Final Part of the Legacy Research Annual Report Card

The S&P 500 has just crossed above 5,000 points for the first time ever.

That means the market has gained 124% from the March 2020 low… And it’s up a staggering 640% from the March 2009 low.

As an investor, what does that tell you? And how does it make you feel?

Does it prove that stocks will always go up… if given enough time?

Or does it make you even more worried that another major crash is just around the corner?

However you feel, one thing is certain: from a financial perspective, you need someone to give you a guiding hand.

The fact that you’re here, reading our content, is proof of that.

That’s one of the reasons we decided to publish an Annual Report Card. Over the past few months, we’ve realized – even more than we thought before – just how much our subscribers rely on our advice.

That’s a big responsibility. And we need to make sure we’re fulfilling it by making sure we put the best people and best ideas in front of you.

The only way we can do that with complete honesty and transparency is to publish our track records and grade the individual performances.

If something isn’t working, we can figure out why and fix it.

And with the markets where they are now, as we head deeper into 2024, you need to work out now which of our publications will best serve you this year.

Our Report Card, grading system, and commentary on the individual results will help you do that.

So, let’s get into it. But first, a brief summary of what went into putting this Report Card together…

Our Most Complicated Report Card Yet

In Part I of the Report Card published two weeks ago, we explained the full details of how we put this Report Card together.

We explained the methods used… the data we relied on… the interpretations we’ve made… and how we settled on the individual grades.

So if you need a refresher, go here to read part one. And if you missed part two, where we covered our premium-level investment services, go here.

This third part is where we’ll focus on the premium-level trading services. Frankly, this was the most complicated to compile and analyze.

That’s mostly because these services use more sophisticated strategies. Of the 14 services we look at today, only one of them involves buying stocks as its sole strategy.

The rest may include a stocks element, but their main focus is options, currencies, or other alternative investments.

Like last week, the diverse nature of the recommendations means we’ve had to use different benchmarks – a total of six different benchmarks.

Furthermore, for some of the services, we’ve even had to adjust how we measure the returns.

Without doing so, the results would have been meaningless, or at least, not representative of the subscriber experience.

We’ll explain more when we get into each of those reports. Fair warning: we realize doing this opens us up to accusations that we’re manipulating the results.

But we think you’ll agree, once you read our explanation, that presenting the results this way allows us to better reflect what a typical subscriber may have experienced.

Plus, as we’ll follow the same method next year, it now gives us a benchmark, so that we can compare one year to the next, using the same method.

And so, with that explanation taken care of, let’s look at our Legacy Research Annual Report Card for our premium-level trading services…

The 2024 Legacy Research Annual Report Card

And now we’ll go through the individual results and the thinking behind why each service received the grade it did. We start with the first of four services to receive a top-mark A+ grade…

Delta Report
Grade: A+

We start this final Report Card by reviewing a service run by the only Legacy Research expert to receive an A+ for his entry-level service.

That is Jeff Clark, and his flagship premium-level trading service, Delta Report.

This year marks the beginning of the eighth year that Legacy Research has helped Jeff publish Delta Report.

This publication provides a genuine multi-strategy approach for investors. And while many associate Jeff with his plays on gold, he’s happy to trade options on any stock in any sector.

Scanning through his trades over the past seven years, we see that Jeff has traded Newmont Mining (NEM) in the mining sector, Intel (INTC) in the tech sector, Citigroup (C) in the banking sector, Viacom (VIAB) in the media sector, Macy’s (M) in the retail sector, and Exxon Mobil (XOM) in the energy sector.

There seems to be nothing Jeff won’t trade.

And looking at the list of trades from our reference period, that timeframe was no different. Gold, silver, online gambling, financials, EVs, and apparel stocks.

One of his best-performing trades was a two-part profit trade on Rivian (RIVN). That involved taking a “free ride” when the option price doubled, locking in a 116% gain.

He then closed the second half of the trade two days later for a 236% gain – giving an average return of 176% across the combined trade.

(Note: You can only take a “free ride” on options if you trade two or more contracts. It’s not possible to split or part-sell a single options contract.)

And towards the end of last year, Jeff told his subscribers to take another “free ride.” That’s when he took a 122% gain on Beyond Meat (BYON) call options. He closed the other half of the trade for a 329% return.

That’s a combined winning trade of 225%.

But the best thing about Jeff’s trading is that he doesn’t just run a single strategy. He’ll often recommend a “combination” trade. That involves buying or selling an option of one type and buying or selling an option of another type.

