Good Morning:

• Today is not the first time I pulled my head up from my computers and rejoined the real world. Where have I been? – I always think to myself. It reminds me of finals week back in college. Law School was worse – with 100% of your grade dependent on one, final test.
• And I am a little punchy after working three days straight with little or no sleep, helping a friend with some legal issues, my old wheelhouse.
• There is so little time to reminisce, as this trading thing can swallow you whole.
• And then it struck me this morning – 10 months into the year. It was the date today that triggered it. Today is the 35th anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash. It seems like yesterday.
• The crash anniversary also meant that I had forgotten another important milestone. I forgot that this year is also the 35th anniversary of my leaving the comfort of a large law firm as a budding securities attorney. It was the year I stepped into the fray of the banking and money management world.
• It is not like forgetting your anniversary or your wife’s birthday. But it is still crazy that I forgot.
• It was April 1987 when I took the plunge. I started an investment advisory firm that would eventually grow into a bank, trust company, brokerage firm, hedge fund, and family of common trust funds.
• But at October 19, 1987, the new company had barely started.
• I remember sitting in the barber’s chair in Scottsdale, Arizona, on that fateful day – October 19, 1987 – as the news came over the radio that the Dow had dropped 25% in one day.
• All I could think was, “smart move, you idiot.” I imagined the groveling I would have to do to get my old job back.
• Everyone in the law firm was always talking about how bad the law profession was (which is true) and why they needed to leave. The grass was always greener on the client side.
• We saw our clients as “stupid” – but making so much money! “I can do that,” we would naively pronounce. Look at my pedigree! That loudmouth, uncouth client never even graduated from high school.
• You see, lawyers both envy their clients and live vicariously through them. Who you were as a lawyer depended on who your clients might be.
• We had some big clients, and I worked on the first Mortgage Backed Bonds that utimately took down the financial system in 2008. My life has been kind of like Forest Gump. Lots of serendipity.
• But having your worth defined by your clients reminded me of being in high school, defined by my parents instead of my own accomplishments. I wanted neither to be defined by my clients or my parents (another story).
• And lawyers – the puffy know-it-alls we were – always want to give you business advice – like they ever had any real business experience! Worse, we billed them for it.
• And those who did leave the law firm for the other side usually failed and returned in defeat. 
• And that always gave a sense of comfort to those who stayed behind.
• And in my psychotic mind, I suspected the crew back at the firm was waiting for me to fail too. It is just how it is – human nature – not like the old gang was evil or anything. In fact, they were very supportive.
• But I left because I decided if I were to put in 2000+ billable hours a year, it would be for myself and my family, not as a grunt on someone else’s gravy train.
• But when I look back, I now realize that I left because I was too stupid to know better and know what any entrepreneur truly encounters in the real world. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
• These thoughts raced through my brain on that fateful 1987 day, as I contemplated my first business failure in the barber’s chair. I was still young I thought – only 28 and time to recover.
• In retrospect, the good news was that I had very few clients, and they owned mostly municipal bonds. I have been blessed many times in life.
• The other good news was that everyone else’s investment clients were unhappy. The clients were looking for a new, pretty face. Unhappy clients were ripe for the taking back then, and I still had a pretty face and an unblemished track record. Well, sort of pretty anyway.
• The moral of the story is that there is always opportunity in adversity, and maybe your first impression will be wrong.
• Life went on, and I comfortably retired at age 39.
• But I could not know the future on that fateful day, and I swore there had to be a better way to manage money than to watch your investments decimated in crashes or bear markets.
• Born skeptical, I always figured someone knew in advance and likely made a fortune. I wanted to find out how they did it.
• That day birthed the Navigator Algorithms that you see on these pages today.
• I had one more bout of market failure after 1987 that nearly ruined me financially, physically, and emotionally. So the journey has never been easy. I am saving that story for the proverbial book. 
• And, like many of us, my life has never been easy or normal. But I will save that for the book, too.
• There is much talk of a crash even now and possibly next week.
• Those that add astrology to their investment work say that we are in a so-called “Dark Window,” similar to 1987.
• The Dark Window is a rare alignment of planets that have been present at every stock market crash in history, particularly 1987 and 1929. That window opens this Friday and lasts for a week.
• One of my favorite websites in the world is SpuriousCorrelations.com. Head over there if you ever need a good laugh. They site many “spurious” correlations and coincidences.
• So is this planet alignment thing just a spurious correlation, too? And I know that there is hidden order and math in the Universe – it drives the success of our algorithms. I discovered these equations nearly 20-years ago.
• So before we completely dismiss the “Dark Window” theory, and for the most part I think we should, take a look at the chart below of the cycle of full moons overlayed on the daily S&P 500 chart: