Among My Favorite Videos—
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Our Way of Finding Stocks
Worthy of More Study
Balliett
Financial Services, Inc., managed investment portfolios for clients in multiple
states. We started with just 15 or so client accounts totaling about
$8,000,000.
For
risk-averse clients, our goal was to avoid a calendar-year loss on any security
greater than single digit.
For
other clients, our goal was double-digit annual total returns, and we succeeded
more often than not, year over year. When we reached $40,000,000 under
management, new business started coming to us in a rush.
By
us and we, I mean our son Phil and I. He’d been tops in his data-processing
classes at Boise State and was recruited by Dun and Bradstreet. Both places, he
created systems and wrote software for mainframe computers, had good knowledge
of both hardware and software. We brought him into the family firm when he
became an avid student of both fundamental and technical securities analysis.
Under
Phil’s leadership, we settled on one of the several stock-selection strategies
we liked—stocks on the move in industries on the move. He wrote software that
identified and compared stocks with price momentum. See:
After
a time, we used VectorVest analysis to identify which of the momentum stocks
Phil had identified that were most worthy of acquisition.
That’s
the two-step approach that propelled us to $200,000,000 under management. Thank you, Phil!
Our
worst year, 2008, was the worst year, too, for the S&P 500 in more than 50
years: down that horrifying year by -37.00% while we were down by -21%.
Obviously,
beating the market in 2008 gave us no pleasure—and our clients less than none.
Down is down. Many left us like an audience escaping a theater on fire. We
closed our 40-year business at the end of 2013. See the S&P 500
performance:
