Proprietary Services

Proprietary Services that JTM subscribes to is a constantly evolving service that is analyzed on an ongoing basis to make sure that the services we are currently subscribing to are continuing to perform as we expected them to when we first subscribed, as well as continually looking for new services that will make our clients money.  There are so many trading services available on the market today that we feel one of the most important services JTM can provide is to analyze the various services and to provide our clients with the ones that we feel give our clients a real edge in trading the markets.  In fact, we are happy to take suggestions from clients on which services they are interested in and if they meet our criteria we often wind up subscribing.

At the current time JTM is providing customers with recommendations from three primary services.  Our flagship service is an S&P daytrading service that

has been very profitable since inception in 1997 and to which we have been a subscriber since that time.  Normally we do not subscribe to any service at inception because we want to see a proven track record before we put our money up. We made an exception for this service because the analyst had an outstanding record in his option service(which we also subscribe to) for the three years prior to our subscribing to the S&P service.  The decision to be one of the initial subscribers has been a very profitable one for us and our clients.  In 1997 this service was up 60%, in 1998 15%, and through April 30,1999 up 30%. 

The second service we provide is a diversified trading system that provides recommendations across the full spectrum of commodity markets as well as a weekly newsletter that describes the fundamental and technical reasoning behind their trades.  This service has been around for many years and although they do not publish a specific track record we picked up the service because of our personal knowledge of the principals and when we realized that they were one of the leaders in the Futures Magazine trading contest.  This service is one of our favorites because of the strict risk parameters that are used with each trade and the information that is provided in the weekly newsletter.  Oftentimes, the newsletter will provide information and reasoning that will enable a client to look at a trade from a different point of view and keep him from making a poorly thought out trade. 

The last primary service that we provide is a little more esoteric but also the one that we have been involved with for the longest period of time and in many ways is our favorite.  The analyst who puts out this service has been involved in the commodity markets since the 70's as a floor trader, forex trader, and newsletter writer.  We have been reading his daily newsletter since 1986.  The newsletter which is put out every morning prior to the US markets opening covers all of the international financial markets, as well as the energy markets and the precious metals.  The purpose of this service is not short term trading, but rather to call the major trends in the international markets.  Over the period of time that we have been following this service we have been amazed at some of the prescient long term market calls that have been made.  For instance, this service has been bullish of bonds and bearish of precious metals for most of this decade.  Other extremely accurate long term market calls include the bear market in the Nikkei and the top in the Japanese Yen. Our feeling in providing this service is that it is often a very good adjunct to our shorter term trading services.  In commodity trading we sometimes get so short term oriented that we are unable to see the forest for the trees.  This service is excellent at keeping things in perspective and keeping a trader's focus on the long term trends, which is where the really big money is made in trading.

Sources

This last area is hard to define, but nevertheless is a service that we provide to the customers we talk with on an ongoing basis and one which we feel is a very valuable addition to the full service that we provide.  Being in the commodity business for over 20 years has enabled us to make some very valuable contacts in the trading community.  For instance, one of the regional brokerage firms that we were with prior to starting JTM Investments made a good deal of their money every year from proprietary trading activities.  After going public and eventually being bought by a bank the proprietary trading was brought to a halt.  Some of their best traders are now clients of JTM Investments.  While obviously not disclosing trading positions we do exchange information with these clients on an ongoing basis and often pick up some very valuable information that we were not aware of and are able to pass on to our other clients.  In addition to these contacts we have people on virtually every trading floor that we talk to on a daily basis to find out what is going on on the floor, where stop orders appear to be, where good buy and sell orders are thought to be, etc.  While all of this information is hard to quantify it is an important part of what we provide at JTM Investments.