My Facebook post for Feb. 3

Among My Favorite Videos—

The VectorVest Watchlist Strategy

See:

http://www.vectorvest.com/vvuniversity/videoplayer.aspx?playlist=http://www.vectorvest.com/vvuniversity/freemovies/playlist4330.xml&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRoivK7MZKXonjHpfsX77+olUaGzlMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4ETcRiI+SLDwEYGJlv6SgFT7fNMal41bgLWRM=

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:

http://www.stocks-simplified.com/Momentum_Investing.html

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:

http://historicalreturns-sp500.blogspot.com/search/label/1999-2009