The Art of Investing

The following few books (super sections) describe different strategies or styles of investing such as Swing Trading, Sector Rotation, Insider Trading, Penny Stocks, Micro Cap, Momentum Investing and Dividend Investing. I included many other miscellaneous strategies. It is not possible for one individual to specialize in all the styles described above. Typically I read two books (minimum) on each of the strategies. I include their ideas and my ideas in this book. All these books share many common topics such as market timing and evaluating stocks. These topics have been described elsewhere in this book, so they will not be duplicated here. You may want to paper test each strategy. Select the one that is favorable to the current market (i.e., it performs best in the last three months). In addition, it has to fit your risk tolerance and your own requirements. In addition, different phases of the market cycle favor specific sectors and investing styles. For example, market bottom favors value stocks while the Up phase (defined by me) of a market cycle favors growth stocks. The article "Dividend better?" in Book 5 serves as a procedure to evaluate a strategy with a historical database. There are two ways to test some strategies such as "Side way strategy" and its opposite strategy "Momentum" without a historical database: Load the historical price data of SPY for example from Yahoo!Finance to a spreadsheet.Many charts provide historical data base right on the charts. However, typically they do not provide most fundamental metrics such as Debt/Equity.Update the stock prices for your strategy weekly or monthly - it will take time to collect all the data. Hence, you cannot draw your conclusions readily as the last two described.
To start, I recommend Long-Term Swing trading. Find sound fundamental stocks. Evaluate them every 6 months and sell them if their fundamentals deteriorate. Briefly I outline some of the shortcomings of the following strategies first as they all have the strengths in certain market conditions.Sector Rotation. Be prepared to spend more time and paper test it. Also sector can reverse direction.Insider Trading. Do not treat it as a value play (i.e., do not depend on fundamentals). Sometimes the insiders are wrong.Penny and Micro Cap. I prefer micro-cap stocks over the risky penny stocks. Ensure the volume is at least 10 times larger than your potential buy position.Momentum. Do not hold the momentum stocks too long as momentum could reverse very fast.Dividend. Do not buy a stock solely on the dividend yield. Today it is very popular and profitable when the bond yield is low. Watch out for the changing interest rate.
The returns of each strategy serve as guideline only due to my limited data and the specific parameters I use in screening and evaluating stocks. When you're making money in one strategy, stick with it until the performance deteriorates. When you lose money in one strategy, find out why and return to paper testing at least for a while. Last update: 04/2022
Size: 150 pages (6*9)