| Home 10 Feb, 2005 - Starting a BLOG to record my stupid mistakes and occasional triumphs. I'm always looking for that perfect mindless approach that stastically and consistently makes money. I have one pretty good system that I call "Surprise Surprise" and here's the idea: you get an account with a broker like Buy and Hold that charges a monthly fee instead of commissions and you buy a preset number of stocks in equal dollar amounts. You pick these stocks this way: they must all have had a positive earnings surprise (I get these from Thomson's or Yahoo Finance) of at least 20% and have positive earnings this quarter. That's it. No other parameter. Weed out the laggards, usually any of these that drop 10%, and replace with a new stock. I usually won't buy more than 5 stocks for this port on any single day, even if there are a lot more positive surprises that day. Always buy the same dollar amount. My current portfolio of these has 20 stocks at $200 each for a total of $4,000 initial investment. It's currently up about 6 to 7%. I'm also considering the possibility of selling off the port when IBD says the market has turned down and restarting when they say there's been an upward follow through. |