plays here the staples we still hung on to nice game there 11 percent so our contention is that studying market history can produce gains like some of the ones here there's one of the copper trades there global brass and copper holdings um southern copper which we've traded ours and networks was one that came through our stock screens as well as united health way back and we still hanging on to united health uh from the sector rotation you can see some some pretty good trades in the materials sector and the financials and the tech stocks as well as the russell 2000 so these are the kinds of things that we're putting uh together with seasonality and trade setups and some technical and fundamental analysis our stock portfolio these are the stocks that we've been picking using our our our technique that i'll tell you about in a couple of minutes or in just a moment um starting in in 19 uh excuse me 2001 the um uh i'm just looking to see you guys got any comments there uh our stock picks with a little bit of you know up and down but again way above the market up 461 versus 122 for the s and p and 220.5 for the russell a lot of our stocks tend to be more russell 2000 type stocks a couple of large gaps so we throw it in there for comparison so let's see richard template let's see thanks richard what about drawdown on seasonal compared to buy and hold um i think you can see the drawdown is is usually um i mean this year's you know the drawdown's negligible uh so far it's a couple of percent but uh i haven't seen any major drawdown on buy and hold i mean on seasonal versus buy and hold more more drawdown on buy and hold like 08 for example in 2000 when a lot of the the carnage happened in the worst months but that's a good question so um our tactical switching strategy buy signal which we just got on october 31st we put out a new um basket of uh you know top ranked hand screen stocks undervalued under wall street's radar accelerating growth technically sound relative strength but not off the charts you've seen some of the fresh allocations to our major averages um you know the the diamond spiders cubes and russells the i w m q q q the sp y and the d i a and then um the allocations into the uh seasonal sector uh the sector ETFs for the seasonal trades now the stock selection process we use uh the zax research wizard to screen for um fundamental criteria uh we have a pretty robust excuse me robust um you know about two dozen or so uh criteria that we screened for we're looking for revenue growth and acceleration earnings growth acceleration uh good margins good valuations with you know PEs uh that are you know comparatively reasonable price to sales ratios like i mentioned earlier good cash flow debt and then ratings is something that we're looking we're not looking for what the ratings are from the different brokerage terms of our houses but how many of them are so if we have two stocks all things being equal and one of them has 20 analysts following it and one of them has three or four or five uh uh analysts following it we're gonna go over the one that's got three or four or five because that's going to be something that's off wall streets radar not a lot of people are following it i i picked up on the story and our screen showing us that the stock's growing it's got good valuations we're looking at the charts making sure there's relative strength but it's not you know running away from us and then um you were going to look for you know points to to get into it on the charts with support and resistance candlesticks moving averages as well as um you know gaps and and uh uh consolidations and different and pivot points and that sort of thing we break it down into different market caps under a billion a small cap for us one billion of five billion is mid cap and over five is large cap and of course on the short side we invert that and look for stocks that are losing money or the revenues you know uh uh decelerating or decreasing and earnings are going down and they're overvalued and you know negative chart pattern maybe failing at support or failing at resistance or something like that are breaking through support and of course our seasonal overlay we'll look at some sector season alien strength as well um like for defensive best we put out earlier this year that did quite well and still doing well october or even you know august september october we're looking for uh stocks to go long once we get through the best eight months in june we'll start to look for some stocks to short uh and there are some other ideas to come up throughout the year so um here's a look at the defensive basket we put out back in june where it was um just in september or even at that point before the market cracked but we're still you know beating the s and p there's a lot of dividends that came through there just about the um a better yield but and about the same about return uh some of these are still on a list i'll show you the current portfolio in just a minute then in november we put out this um new long stock basket with a little uh description of what they do you can see the small caps we got a few of them there uh good chunk of mid caps we've got sales growth pe's price to sales ratio market value there's a yield and then a buy limit and a stop loss and here's where we are as of uh about a month ago uh pretty much around the same we did get stopped out of a few things this uh momentum stock uh they lost a big client so that one we got that pinged down we got rid of that but um a lot of the other ones are doing well and you can look at some of the uh um um what do