A great example of that is a trade Jeff recommended last October. He recommended selling $20 put options on Penn National Gaming (PENN), and at the same time buying $22.50 call options on the same stock.

Potentially, that gives the trader the opportunity to win twice. In this instance, as long as the PENN stock price remained above $20, the trader would keep any premium received – around $120 by the time Jeff recommended closing the trade.

Plus, if the stock price went above $22.50, the trader would have the chance to win on that part of the trade.

As it turns out, that’s exactly what happened. The result was any trader who followed Jeff’s recommendation, had the chance to lock in another $95 or so per contract traded.

The result of this effort was an excellent 79.2% trading gain, based on an account size of $5,000. And assuming you made all the trades. Such a return would have allowed you to turn that $5,000 account into $8,959.

No mean feat. It also beat the benchmark, which in this case is the S&P 500, by more than two-to-one.

And it wasn’t just Jeff’s returns, his excellent win rate of 77.5% meant his followers had significantly more wins than losses, with an average time in each trade of just 34 days.

All up, an outstanding result, and well-deserving of another A+ grade for Jeff Clark.

Delta Direct
Grade: D-

Now on to Jeff’s trading blog service. Here Jeff sends market updates to subscribers two to three times per day – morning, afternoon, and near the close of trading.

The results here didn’t match Jeff’s Delta Report performance. With just a 50% win rate on 20 trades in total during our reference period and a return of -12.9%, we had to mark Jeff low on this one.

As we look at the individual trades, Jeff focused on options on ETFs (exchange-traded funds). The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) and the VanEck Gold Miners ETF (GDX) are the two Jeff traded the most.

Our guess is that perhaps once too often he tried to time a turn in the market. Hence a handful of 100% losing positions as those trades expired worthless.

Of course, while losses are hard to take, that’s one of the benefits of buying call and put options. You know your maximum loss in advance. So it acts like a stop loss.

Providing you don’t go crazy, buying more contracts than you should, the limited risk of buying call and put options is a great way to profit from big market moves.

(Note: When you “sell-to-open” an options contract, you don’t have limited risk. Your broker will require that you have a margin account, and you will need to show your broker that you understand the risks before they approve your account.)

Fortunately for Delta Direct subscribers, the only way to get access to this service is by also subscribing to Delta Report. In which case, the relatively small -12.9% loss on Delta Direct trades would be more than covered by the trade performance for Delta Report.

But because it does run its own trades, we’ll still grade it separately. Due to running at a loss, and not matching the benchmark, we can only award Delta Direct a D-.

Forever Portfolio
Grade: A

The Forever Portfolio was a portfolio service Jeff launched in October 2022.

In fact, he launched it on October 13, 2022 – one day after the beginning of our reference period, and the exact beginning of the current leg of the bull market.

So, his timing was perfect.

And the returns he’s been able to generate in the Forever Portfolio are close to perfect too. The idea behind this service is that, from time to time, Jeff can identify beaten-down stocks that he believes are set for a turnaround.

To take advantage of that, Jeff uses two strategies – a stock strategy and an options strategy.

The stock strategy is exactly that. You buy an equal position in each of the recommended stocks.

The options strategy involves a combination trade, where you sell a put option and buy a call option on the same stock. We won’t go into the full details here, but it’s broadly similar to the strategy Jeff uses sometimes in Delta Report.

Based on the results, it has worked terrifically well. For this Report Card, we’ve combined the stock and options trades into a single portfolio.

That means, overall, the Forever Portfolio has a win rate of 70% and a total trading gain of 30.6%. That compares to a 33.3% return for the S&P 500 over the same timeframe.

Considering this is a relatively conservative strategy, the slight underperformance compared to the index is no reason to deduct any marks.

We give this service a well-deserved A grade.

Currency Trader
Grade: F

The Currency Trader service is the first of the services where we’ve had to make a significant change to how we record the results.

We’ll explain the reasoning here.

Foreign currency trading is different from the other strategies, services, and assets we publish. That’s because currency trading involves built-in leverage.

That means, if you want to control (for example) a currency trade size of $20,000 you can do so by using no leverage. That would mean depositing $20,000 in your trading account and then trading that exact amount.

Or, depending on the trading platform you use, you may be able to deposit only $1,000, which would also allow you to control a trade size of $20,000.

If the trade goes the right way, both traders would make the same profit (let’s say it’s a 10% move). The first trader, using no leverage, would record a 10% return – a $2,000 gain on a $20,000 trading balance.

