No. of Recommendations: 11
I'd expected a bit more required time investment in number crunching and automated trading.
Remember the old joke about the young bull and the old bull gazing over a flock of female cows?
When I put in for retirement, many of my co-workers stopped by my office and asked how I could afford to retire at 58. And what I did that let me retire so young.
I told them "I worked 40 hours a week for Motorola and 10-15 hours a week at investing."
Every single one of them said, "Oh, uh, okay" and wandered away. Nobody wanted to put in the work, nobody even asked me what I did.
So....
I put in a lot of work over the years. Mostly for entertainment (that paid well!), and as a hobby.
I ran a lot of the complicated MI screens for a long time. Then decided that most of them were either very complicated and time consuming. And required a subscription to 1 or more data services (expensive). And seemed to turn out to have been data-mined and didn't do so well going forward.
Or you depend on the kindness of strangers to post picks.
One fiasco was Green Mountain Power. A small company that one day suddenly jumped up -- way up -- for an unknown reason. The volume that morning was several times the normal volume. The SEC contacted the CEO and demanded to know what he did that the stock jumped so much.
I snickered because I knew that it jumped because GMP was a new stock pick on a popular MI screen. All the MI people bought it when the screen picks got published on the MI board.
AFAIK, the SEC and the company never figured out why it jumped.
So, anyway, several years ago I ditched almost all the MI screens that I followed and settled on a small number of SIMPLE screens.
Various MI people have made a lot of money in some screens. Elan has said that until recently he made a ton with a "6/3 options" screen.
Now I stick by my mantra "We don't have to be perfect, we only need to be Good Enough." Applied to investing.
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One thing to keep in mind: The last few years have been dominated by a dozen or so stocks. This will not last forever. But as long as it continues, any other screen will underperform.
