Tool for knowing when to buy/sell?

Type_45

I found this an interesting article. It's advice is to use the 200 day moving average as a trigger to buy or sell shares ahead of crashes and recoveries.

Ie, sell your shares when the market is below the 200 day, and buy again when the market goes above.

This wouldn't have worked, says the article, in 1987 when there was little or no notice before the crash.

Thoughts? 

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/really-the-market-will-collapse-by-end-of-june-11619199491

[Deleted User]

It's bad advice. 
But that's the thing about doom-mongers, they pretty much get a free ride all the years they're wrong. In the case of Harry Dent:

• In Japan, Dent was using their peak of 45- to 50-year-olds (1990–1994) as the beginning of a long slowdown. In the US, he used, and continues to use, the peak year for 48-year-olds, 2009, as the top of a long term growth pattern.[citation needed]
• Launched in June 1999, AIM Dent Demographics Fund had significant first year gains. Its subsequent performance was lackluster, however, and in July 2005, it was merged into another AIM offering.[3]
• His 2011 book goes on to suggest consumer spending will begin to plummet in 2012 with the Dow bottoming out somewhere between 3,000 and 5,600 in 2014. After hitting bottom, stocks will experience a mini-rally in 2015–2017 before falling into a final bottom during the 2019–2023 period, when the 45-50 age group troughs because the U.S. birth rate reached its own low in 1973.[4]
• In 2012 the "Dent Tactical Advantage ETF," symbol DENT, was de-listed having consistently under-performed the market for three years while at the same time charging an egregiously high 1.65% management fee.[5]
• In 2012, he began writing weekly articles for the free investment newsletter Survive & prosper, now known as: Economy & Markets, which offers investment advice guided by his belief that a major economic crash is inevitable and that it will drop the DOW all the way to 3,300. As of early 2013, he has amended his predictions slightly to an expectation that the financial crash will begin between the end of 2013 and the first half of 2014.[citation needed]
• In 2013, Dent predicted the market would crash again in the Summer of 2013 and would take a further year and a half to recover.[6]
• In 2014, while promoting his book The Demographic Cliff in Australia, he predicted a major Australian housing market correction beginning in 2014 after an even bigger one in China.[7] He also predicted that the price of gold would fall to USD$700 an ounce, and has since revised this prediction to 2017.[8]
• On December 10, 2016, Dent predicted that the Dow Jones Industrial average could fall 17,000 points as a result of Donald Trump's election win. Less than two weeks later, Dent reversed his opinion and thinks there is short term growth for the US stock market, but demographic forces will keep the economic growth stagnant in the longer term.[9]

csgohan4

Still speculation. The best analytical tools are not available freely, they are usually in house for large financial organisations and take alot of R+D to develop as they are complicated algorithm based.

But if you find one free, do share

bostonerimus

More numerology that cons people into thinking that there's some magic to investing - that they can run some algorithm and optimize their trading. The way to maximize your probability of success is to invest regularly, over many years, into a broadly based portfolio suited to your circumstances.
I've ridden VTSMX up and seen big gains, but I'm not relying on those for my retirement. I have used some of those gains to set up sources of retirement income that are independent of VTSMX and won't be affected in the inevitable next crash. So rather than using the equivalent of tarot cards to predict the next crash or govern your trades, design your finances so you can live well through the crashes.

[Deleted User]

Crash-predictors are never wrong, only not yet proved right. 
Funny how impervious they all are to reality. In truth, to make a good living, they don't ever have to be proved right; they only have to convince a few readers they will be right eventually.

coastline

Tools can help but if the magic tool was out there everybody would use it. Moving averages are better used for topping up with spare cash not these 50 and 200 day crossover methods. Look at the link the 50 in blue crosses over the 200 in red right at the bottom of the correction in March to give a sell and doesn't give a buy signal until July. Hopeless. !! 
Much better off adding spare cash at the 50 day average or if the index is near the 200 top up there. Nothing perfect about this either. Institutions used to top up at the 200 day years ago.
E1O3takUcAI655l (700×312) (twimg.com)
EzarU-9VgAM4T6w (881×609) (twimg.com)
What can be used as an alert is the distance between the 200 day average and the index itself. Today this is the situation and it's more than likely to correct but who knows when. ? It's been over extended for weeks now.
EzargtuVEAYAhMs (892×612) (twimg.com)
There's dozens of indicators on charting packages out there for free and even on your brokers website. Most are used for determining overbought and oversold conditions in short and long term timeframes. Again today looking at this link you can see RSI MACD and Stoc all extended but can stay extended until the index drops. Still there is uses for them just a case of what you want them for. 
$SPX | SharpChart | StockCharts.com

Type_45

coastline said:

Tools can help but if the magic tool was out there everybody would use it. Moving averages are better used for topping up with spare cash not these 50 and 200 day crossover methods. Look at the link the 50 in blue crosses over the 200 in red right at the bottom of the correction in March to give a sell and doesn't give a buy signal until July. Hopeless. !! 
Much better off adding spare cash at the 50 day average or if the index is near the 200 top up there. Nothing perfect about this either. Institutions used to top up at the 200 day years ago.
E1O3takUcAI655l (700×312) (twimg.com)
EzarU-9VgAM4T6w (881×609) (twimg.com)
What can be used as an alert is the distance between the 200 day average and the index itself. Today this is the situation and it's more than likely to correct but who knows when. ? It's been over extended for weeks now.
EzargtuVEAYAhMs (892×612) (twimg.com)
There's dozens of indicators on charting packages out there for free and even on your brokers website. Most are used for determining overbought and oversold conditions in short and long term timeframes. Again today looking at this link you can see RSI MACD and Stoc all extended but can stay extended until the index drops. Still there is uses for them just a case of what you want them for. 
$SPX | SharpChart | StockCharts.com

The article doesn't mention the 50 day. Only the 200 day.

If you look only at the index and the 200 then it does seem to be quite accurate as a sell signal?

Perhaps less accurate as a buy signal, as by that time a lot of upside has been missed out on.

coastline

Type_45 said:

coastline said:

Tools can help but if the magic tool was out there everybody would use it. Moving averages are better used for topping up with spare cash not these 50 and 200 day crossover methods. Look at the link the 50 in blue crosses over the 200 in red right at the bottom of the correction in March to give a sell and doesn't give a buy signal until July. Hopeless. !! 
Much better off adding spare cash at the 50 day average or if the index is near the 200 top up there. Nothing perfect about this either. Institutions used to top up at the 200 day years ago.
E1O3takUcAI655l (700×312) (twimg.com)
EzarU-9VgAM4T6w (881×609) (twimg.com)
What can be used as an alert is the distance between the 200 day average and the index itself. Today this is the situation and it's more than likely to correct but who knows when. ? It's been over extended for weeks now.
EzargtuVEAYAhMs (892×612) (twimg.com)
There's dozens of indicators on charting packages out there for free and even on your brokers website. Most are used for determining overbought and oversold conditions in short and long term timeframes. Again today looking at this link you can see RSI MACD and Stoc all extended but can stay extended until the index drops. Still there is uses for them just a case of what you want them for. 
$SPX | SharpChart | StockCharts.com

The article doesn't mention the 50 day. Only the 200 day.

If you look only at the index and the 200 then it does seem to be quite accurate as a sell signal?

Perhaps less accurate as a buy signal, as by that time a lot of upside has been missed out on.

If you sell at the 200 are you buying back in at the 200 ? Wouldn't have made much looking at the green line. Also there's at least six times it touched the 200 and reversed upwards again.
That's the trouble you can miss out on the action and when it goes sideways your signals will be all over the place.
EzarU-9VgAM4T6w (881×609) (twimg.com)
If you're going to experiment with this kind of stuff you can buy an index ETF and use the 8 21 crossover method. Simply change the moving averages to 8 and 21 and alter the timeframe until you see last years big fall. Nothing perfect.
$INDU | SharpChart | StockCharts.com
ISF.L | SharpChart | StockCharts.com

wmb194

What you're asking about is called technical analysis and it's been around forever. You usually use multiple signals in conjunction with one another and can include RSI, MACD, Bollinger bands, moving averages of various durations, candlestick patterns and all sorts. No doubt you can Google a beginners guide but there's no magic bullet for these things.

Thrugelmir

A method of tracking individual shares. Not a way of tracking markets per se. Within a market they can be a wide fluctuation of underlying returns both positive and negative. 

bostonerimus

Type_45 said:

coastline said:

Tools can help but if the magic tool was out there everybody would use it. Moving averages are better used for topping up with spare cash not these 50 and 200 day crossover methods. Look at the link the 50 in blue crosses over the 200 in red right at the bottom of the correction in March to give a sell and doesn't give a buy signal until July. Hopeless. !! 
Much better off adding spare cash at the 50 day average or if the index is near the 200 top up there. Nothing perfect about this either. Institutions used to top up at the 200 day years ago.
E1O3takUcAI655l (700×312) (twimg.com)
EzarU-9VgAM4T6w (881×609) (twimg.com)
What can be used as an alert is the distance between the 200 day average and the index itself. Today this is the situation and it's more than likely to correct but who knows when. ? It's been over extended for weeks now.
EzargtuVEAYAhMs (892×612) (twimg.com)
There's dozens of indicators on charting packages out there for free and even on your brokers website. Most are used for determining overbought and oversold conditions in short and long term timeframes. Again today looking at this link you can see RSI MACD and Stoc all extended but can stay extended until the index drops. Still there is uses for them just a case of what you want them for. 
$SPX | SharpChart | StockCharts.com

The article doesn't mention the 50 day. Only the 200 day.

If you look only at the index and the 200 then it does seem to be quite accurate as a sell signal?

Perhaps less accurate as a buy signal, as by that time a lot of upside has been missed out on.

My buy signal was always when I got my pay check and rebalancing when I diverged from my set asset allocation, but I think the rebalancing wasn't  that useful. You are really only financially independent when you actually stop worrying about money and the sooner you do that the better.