But the trader who only deposited $1,000 would also make a $2,000 gain. For them, it would be a 200% return on their trading balance.

You see the issue we have.

(Note: We’ve used the same method for Larry Benedict’s Currency Wizard service. We’ll review that performance below.)

Our reckoning is that when someone opens a forex (foreign exchange) trading account, they would have deposited a set amount, and used that as the “float” for their trading.

Further, we figure they would likely use that initial deposit balance as their reference point for measuring whether they’ve profited from the trades.

Second, we had to decide on a reasonable number. Again, without going into the full details, we’ve chosen a starting account balance of just under $9,000.

The reason for this is we chose what we felt to be a reasonable and reflective average trade size and a reasonable and reflective amount of leverage that a typical subscriber may use. For that, we’ve gone with 6:1 leverage.

For forex trading, we believe this is quite conservative, and therefore doesn’t unrealistically “juice” positive returns, and it doesn’t unfairly penalize average or poor returns.

Now that we’ve covered that, how did Currency Trader perform? This service was launched by Imre Gams in October 2022 – just after the beginning of our reference period.

Overall, the service started quite well, apart from a larger loss on the third trade after launching.

Imre was able to help his subscribers recover from that until the middle of 2023. But from then, the forex market became less favorable, and Imre found himself on the wrong side of as many trades as he was on the right side.

That resulted in a number of losses with the gains not big enough to make up for it.

In terms of performance, Currency Trader had a decent 68% win rate. Unfortunately, based on our methodology, a starting balance of $8,588 would have recorded a -43.3% loss. That’s the equivalent of losing $3,721.

It also greatly underperformed the benchmark. For this service, we benchmarked it against the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY), which recorded a -6.2% loss over the same period.

Look, we’ve graded it an F, due to the size of the loss. However, we will give credit to Imre for his risk management discipline.

We can tell you that many people who get into forex trading lack a risk management discipline at all and end up blowing up their entire account. We look forward to Imre turning around the Currency Trader track record this year.

Currency Wizard
Grade: A+

As mentioned, we used the same methodology for Larry Benedict’s Currency Wizard forex service.

This service launched in April last year.

Over his nearly 40 years as a trader and hedge fund manager, Larry has traded more than $500 billion worth of foreign currencies – an insanely large amount for the average person to understand.

In Larry’s service, he only traded two currency “pairs” – the British pound sterling against the U.S. dollar… and the euro against the U.S. dollar.

That was it. A perfect example of keeping it simple.

Along with four options trades, it meant Larry only issued a total of 20 trades from launch through to the end of the year.

As a result, he was able to produce an excellent return of 16.5% on a typical trading balance, using 6:1 leverage (slightly more conservative than the 7:1 suggested by Larry).

This compares to a 0.3% return for the benchmark U.S. Dollar Index.

For this reason, we’ve awarded Larry an A+. Like Imre, Larry is a strong advocate for risk management. In fact, if you ask him, Larry will always tell you that his number one priority is to manage risk.

The thing we like most of all about the returns here, and why we’ve awarded it an A+, is that it shows you don’t need to take outsized and irresponsible risks when trading currencies.

If you play it right, even fairly conservatively, you can build your account balance over time. Those who followed Larry’s trades in 2023 have a great opportunity to build on their balance in 2024.

S&P Trader
Grade: A+

Another one of Larry’s tremendously successful services is S&P Trader.

In S&P Trader, the focus is on trading “zero day to expiry” (0DTE) options. These options, as the name suggests, expire at the end of each day.

Importantly, Larry’s strategy here is more of an income-generating options strategy, rather than seeking to profit from big moves.

The perfect market action for these trades is for the S&P 500 to remain within a specific price band.

This is why, even though we’ve used the S&P as the benchmark, a more appropriate benchmark could be an income-generating index.

But the S&P 500 benchmark is still relevant. An investor has the choice between being a passive investor, collecting dividends from a stock portfolio, or taking a more active approach.

The active approach is to look at the market each day and determine the bounds within which you believe the market will trade. That’s the S&P Trader approach.

Just note that when we say this is an active strategy, we mean it. Through our reference period, Larry issued 403 trades.

Furthermore, this isn’t a pick-and-choose service. To make the most of these trades, a trader needs to take on every trade. That’s because while Larry has a high win rate of 81.7%, there’s no telling in advance (as with any trade) which trades will be winners and which losers.

So a trader needs to be prepared and ready to action each trade.

