Why investor shows make me nervous

I’ve been in NYC at the MoneyShow’s Trader’s Expo, a show full of mostly retail and novice traders. I think more than 5,000 of them having swung by at some point.

I gave a speech called “Everything You Need to Know About Investing.” In a nutshell, you know it’s a bull market and has been for a while when a show like this is packed with so many retail, penny stock, forex and commodity traders with little or no experience to speak of.

Such universal greed/bullishness at a retail event like this gets my neck hairs standing on edge because you don’t have events like this when stocks are cheap and likely good at good values for longtime Revolution Investors. Many of the sessions and booths around this Trader’s Expo were focused on trying to learn how to draw straight lines on historical pricing graphs of individual stocks, also known as technical analysis.

As a TradingWithCody subscriber, you know that I don’t believe that the forces of the world and the trends in the economy and technologies aren’t readable or predictable by using a simple (or a very complicated) chart program or concepts built upon historical price charts of individual stocks. On a similar topic, I asked hundreds of investors and traders if they were trading any penny stocks, and there were a lot of “yes” answers.

And just as #potpennystocks have been the hottest trending sector on Scutify and on my other trading sites right now, I’ve started to see the same answers repeated to me from these penny stock investors, especially in this sector.

When I would press these retail investors on why they thought they were ever going to make big money on penny stocks, they said they were hoping that by buying a stock that trades for pennies today would someday be a Philip Morris or a Budweiser. I have bad news — the best bet on the Philip Morris or the Budweiser of marijuana is to buy a huge conglomerate of beers, liquors and/or tobacco products such as Philip Morris or Budweiser. An even better play to invest in the potential of the legal marijuana trends in this country is buy a Calgon or Lindsay which will supply the shovels and denim, i.e. watering and farming systems, to the marijuana gold miners.

One other note I thought was important to make about this conference and what’s hot (or what’s not in this case) here. During my speech, I asked the crowd if any of them had ever bought or owned any bitcoins.

None had ever bought a bitcoin, though several of them raised their hands when I asked if they’d even considered buying a bitcoin or two at some point. I would have thought that at least a few of the people here at a MoneyShow Trader’s Expo where you’ve got presentations and booths that try to help people learn to trade forex currencies and precious metals like gold … that at least a few people would be onboard the bitcoin train with me.

I do have a few new ideas and suggestions for those of you who are still interested in trying to figure out how to make money on the still-burgeoning bitcoin revolution and I’ll have more details coming on that in the next few weeks here at TradingWithCody.

I’ll be back on a normal schedule and have lots of new thoughts and ideas and trends and maybe a couple new names for the portfolio next week.