you call the um the the offensive ones to pick McCormick back in june up 39 percent uh church in july at up 30 percent so some of these uh nice stocks that we picked even back in you know you know remember when things were still down that's some nice numbers here the recent batch whoops the recent basket we picked some of them are a little bit of a drawdown right here but um i think we'll be doing pretty well with these uh in another month or so so there's some opportunities for people to get into stocks uh at this juncture right here just seeing where we're at so um again i think uh i just want to you know sort of wrap it up a little bit and open the floor to questions but i want to remind you guys that you know the 2019 stock critters almanac is here if you want to get a free copy of that with your subscription you can go to the website at stocktradersalmanac.com and punch in that code there ctu one year ctu two years we'll send you the almanac and you'll be in for the only free lunch on wall street picks our santa claus rally and january barometer indicators as well as um a host of different uh seasonal uh sector and commodity trades we'll be looking at copper coming in there natural gas comes around in december uh excuse me in february um and there'll be uh you know several other stock and etf uh you know trades and trading ideas throughout the year as well as some shorts in the summer and some defensive positions in the in the later in the spring and um our current and ongoing advice on you know what we think about these individual stocks of trades and where our stops are and when to get in and out so actionable trading advice and comparatively speaking it's quite a deal for um the kind of prices that i'm seeing out there you kind of get a class every week every month and what we're looking at uh and we're always here if you want to give us a call and have questions about things so um give us a shot and some of the benefits you know we have uh these expanded model stock portfolios targeted strategies for growth and income you see also some of that the defensive basket frequent updates and analysis on all of our trading and investing ideas you get the tactical switching strategy sector rotation and etf portfolios the market glance what they showed you the monthly outlook and the almanac i got into a little bit our strategy calendar you saw the best six months buying sell signals and all our portfolio updates the stocks that have been uh beating the s and p 461 that's 122 percent and of course the free almanac so um with that i'm going to see if anybody has any uh questions over here so let's see um thanks hillary uh you're in linda all right well send us a note jeff dot her should uh hershoor.com or or go sign up at the website give us a call either way um i guess the phone number i could give you is<PHONE_NUMBER> is that right if so it's also on the website it's doctorisomnac.com um so robert what initial investment is recommended for beginners fast so fasto uh mentioned that we can get a feed of level three data for $15 if someone talked about that i don't know about that you can get my newsletter for $19.95 a month though so um hopefully uh we can help you guys um you know take some of these trading profits and uh put them into a retirement nest egg so i can just go back through here if you want to see what the deal is some of the stocks is that what people want to look at well see if anyone's got a question if not you know it's okay we can wrap up a little bit early i'll give it a few minutes i'm sure everyone's got lots more to do thanks jim maybe i spoke too fast uh try to you know get him in or again uh get him out early you know all right well you guys know where to reach me stockchartisomnac.com you got our number you can email me i'll send you the slides you can call me we can talk about you know other things uh if you want you know more detailed explanations on things uh how do i send the powerpoint to this gentleman can you email me or can you send me your email address um you can do this subscription monthly it's 1995 a month but the year subscription is um a better deal for you it's uh $150 and you get the stockchartisomnac which is $50 retail you can probably buy it for i don't know 25 or 30 bucks on amazon but um two years 250 buck on a quarter a year you get free omnac and all the stuff regularly it's gonna be um you know uh about 240 for the for the year if you do it monthly it's you know 239 40 or you can get two years for 250 so again you could shoot me an email or send me yours and i'll uh send you the slides and and um see if you can't you can also uh check out a free trial for seven days and see everything we do any general questions about the stock market about the fed whether they will cut or won't they i think they'll probably raise their quarter and say we're gonna pause that's my guess ready guys i'm gonna sign off um i'll send you the slides anyone else wants them just hit me at jeff.hershedhershorg.com hey jeff thanks for that coming and uh everyone make sure you take up jeff on his offer at the stock traders almanac and jeff's always great meeting up with you and thanks for taking the time to talk to everybody and like i said it's always uh always look forward to have you on old friend i appreciate it fast i looked like a couple questions just popped in so um what are what are your feelings about the volatility due to algor trading i think the volatility is not due to algor trading i think it's due to overvaluation and the tariff wars and the fed mostly the fed being a little bit wishy washy uh saying we're gonna keep cutting and then oh wait we're pretty close so i think that's created some of the volatility the way ever you just stop on seasonals yes uh on the seasonal sectors on the best and worst six months as we get deeper into it we'll you know add a stop to it um but right here right now with our um you know dow s and p nasdaq and russell etf positions or holding that without a stop and i and i think it it's paid off right now with the volatility so again thank you guys i'll send you um the slides the guys sent me the email address and once again fasto appreciate it buddy have a great uh great holidays everybody and uh be safe and have fun you too you too jeff thanks a lot