As for the results, if a trader traded a single contract, they would have returned a total profit of $3,891 for the year. If they traded two contracts, it would be $7,782. Three contracts, $11,673.

What does that mean in percentage terms? Again, we use a similar method to how we calculated the returns for the forex services. We’ve assumed a typical trader would deposit $10,000 into their trading account to support these trades.

Such a starting balance allows for trading profit and loss fluctuations, and any margin requirements. In which case, a $10,000 starting balance would have grown by 38.9% to $13,891.

Of course, we acknowledge this isn’t a perfect measure. But we feel it would be representative of a typical trader’s experience, and the service is well-deserving of an A+ grade.

Opportunistic Trader
Grade: F

Next, we move on to Opportunistic Trader. This was Larry’s first trading service, which he launched with the assistance of Legacy Research in 2019.

Opportunistic Trader recommends buying calls and puts only. Larry looks for specific market and sector trends and seeks to help traders profit from those trends by betting on the stocks rising and falling.

Larry is a “mean reversion” trader. That means he looks for stocks that have either climbed too high relative to the historical price action or have fallen too low relative to the historical price action.

Based on that, Larry will recommend either call options or put options.

The strategy worked well from the publication’s launch in 2019 through to the end of 2022.

In 2020, the service recorded a 58% return. In 2021 a 48% return. In 2022, a big 180% return.

But in 2023, it was the first losing year since launching the service. Overall, the service recorded a -56.5 loss, with a win rate of 59.1%.

As it happens, that win rate is in line with the average over the previous three years. The difference is that the trades didn’t capitalize on the market’s big moves in 2023… a year largely dominated by the “Magnificent Seven” stocks.

Regardless, it was a bad year for Opportunistic Trader. For that reason, we can’t give it anything better than an F grade.

The 2/20 Report
Grade: C-

Larry’s final service for us to review is The 2/20 Report. The publication name refers to the common fee structure in the hedge fund industry.

Hedge funds will typically charge a 2% fee on all assets under management. They will then charge a 20% performance fee from all profits generated for the year.

If the fund doesn’t generate a profit, no fee. If it generates a big profit, that’s a big fee.

Unlike most of our premium-level services, which promise fast-action trades, or big percentage gains, the 2/20 Report promises neither.

Instead, it provides access to the kind of ideas that most regular investors will struggle to get.

So far, this has mostly included high-yielding “structured notes.” But how do they work? We’ll keep this simple.

A structured note may offer terms similar to the following: the promise to pay a 10% yield, providing the value of (say) the S&P 500 doesn’t fall below a certain level.

If the stock index stays above that level, you get back your money at the end of the term (say, two years), plus you’ll receive the income from the structured note. In this case, a 10% yield.

But if the index falls below certain levels, it triggers certain events, such as the non-payment of the yield.

In other words, there is an element of risk with these. You could, in effect, end up lending money to a big bank for two years, and then not receive a penny in interest, because a stock index fell below a certain level.

As with any investment, there are “good” structured notes, and “bad” structured notes. Larry and his team’s job is to filter one from the other.

So far, they’ve done that with great success.

However, the track record has been slightly below par. Part of that reason is one of the structured notes isn’t due to pay the income stream until March 2025. That means we’re unable to record it as a gain right now.

That’s why, the service has a track record performance of -2.4%. If we add the expected yield of 15.2% to the track record, it would lift the overall return to 3.7%.

That’s better, but still short of the returns a subscriber would like to see from a hedge-fund-style service.

For that reason, we’ve had to mark this as a C- grade.

Intelligent Options Advisor
Grade: A+

Now we look at two options income services. First, Intelligent Options Advisor from Wide Moat Research, with Stephen Hester.

Stephen’s approach is simple. He looks for good quality companies he would be happy to own, but instead of immediately buying the stock, he recommends selling put options against the stock.

It’s a strategy commonly used by wealthy individuals, who use it as a way to generate an extra income stream.

We’ll use one of Stephen’s trades to illustrate how it works.

In January last year, Stephen recommended selling the March $200 put option on Lowe’s Companies (LOW) stock. At the time, the stock traded around $210.

But Stephen didn’t want to pay that much. He thought $200 was a fairer price. Hence selling the $200 put option.

By selling the put option, an investor must buy the stock for $200 if the stock price is below $200 at the time of expiry.

In return for taking on that obligation, the investor selling the put received $11.50. This is known as the premium.

As it happens, when the options contract expired in March. The stock was at $197. That meant the investor had to pay $200 per share, even though it traded on the open market for $3 less than that.

