When it comes to stock market timing strategies, years such as 2011 are fraught with challenges. 2011 was a go-nowhere, trendless, volatile, news driven, gap up/gap down market environment that some would argue represents the most challenging year in the history of the NASDAQ Composite which is now 42 years old, as 1971 was its birth year.
Consequently, stock market timing results were quite dismal across most all stock market timing services. Even tried-and-true market timing services with 10+ year track records were caught out, finishing the year in the red. The esteemed trend following wizards were collectively down, with down double digit percentages in 2011: http://www.automated-trading-system.com/trend-following-wizards-december/
And then in January 2012, when the market finally started to trend again, it was easy to disbelieve the trend, since 2011 was rife with 2 week trends that quickly came to a violent end. Thus, by the third week of January 2012, it then seemed a bit late to join the party trend. Indeed, the trend following wizards, after a brutal 2011, continued to see red in January 2012 with the group collectively down for the month: http://www.automated-trading-system.com/trend-following-wizards-january-2012/. Meanwhile, the NASDAQ Composite scored a +5.44% return for the month.
At Virtue of Selfish Investing, we jumped on board a number of leading stocks in January to capitalize on the trend, issuing key reports in real-time to our members who then could act on these buy timing signals, which well outperformed the major averages: https://www.virtueofselfishinvesting.com/reports/view/MLR-2012-so-far-so-good
For those who valiantly were able to find pocket pivots on their own in leading names in real-time, such investors were able to utilize our other services in a manner that rounded out their trading. We discuss our other services here which include ETF picks using our stock market timing model.
Stay vigilant and the trade of a lifetime often comes around every few weeks.