Guru Grades

Jason Kelly: The Neatest Little Market Advice? (Last Updated 6/13/09)

We evaluate here the investing and trading advice of Jason Kelly, author of the "Neatest Little Guide" series of financial books, since late 2001. 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 our judgments of whether the market subsequently proved those items right (wrong). We conclude that:

• Jason Kelly's style might be characterized as intermediate-cycle Buffet-like (patience awaiting intermediate-term value), focused on entry and exit points for a few stocks in the context of overall market climate. He sometimes buys, sells and rebuys the same stocks.
• Mr. Kelly looks to buy (sell) during states of maximum gloom (euphoria) stemming from what he regards as superficial indicators. Seasonal trends are an important consideration for him.
• Two of his complex forecasts proved to be about equally right and wrong, so we evaluated it "0" and graded him both right and wrong.
• Based on subsequent stock market performance and our judgments about his forecasts for overall stock market direction, Jason Kelly's forecasts have been accurate about 60% of the time, which is pretty good.

In summary, Jason Kelly's performance in forecasting the behavior of the overall U.S. stock market is pretty good. Confidence in this conclusion is moderate.

Note that Jason Kelly publicly grades his strategies and trades.

See Jason Kelly's article "Stock Market Timing" for his own thoughts on this subject. See also his comments on this evaluation.

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.