Most people never forget their first love. I’ll never forget my first trading profit! But the $600 (1970 dollars) I pocketed on Royal Dutch Petroleum was not nearly as significant as the conceptual realization it signaled! I was amazed that someone would pay me that much more for my stock than the newspaper said it was worth just a few weeks earlier! What had changed? What had happened to make the stock go up, and why had it been down in the first place? Without ever needing to know the answers, I’ve been trading RD for thirty-six years!
Looking at scores of similarly profitable, high quality companies in this manner, you would find that:
(1) most move up and down regularly (if not predictably) with an upward long-term bias, and
(2) that there is little if any similarity in the timing of the movements between the stocks themselves. This is the “Volatility” that most people fear and that Wall Street loves them to fear. It can be narrowly confined to certain sectors, or much broader, encompassing practically everything. The broader it becomes, the more likely it is to be categorized as either a rally or a correction. Most years will...