Guru Grades
Price Headley's Trends (Last Updated 3/17/10)
We evaluate here the weekly market commentary of Price Headley, previously available via a now-inaccessible archive since May 2000 and now available as the "Weekly Market Outlook" via BigTrends.com since April 2009. Price Headley, founder of BigTrends.com, "provides investors with specific real-time stock and options strategies and investment education to profit from significant market trends." His methodology involves "sophisticated tools to distill the most important information from BigTrends.com's Integrated Analysis, which encompasses a wide array of fundamental, technical and sentiment data." The table below extracts 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:
- Although he sometimes refers to the intermediate and long terms, Price Headley focuses his commentary on short-term actions based on near-term trends.
- With respect to market timing, Mr. Headley sometimes swings rapidly from bullish to bearish and back again. He is usually clear with his recommendations. Because his forecasts focus mostly on the short term, we weighted near-term stock market behavior most heavily in judging forecast accuracy.
- Based on subsequent stock market behavior and our judgments about the associated accuracy of his timing forecasts, Price Headley's bottom-line advice about market direction is right 42% of the time, which is below average . The forecast sample is fairly large, so we have confidence in this assessment.
In summary, Price Headley's record for timing the overall market is below average. Confidence in this conclusion is high.
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.