However, remember the $11.50? The investor keeps that. So in effect, the investor’s net entry price is $188.50 (that’s $200 paid for the stock, less the $11.50 premium received).

Even better, ultimately, Stephen’s call was right. It was a company he wanted to own anyway… just at a cheaper price. And by the end of the year, the stock price had rallied to $225. That’s a 19.4% return on the effective entry price.

Compare that to the investor who would have paid $210 when Stephen recommended the initial options trade. Their gain is only 7.1%.

This is the power of using options strategies to generate short-term income, with the possibility of longer-term capital growth.

It’s also why Stephen produced such a strong track record during our reference period. From the inception of the service in late October 2022 through to the end of last year, Stephen had helped investors generate an 18.1% return.

That’s nearly five times better than the benchmark we’ve chosen to measure this service against. You see, this is an income service, not a capital growth service.

The perfect scenario for these trades is that the stock never falls below the exercise price level. This means the investor can just keep selling put options and banking the premium.

For that reason, we can’t measure it against a growth benchmark – the S&P 500. Instead, we’ve chosen the Bloomberg U.S. Treasury Index. This index measures a basket of U.S. Treasury bonds and their yields.

For the yield, we’ve used what’s known as the “yield-to-worst.” In simple terms, that means the worst possible yield you could get today from investing directly in those bonds and holding them through to maturity.

We see this as the fairest comparison, as folks who follow a strategy such as this are more focused on the regular income streams than they are on the capital growth.

And with an 18.1% return for our reference period, and even with a relatively low win rate of 58.5% Stephen has managed to beat Treasury yields and produce an income stream that’s more than nine times greater than that available from purely owning S&P 500 stocks.

A well-deserved A+ grade.

Alpha Edge
Grade: B-

The Palm Beach Alpha Edge service offers a similar strategy to Intelligent Options Advisor.

The main difference is that Alpha Edge will often try to enhance the income even further if they end up owning the stock. They will do this by selling call options against that stock.

The man responsible for operating this service is Michael Gross.

Overall, Alpha Edge recorded a pretty good result, and it too outperformed the benchmark, but by a smaller margin.

The gain for Alpha Edge was a modest 5.2% return, beating the 4.3% benchmark return.

However, the performance could have been even better, a respectable 7.1% return, if not for an untimely trade in Charles Schwab Corp (SCHW) last February. That’s when trouble was running through the banking sector and the bond markets.

But we won’t overly punish the service for this one misstep. But based on the returns, and comparing it to a similar service (Intelligent Options Advisor), we have knocked it down a couple of grades.

We graded Alpha Edge a B-.

The Map
Grade: C

Finally, we move on to our two stock trading services.

First, The Map, with Mason Sexton in charge. Mason has traded the markets for over 40 years.

He famously called the top of the market in 1987, and then just a week before the crash, he told his clients to sell… and he went further by recommending short-selling a number of stocks.

Mason’s strength is his ability to pinpoint key market turns, often months in advance. For example, when we launched the service last May, Mason identified the period around July 17 as a likely market top.

He got the initial call almost dead right. The market fell… rallied back to that high a week later… and then fell more than 10% over the next three months.

One of the features of Mason’s service is that he doesn’t just trade stocks “long,” he short-sells too – looking for opportunities to profit from a falling market.

So far, The Map has a low win rate of just 47.5%, but due to the strict risk management policy of using stop losses, Mason has avoided any major losses.

That has resulted in an overall performance of -0.1%. We can effectively call that a breakeven record.

But, there is a lot of trading activity. Since its inception last May through to the end of December, Mason has issued 59 trades.

We’ve chosen as our benchmark, the First Trust Long/Short Equity ETF (FTLS). By comparison, this ETF, which also seeks to profit from rising and falling markets, recorded a 9.9% return.

For that reason, we can only give The Map a C grade for now.

The Signal
Grade: C+

Finally, The Signal. The man behind this service is Phillip J. Anderson. Phil is an Australian-born economist, who now spends most of the year moving between his homes in Indonesia and France.

Phil’s entire philosophy rests on what he refers to as the 18.6-year real estate cycle.

Unlike most economists, who look at government data… unemployment numbers… GDP… interest rates… and inflation… Phil’s main focus is on the one thing he says influences everything else – land values.

Only when you understand that – and the relationship and effect it has on the broader economy – will you be able to predict when markets are set to boom and when they’re set to bust.

