TPM is too small to even make a ripple in the ocean of the financial market. Ah, but Fidelity, Vanguard, Blackrock, Goldman, and many others are the “Big Elephants.” And like a 300 lb. person jumping into a neighborhood pool, their splash is unmistakable when they are parading in. The same is true when they are stampeding out. Either way, their “footprints” are unmistakable. It’s simple supply and demand, and the internals (the technicals) reveal it. The problem for us is that they know this about themselves, and they work hard to cover (hide) their tracks with shakeouts, fake outs, and failed breakouts. Those are designed to hurt your confidence and to confuse you – at least until they can get a head start.

If you have ever gone into a jungle or the deep woods with a professional tracker, you instantly learned that they see things the average person misses. Certain people have insights or experience that others just don’t have. Let’s use something more common, like the weather, as an example. When a storm is brewing in the west and the sky is darkening, you’d be a fool to dismiss it and say no one can foresee the future. Yet, someone else may see the change coming and take proper steps to mitigate any potential damage from “the storm.” But sadly many times folks simply pay no attention and are often hit unaware. This kind of attitude in life is particularly dangerous in the realm of weather regarding tornadoes… and in the realm of finances regarding recessions. Which person are you most like?

Our proprietary system, dubbed the “Core Four,” was developed over 20+ years of intensive, almost obsessive, study of past charts and current real-time graphs spanning thousands of time periods and covering tens of thousands of different investments. The Triumphant “Core Four” simply tracks the actual decisions of the big elephants in real time each day and then compares the present readings to the historical norms (a “baseline”) to discern the current health of the market. That comparison determines a color code that is assigned to each of the 4 categories individually based on the current technical internal readings of each category. The cumulative color code is then calculated by the average, or blend, of the 4 “Core” colors, which in turn determines our official “Current Market Outlook” (C.M.O.). Note: In the event of a statistical tie, a certain aspect of the VIX is used as the tie-breaker.

(See below for more detail)

We have long been fans of many different axioms, but our ultimate favorite is, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor take warning.” It was in that spirit that the “Core Four” was developed and put into service.

The Triumphant Core Four is not meant to be a short-term or day trading tool. Rather, it is a tool that “takes the current temperature” (so to speak) of the stock market and gives very current (fresh) readings on the present technical conditions in the market through the most immediate actions of market participants, big and small alike. It was designed to help investors more confidently determine and plan for what would most likely happen in the near future, on a historical basis.

It has exceeded our expectations!

While the main purpose of the Core Four is to ascertain the “Current Market Outlook” (emphasis on the word outlook – near future) of the general stock market, it has also proven to be invaluable at key, violent moments in recent stock market history by immediately signaling a serious drop ahead (emphasis on the word current – now). This has made our “Core Four” and the resulting “Current Market Outlook” signals very useful as a tool for certain immediate decisions regarding the major stock market indexes as well. (See 10/10/2018 & 02/25/2020 links as examples.)

It has proven to be effective and timely regarding the start of new uptrends too (discerning “elephants” stampeding back in).

Below are the 3 possible C.M.O. signals, a list of the 4 technical categories along with the trend attributes that the Core Four identifies, and a larger image of our TPM Core Four color grid.