Since the last campaign actually we have been going through a brand introspection and while we have many products, panels or what you call ply, what we call panels, is our bread and butter business. So that's the big one. One of the key things in this category is advertising has been ad hoc, across the category, from competition, from us, there has been no serious brand building or category building. Forget brand, even category building has not happened. So what has really happened is people still serious as a commodity. Last time I met you, I think it was still the same thing but my conviction continues that we will make this a paints kind of a category where the commodity becomes a brand. I hope competition also follows suit and gives us good advertising propositions for the consumers to make this category into a consumer brand. Within that introspection we realized that one of the key issues for people not understanding plywood is also because it's a background product. You don't really see that product or feel that product and hence maybe your involvement with the product is not too high or you have not given it a thought as a consumer or that kind of a product. But what you don't realize is using bad quality or poor quality has a cost to it, a cost of replacement and a cost of social embarrassment. These are the two pillars that we build our latest campaign on. The cost of replacement can be very high. It can be actually replacing your whole interiors that you have made which includes your laminates, vineyards, paints, everything else because the plywood inside was bad. It got border infested, termite infested or water infested or whatever happened. So hence this campaign is built on that, the campaign idea is interesting but the objective is to instill in the minds of consumers the fact that the cost of using bad quality and that technically is category agnostic. Cost of replacement and the social embarrassment is best avoided by using the right quality. So that is the basis of the campaign. It's just become more effective I think and that's about it. I mean century ply has not been known for and I don't have any qualms of saying this has not been known for very continuous advertising but good advertising. It has done good advertising but not very continuous sustained brand building advertising. It's only last three years that we are sustaining our advertising. The good part has been retained. I think the TVC's and the rest of the campaigns have been appreciated and that kind of keeps us going and getting more excited about it. We use the best of the people to create these campaigns. So that's been the continuity in that bit. What has come in of course is that we have started using digital to a great extent to a much larger extent than we earlier did or believed in that media and retail saliency has come up in a big way. So it's almost now slowly becoming a consumer brand. So people see century ply more often than they used to earlier. While it was earlier restricted to influencers and trade today consumers get to see century ply more often and eventually I think hence they will start believing in the brand also far better than the current earlier date. So that's the way it is. GST is going to be a great market leveler in this category. They will be affecting many more categories of course but for commodity categories for building material categories etc which has a lot of unorganized market it's going to be a great leveler. One it will help us reduce our prices dramatically. I mean we are perceived as a costly product which we have no qualms about because we give that kind of quality but it will still help us bring down our cost in a manner or hence price in a manner. So there will definitely be an effect to that. The other part with the bigger part is that the unorganized market will be shaken up. They will not be able to afford this kind of pricing that they currently play on the undercutting that they currently do the local market playing that they do they cannot do that. So that will ensure that their prices come up quite much. So hence the consumer hence will have so if the difference was almost 30% 40% now between a branded product versus an unbranded product it will come down to 10%. So to that extent what will happen is a consumer would rather pay that 10% extra for far superior quality than afford or take unbranded product and kill himself for that. So you know that is going to be a major leveler in the industry. Also it will make our life far more simpler both for dealers, trade channels, consumers because it's one India one pricing after that. So the MRP in real sense will come up. So it's one India one pricing Kerala pricing versus Kashmir pricing will be the same and that's for most products. So that's going to change consumer behavior completely. So that's going to affect industry and many other categories together. So let's get picking.