A perfect example of that was last year. From 2022 onwards, every economist claimed the U.S. was guaranteed to head into a recession in 2023 or early 2024.

Phil was the only economist we know of who said that wouldn’t happen. He even went so far as to “promise” stocks wouldn’t crash in 2023 (they didn’t).

And he went one step further by recommending housing-related stocks to subscribers of his Signal trading service.

His best-performing pick was M/I Homes (MHO), which recorded a 47.4% gain. That was at a time when the markets were still reeling from the recent bank failures and talk of recession was everywhere.

That said, the track record of The Signal has underperformed its benchmark. Due to the nature of the recommendations, which are mostly midcap stocks, we’ve benchmarked it against the SPDR S&P Midcap 400 ETF Trust (MDY).

Since the inception of Phil’s service, he has recorded an overall 4.6% gain. That compares to the midcap ETF gain of 11.2%.

So, it’s still a gain but falls short of the benchmark. For that reason, we grade it as a C+.

And now let’s review the two services we discontinued last year…

Neural Net Profits
Grade: C-

The Neural Net Profits crypto trading service originated under the Brownstone Research franchise within Legacy Research.

The premise behind this service was to use machine learning and AI to help deliver a way to trade a select group of cryptos.

The service had some success, although, during our reference period, it only recorded an overall return of 3.2%. This was below the benchmark (Bitcoin), which returned 44.2%.

With the departure of Jeff Brown from Brownstone Research in 2023, we decided to close the service in order for Colin Tedards to concentrate on ideas that fit more closely with his background and expertise.

For Neural Net Profits, the best grade we could award is a C-.

Earnings Trader
Grade: F

Earnings Trader was likely Jeff’s biggest disappointment for 2023.

The idea behind this service was that Jeff would use his knowledge of stock behavior around earnings and combine it with his trading strategy to pick off easy wins around earnings season.

In the end, it didn’t play out that way.

The service got off to a good start when it launched in mid-2022. But as time went on the ongoing results couldn’t match the early promise.

One problem was that as we moved into a bearish market, a slowing economy, and rising interest rates, companies started missing earnings estimates, or guided them lower. That made earnings season during most of 2023 a coin flip.

It’s a shame because we know for sure the performance wasn’t due to Jeff’s trading ability. His A+ for Delta Report and B+ for Forever Portfolio is proof of that.

But regretfully, due to the poor performance (29% win rate and average return of -44.4%), we had little choice but to close this service in December last year.

There was one other publication we closed during our reference period. That was Jeff Clark’s Breakout Alert.

However, it closed one month after the beginning of the starting date for our report card, so any grading and commentary on it for that period would be meaningless.

That concludes our first-ever Legacy Research Annual Report Card. We hope you’ve been able to get something out of it.

We’ve gone through this process to show you that we’re accountable for the services we provide you and the money and time you invest in our services.

We know we don’t get everything right, and we’re sure this final part of the Report Card will draw some criticism. So please, do give us your feedback.

We’ve received a bunch of emails over the past few weeks and will publish a selection of those next Friday, along with our comments.

To give your feedback, you can email me directly, straight to my inbox: [email protected].

Remember, that email doesn’t reach me via a customer service team. It comes straight to my personal inbox. And while I can’t answer your email personally, I do read each one.

I look forward to hearing from you.

And now, let’s finish with today’s market action…

Market Data

The S&P 500 closed up 0.6% to end the day at 5,026.61… the NASDAQ gained 1.3% to close at 15,990.66.

In commodities, West Texas Intermediate crude oil trades at $76.51, up four cents…

Gold is $2,039 per troy ounce, down $9… And bitcoin is $47,589 up $2,214 since yesterday.

More Markets

Today’s top gaining ETFs…

• Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF (BLOK) +4.7%

• Invesco Dorsey Wright Technology Momentum ETF (PTF) +3.5%

• Invesco Semiconductors ETF (PSI) +3.2%

• Invesco S&P SmallCap Information Technology ETF (PSCT) +3.1%

• First Trust Brazil AlphaDEX Fund (FBZ) +2.5%

Today’s biggest losing ETFs…

• Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE) -1.5%

• Fidelity MSCI Energy Index ETF (FENY) -1.4%

• Vanguard Energy Index Fund (VDE) -1.4%

• First Trust Nasdaq Oil & Gas ETF (FTXN) -1.4%

• iShares U.S. Energy ETF (IYE) -1.4%

Cheers,

Kris Sayce
Editor, The Daily Cut