I receive about a dozen different newsletters every month.  Each day I receive daily editions of at least six of those.  And those are the ones I paid for or deliberately subscribed to.  There are at least a dozen that are randomly emailed to me every day.  I could spend half my day just reading this stuff. So how do I make sense of them all? Well, the first thing I do is figure out which newletters are actionable on which time frames.  All the macro newsletters are NOT actionable. Its interesting information but none of them are going to make me money as a trader tomorrow.  The list of newsletters that meet this criteria is greater than you think.  For me it includes:

• The free versions of John Maudlin’s newsletters
• The paid version of John Maulin’s newsletters
• The Casey report and related subscriptions (paid)
• Evergreen-GaveKal (Free)
• Absolute Return (Free)

Paid, What Do You Mean Paid?

Now, why would I pay for newsletters that I don’t use?  I use them – as important background information, for entertainment and to understand after the fact, why certain things happened.  But as real-time or even semi-real-time trading tools, they are of no help.  On the weekends though, reading world macro-analysis from leaders in the field is great for understanding the big economic picture affecting the super-large time-frame economic action.  Understanding demographic cyclic profiles and the debt super-cycle are just two examples of this.

On the other hand, there are some newsletters that include nightly actionable information.  For me these include:

• Chartpattern Report (Paid)
• Mercenary Trader (Paid)
• The Factor Report (Paid)

But even these can be outdated rather quickly since price patterns change substantially overnight.  They are, more often than not, sources of ideas and present different perspectives on charts that I already know.  Having a conflicting opinion on a chart can be very helpful for maintaining the “strong opinons, weakly held” narrative in my head.

Wait – Are You Trying To Get Me To Drop Your Subscription?

It sounds like I’m telling you newsletters are useless, right?

No, I’m just suggesting that some are useful for trading while most are not.  Which one do you think our newsletter falls into? 

At the end of the day, as a small trader without access to vast amounts of capital for boots-on-the-ground research, you will make your best decisions using just the charts.  Remember the night of the US elections?  The markets were making new highs for the week but then it turned on a dime and started falling.  I wasn’t watching the results but I knew right then that Trump had taken the lead – it was on the charts.  It showed up there before or simultaneously with the event.  

Learn to read the charts.  And use newsletters that focus on making sense of charts (i.e: technical analysis based newsletters).  The only chance you have of processing vast amounts of information simultaneously is to let the charts process it for you while you process the chart!

Its your best option for success in the vast sea of information that flood your inbox every morning!