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The Dow closed at 44,563 yesterday, which is a record new all time high. This was in part driven by Intel jumping 6.4% on Monday after winning up to $3 billion in grants to make chips for the US Defense Department. Intel gained another 7% after hours after announcing a deal with Amazon where Intel would produce a custom chip for AWS.

I remember the first MI strategy I ever used was the "Dogs of the Dow", which I first read about on TMF in 1997. But the Gardner brothers were also recommending Amazon and AOL at the time. Investing in those stocks, plus following Jon Markman's FOG MI strategy from '97 to 2000 changed my life.

Shout-out to Tom and Dave Gardner for founding TMF, giving us this community, and enriching our lives in a very literal sense. You can follow David on X (aka Twitter) at https://x.com/DavidGFool. He still posts occasionally about his "spiffy pops", of which there have been many.

I remember the first MI strategy I ever used was the "Dogs of the Dow", which I first read about on TMF in 1997. But the Gardner brothers were also recommending Amazon and AOL at the time. Investing in those stocks, plus following Jon Markman's FOG MI strategy from '97 to 2000 changed my life.

Wow, takes me back.

I had about $2000 invested at Olde Discount Broker, in ETFs in a trading system based on the discount to NAV. I had sold one about $1000 and was holding cash for the next buy. One day Olde called me and said they saw I was just sitting in cash and recommended a Dog of the Dow fund. Never heard of it.
I googled it, which led me to TMF. Heck, don't need a fund, I can do it myself.

Datek was a newish deep discount broker- $9.99 commission. So I sold the other ETF at Olde and transferred to Datek.
Olde "Discount" charged me $65 commission to sell a $1200 holding.

I eventually bought some Amazon, but I sold it at 10X gain. Bad move, I should have held on.

Yup, made a potload of money with FOG (FlareOut Growth). Especially using the FOG picks on 6/3 Options.
I even created a web page called "The House That MI Built", when we used those profits to build our 5 bedroom "retirement cash cow" house.
Until 2000/2001 when everything stopped working. :-(

Years later, I had a stockscreener123 (now portfolio123) account and ran a backtest on FOG. Bad, bad, bad. That 3-4 year period was the ONLY period where FOG returned a profit.


Rememeber when everybody was pointing and laughing at the guy who wrote the book "Dow 30,000"?
And here we are. Dow 44,000.

The Dow closed at 44,563 yesterday, which is a record new all time high.

Huh, I wonder if they will re-release the book "Dow 36,000".
A whole new meaning, for a whole new generation.

Jim

Yup, made a potload of money with FOG (FlareOut Growth). ... I even created a web page called "The House That MI Built", when we used those profits to build our 5 bedroom "retirement cash cow" house.
Until 2000/2001 when everything stopped working. :-(

Yep, I have a similar story. I double-majored in EE and Computer Science in college, and remember the thrill of logging on to AOL over dialup and a 9,600 baud modem on my Atari ST :) Got a job building software, and started putting money in the hot funds of that era: Fidelity Magellan and 20th Century Ultra. The year after Windows 95 came out, I stumbled on to the Motley Fool site. Their pitch was that you could do better than a fund by picking your own stocks. Made sense to me.

Opened an account at ETrade and started buying boatloads of shares in AOL, Amazon and Iomega in 1996, following TMF Rulebreakers. Got my hands on every investing book I could find, and read Bill O'Neill's "How to Make Money in Stocks" cover to cover.

From 1995-98 I was compounding my net worth at 35% CAGR thanks to the Rulebreaker stocks plus Dell and the Ultra fund. I was in my early 30s at the time, gotten married, had a 1-year old, and was living in a 2-BR apartment. My wife said we needed more space, so I started looking at 3-bedroom starter homes. In 1999, Jon Markman's "Online Investing" book came out. He described his FOG screen, and showed a backtest where picking the top 3 stocks in that screen each year turned $10,000 into $5 million starting in 1986 and ending in early 1999.

I was sold. At that time, Microsoft had launched their MSN Money Central site where they were listing the stocks from Markman's "Supermodel" screens for free. I had already been buying Yahoo, Altavista, Network Solutions and Infoseek in early '99, then went all in and bought Qualcomm, CMGI and Broadvision in Sep. 1999 at 33% position sizes each. Wound up tripling my net worth with a 230% return that year.

