How often should we trade?

I’d like to start by asking each of you for some referrals — think of three or four friends who would benefit from Trading With Cody. Please feel free to forward them some of your favorite posts and trading ideas from Trading With Cody or send them a link to the Trading With Cody apps.

I’m quite proud that our retention rate here at Trading With Cody is over 95% for my subscribers who have been around for at least a year.

I’ve worked extremely hard to help you guys position yourselves in front of this ongoing bubble blowing bull market and the incredible gains we’ve had in many of our biggest positions including Facebook, Google, Ambarella, Apple, and more recently Sony, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks and so on.

Of course, I’ve had a few losers too and we’ve had to take some losses and move on from those — but seeing me do all that in real-time and helping you guys navigate the ebbs and flows and realities of investing/trading, is part of why this service is loved by so many of you.

Newer subscribers sometime complain because they want more trade alerts. As this email I got today explains:

“I thought Cody would be trading more and giving more ideas.”

I went back and looked up when the subscriber who sent this email to me had originally signed up for Trading With Cody and it wasn’t but six weeks ago. The trades I’ve made in the last six weeks were only these:

• Scaling into a little more SYNA and ICON
• Buying SLV call options
• Trimming GOOG and FB
• Buying GDX call options

And that’s it. Now clearly, I’ve been spending a lot more time each week away from the office and have likely been trading a bit less than I might otherwise have been for the last six weeks while my daughter has been in the hospital NICU.

But more to the point, I want to remind all of you why you’re investing and trading in the first place. It’s not to get a short-term pop in your portfolio or to make some quick gains on some hot stock picks (though both are very good things when they work!).

A few months ago at another Money Show speech, I posted the Revolution Investing model portfolio up on the big screen as I talked. Several people took pictures of it and in every question I took that day centered around how big the gains were and how long we’d been holding our biggest winners. Most retail investors over trade their accounts to the point where they never have any big winners to look at.

You’re not trading and investing to get an adrenaline fix or a hit of dopamine. I’m certainly not here to just throw out idea after idea or to chase each little name as it moves up and/or down each day, each week and each month even when I am able to work the 60-80 hours a week I like to spend in front of my desks. I’m here to help you navigate the markets, finding trading opportunities with low-risk, high-reward and to get a bigger picture of what you should be doing with your money given all the crazy economic, political, cyclical and outright revolutions we’re living through.

Stepping back from the day-to-day desire to grow your money quickly and trying to catch tops and bottoms and swings in the markets, you’ll see the big money has been made by finding the most Revolutionary companies on the planet and investing in them for a long time. Doing a little trimming and reducing exposure when stocks are through the roof. Scaling in and adding to exposure when stocks get crushed.

Long-time subscribers of mine has also had success navigating the broader economic cycles along with positioning ourselves broadly to avoid the pain of the outright crashes while being perhaps the only analyst/trader/investor who does this stuff in public who caught the bottom of the Nasdaq in 2002 and the top in 2007 and then again got wildly bullish like I did back in 2009-2011 to position us for this ongoing bubble-blowing bull market.

One of the main reasons you guys subscribe to me, and why we’ve had so much success in the markets over the last five, ten and during my whole 20-year career on Wall Street, has been because we’ve had the discipline to be patient and let the market pitches come as they may. We will miss some big winners, like I did with Netflix, for example. Netflix keeps me up at night and the fact I never bought it after having cited it repeatedly as one of the best pure plays on this App Stock Market Bubble that I predicted was coming for 2012-2015 back in 2010 is one of my greatest regrets as an investor. And yes, we will have a few losers along the way too.

Let’s keep ourselves grounded and keep our eyes on the prize. Whether you’re daytrading, swing trading or taking a buy-and-hold approach to your stock market interactions, it’s crucial to look out over the next 10,000 or more days. 10,000 days is about 30 years, and unless you’re over the age of 70, you probably need to be thinking about your money, your portfolios, and your entire net worth in terms of the next 20, 40, 50 years or more.

Coincidentally, I do think there are some great pitches and opportunities on both the long and short side of the equation coming down the pike. I’ve got some updated on analysis on FitBit, Ambarella and Twitter for you too. Stay tuned.

So on that note, I’m asking you guys today to help us spread the word about Trading With Cody.  Please tell some of your friends and colleagues about the product and if they’ll sign up, we’ll give them one month free so they can see for themselves why our long-time subscribers stick with us like you do.

Thanks again, Cody