On Monday, April 27th, Apple reported Q2 earnings which turned out to be the 2nd largest earnings report in US history. And look what happened to the stock post earnings.

Here we are a full 10 days after Apple’s incredible showing, and the stock is more than 10 percent down. Hows that buy and hold strategy working for ya now? Were you enticed by the prospect of blowout earnings, and swayed into buying a few hundred or more shares of the best publicly traded company on the planet? If you were, then you are down big, I mean really big.

Buy and hold just doesn’t work anymore in the pre-apocalyptic Fed environment. Sure, everything has been going up since 2008, but stocks are stretched beyond their natural limits, and the economy is not getting stronger. The government reported an extraordinarily weak GDP this past quarter of only 0.2%, and most economists expect that number to be downgraded into negative territory.

Apple is killing it, with sales, growth, new products and new markets. But do investors care? Of course they do, and they see the writing on the wall, and that says to hunker down, something big is coming…we don’t know when or how, but it is coming.

What if you could profit during these turbulent, uncertain times? Froth is a very difficult situation for most traders, and that’s because they are guided by their own discretion, and we all know that traders on the whole are fantastically poor at picking market direction, as more than 85% of you don’t make money in the markets.

Click on picture to enlarge

Apple Auto Trader Showing the 3 Systems DBOL, OTW and MOAX

It’s probably too late to consider an index fund, unless you’re willing to ride the roller coaster of the coming volatility wave, and possible correction. Or, you could do what smart investors, and hedge funds and institutional traders are doing, and that’s relying on algorithmic trading systems. With an automated strategy, the human discretion is removed from the equation, and the unfiltered experience of industry quants, and precision of computer trading are put to work for you.

Since the day of Q2 earnings, Apple stock price is down from an extended market high of 136.20. My Apple AutoTraders are up nearly 20% of initial capital. That’s a nearly 30% swing! The really cool thing is that difference is based on using less than half the capital as buy and hold.

So, which is the smart way to go? Which would you rather live with? And do you trust your discretion as the Fed gets pushed up a giants a wall? Or would you prefer to do what the smart money is doing, and use proven systems to guide your investment strategy?

All these questions are rhetorical of course. It really comes down to this…would you rather lose money, when you should be making money? Your choice.