Guru Grades

Martin Goldberg: Financial Sense? (Last Updated 1/30/10)

A reader suggested that we evaluate the market commentary of Martin Goldberg, as available via Financial Sense Online since September 2003. Martin Goldberg "is a Chartered Market Technician who manages money privately." He sometimes notes that "when you identify a hot guru, it pays to follow his advice." The table below lists forecasting highlights from his commentary and shows the performance of the S&P 500 index over the 5, 21, 63 and 254 trading days after the publication date for each item. Red plus (minus) signs to the right of specific items indicate those that the market has subsequently proven right (wrong). We conclude that:

• Martin Goldberg times the market using a combination of fundamental and technical analysis, interpreting a wide range of charts.
• He covers stocks, gold, bonds and oil. Within stocks, he focuses most often on the QQQQ (for which we use the S&P 500 index as a rough proxy).
• He believes U.S. equities are in a secular bear market. He often describes advances as unjustified and unsustainable and declines as inevitable.
• We skip issues in which there is no market forecast call or the forecast is substantially conditional/equivocal.
• Based on subsequent stock market performance and our judgments about the accuracy of Martin Goldberg's market direction forecasts, his bottom-line advice about market direction has been right 42% of the time, which is below average . The forecast sample size for Mr. Goldberg is moderate, as is our confidence in this result.

In summary, Martin Goldberg's stock market forecasting record since September 2003, tilting strongly bearish, is below average. Confidence in this conclusion is moderate.

In a 12/18/07 email, Mr. Goldberg comments: "[W]hy do you continue in setting stock market commentary to an objective percent correct/percent incorrect context? ... It makes little difference to me but you are subjecting many good professionals to criticism that is both unfair and unprofessionally presented." We invite readers to browse tabular summaries such as the one below and source commentaries and decide for themselves regarding the value of the approach. See also his additional specific comment on this review.

See Guru Grades for a snapshot of the accuracy of various experts in predicting the direction of the U.S. stock market, including links to evaluations of the commentaries of other individual market pundits and gurus.