Found a builder to build a custom 5-BR 5,000 sq ft home in a wooded cul de sac on 1.5 acres of land. Paid for the house almost all in cash after selling 2/3 of my portfolio in July 2000. Still had enough left over to set aside and fund 4 years of college for 2 kids plus start a safer allocation in bonds. The 1/3 that I still had in stocks started crashing in the latter part of 2000 through 2001. Wasn't fun watching that. But I had life's 2 biggest expenses taken care of.

Despite the McMansion, we lived frugally in all other aspects. Never cared for fancy cars or showy stuff, always drove Toyotas. My employer had a 401K and I kept making automated monthly contributions from my paycheck straight into an index ETF that compounded tax free over the next 20 years.

I retired early in 2020 thanks to that index ETF plus a supersized allocation in Amazon that had snowballed over the years, and by following Saul's board. I estimate Saul accelerated my financial independence by 4 to 5 years. He absolutely nailed the correct sector during 2017-2021.

BTW, my father had died suddenly while I was a freshman in college, leaving our family well below the poverty line. I worked part time jobs at McDonald's and gas stations to pay my way through school and support my mother and brother. If I can make it, anybody can.

Mechinv

P.S. Re: the FOG screen, it has actually started working again since 2013. If you look at musselmant's Nasdaq screen from earlier this year, the formula used is based on the FOG formula, which is looking for a recent flattening out of momentum. This is also known as a "bull flag" in Technical trading.

This one? Naz 100 consolidators?
https://www.shrewdm.com/MB?pid=375700638

This one? Naz 100 consolidators?

Yes, the link you posted was the original version, but later in the thread, musselmant posted a newer version. It's the second gtr1 link at

https://www.shrewdm.com/MB?pid=-2&previousPostID=1...

The rationale for the screen criteria was discussed in the thread at https://www.shrewdm.com/MB?pid=375700638&wholeThre...

In particular, the step ratio(tr(1,5),tr(1,200)) bottom 10 is looking for stocks with very high 40-week momentum that had a pullback in price over the most recent week. The chart should show a steep price rise over the past 200 days, and then a flattening out (consolidation) over the past 5 days. Markman's FOG formula was similarly looking for high 52-week momentum with a consolidation over the past month.

This screen has an annualized return of 26% over the past 10 years, and is up 21% YTD according to

https://discussion.fool.com/t/curated-screens-2024...

So, yes, FOG has made a comeback.

Thanks. still using the original def with float & mcap, For current stocks by using Fidelity's limited screener which only has TR1Y (not specifically 200d), I get

EA Electronic Arts Inc
KHC The Kraft Heinz Co
PANW Palo Alto Networks Inc
AZN Astrazeneca PLC
ADBE Adobe Inc

Which made me wonder how gtr1 calculates tr5d/tr200d when either value is negative...

so I just made it a negative aware subtraction to get a basic gap instead of a percentage (if TR1Y <0, TR5-TR200, otherwise TR200-TR5). Negative percentages wonky.

Now it gets the following
AVGO
NVDA
META
COST
ISRG

although only 1 has a negative 5day return.

I don't think tr(1,5) is ever negative. Just less than 1 if the price is down.

Aussi

^^If I can make it, anybody can.^^

Great story mechinv. Thanks for sharing. Do you think you got lucky in July 2000 to sell out 2/3 of your portfolio right near the market high (to buy the house), or were you wanting to sell out anyway with a view on the tech valuations being high at that time?

I definitely did not sell out in 2000 and rode the tech stocks down right to the bottom. I even moved into more defensive stocks after, so missed out on much of the slow recovery in the early 2000s.

Your move in July 2000 to hugely reduce equity exposure right near the tip would have been a gigantic boost to your future situation and gains from that point on, following on from all the gains you got through the late 90s. Well done with that working out spectacularly well.

Looks like the S&P 500 will also end the day at a record high today. My portfolio is having a blockbuster day of gains this morning, and I decided to take partial profits by trimming some of my biggest winners by 10%. Still holding 90% of my positions in NVDA, TTD, APP, FOUR, etc. And keeping 100% of my supersized position in AMZN - no trimming there. Hope you all are also having a prosperous day. I'm heading out for a drive to see some fall colors now.

Wow, I mean... duh on me. I have known that for years. Serves me right for trying to build something at 11 at night... thx Aussi for the gentle reminder.

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