About

(The contents of this blog do not constitute advice and should not be regarded as a recommendation to buy, sell or otherwise deal with any particular investment. Click here for more detailed disclosures and disclaimers).

How to Use One-Twenty Two by Dr. Duru

One-Twenty Two brings together a number of topics from across financial markets and business. If you are a student or fan of financial markets, you will find something for you. Thus, even long-term and passive investors can enjoy reading about financial trials and triumphs just as someone might follow politics and sports without being a politician or an athlete. One-Twenty Two consists of three three main topics:

• General trading and investing insights and various analyses of the S&P 500. The S&P 500 (SPY) is a broad index of stocks representing America’s biggest companies.
• The Market Breadth navigates stock market cycles, including my customized market breadth methodology called AT50 for “Above the 50-day moving average”. Market breadth describes the percentage of stocks participating in current market trends. I use AT50 to identify and trade around extremes in stock market behavior.
• The housing market.

Readers can find much more by browsing the site categories or clicking through my extensive archives going back to 2009 (available here on the home/about page and main blog page).

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I provide my content completely free. You can subscribe to get the latest content in your email as I publish it. You can also subscribe to a digest (summary) of all the financial market, business, economics, and data analytics content that I publish across the web, what I call Dr. Duru’s FinWeb.

Dr. Duru’s FinWeb includes this blog (One-Twenty Two); Seeking Alpha where I write in depth about the business fundamentals of specific companies; Inflation Watch where I monitor indicators and drivers of inflation; Ahan Analytics where I write about data analytics for my consulting practice; and YouTube where I present compelling visualizations of financial markets, trading, and economics.

While I invite readers to consider my ideas as they implement their own trading and investing objectives, tactics, and strategies, note well that my content is only for educational purposes. I love using my site as my own personal journal of thoughts. I frequently refer back to my past words for focus and discipline. The content is too vast to follow-up on every idea, but I do my best. Review my disclaimer for additional details.

The trend is your friend until it ends. The extreme is your team once it runs out of steam.

Introduction to Dr. Duru

I have blogged about financial markets since the year 2000. A veteran of the dot-com bubble and bust, the financial crisis, and the coronavirus pandemic, I fully appreciate the value in trading and investing around the extremes of market behavior. In this spirit, “One-Twenty Two” delivers a different narrative for students and fans of financial markets. I challenge conventional market wisdoms and offer unique perspectives. The blog posts cover stocks, options, currencies, Bitcoin, and more, while leveraging the tools of both technical and fundamental analysis for short-term and long-term trading and investing. I write and post across the web to cover stock markets, currency markets, economics, and an analytic perspective on market behaviors.

My Passion and What Motives Me

The dot-com bust caught me completely off-guard. In the preceding 1990s I did well for myself investing in mutual funds with the occasional rotations. That success did not prepare me for the discipline and rigor required to trade and invest in individual stocks. I will never forget the first time I lost substantial money because a company reported “disappointing” earnings; I had no idea publicly traded companies had to regularly reveal financials! From there, I watched the edifice of tech investing collapse and sought to warn everyone I knew about the hard lessons I learned.

I fired off periodic emails to everyone in my contacts. After receiving little response, I realized I had a passion for these markets that surpassed the average person. So I decided to write a blog (using html code!), and I called it “One-Twenty.” At the time, I had a fascination with 20-dollar bills. So to me earning one twenty sounded like building the foundation of success. In 2009 I moved the site to WordPress and called it “One-Twenty Two”, as in version two.

I have the same passion today as I had in 2000 for educating people about the financial markets beyond the standard fare from conventional media. While social media opened the floodgates of opinion and observations about financial markets, I find that I still offer unique perspectives not available elsewhere.

My Background

I received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (and an honors degree in Values, Technology, Science and Society – now the Program in Science, Technology & Society) from Stanford University. For graduate studies, I went on to earn a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems (now Management Science and Engineering) at Stanford University. My work experiences include:

• Data Analytics, including Data Science and some Data Engineering
• Consulting in operations research, decision analysis, and data analysis
• Price optimization (including a shared patent for methodology: Method and System for Producing Optimized Prices for Products for Sale)
• Management consulting in product development and technology strategy
• Building algorithms for Expert Systems

I also enjoy volunteering in my local community and providing leadership and guidance for family and friends. I am currently VP of Development for a new “start-up” mental health non-profit called Rising Opportunities through Science, Education and Service (ROSES); we would love to get your support!

Through my company Ahan Analytics, LLC, I accept data analysis projects for small companies and non-profits.

Finally, you can find me posting on twitter and stocktwits. You can also contact me directly by email. I encourage you to subscribe for free email updates.