Preface
Brace yourself. you're about to see the stock market from a radically new angle. The focus of this book is figuring out which stock is going to be the year's single best performer in the S&P 500 Index. In the period studied here, those stocks have produced one-year total returns ranging from 80% to 743%.
You've read the standard investment approach lots of times. Financial institutions and personal wealth advisors present familiar themes: "Focus on the long term. Diversify. Stick to high-quality companies with dependable earnings and proven management." These are wise words, well worth heeding if you hope for a secure financial future.
But let's face it. Those prudent principles don't even vaguely describe the actions of certain investors. A nontrivial percentage of people who buy stocks are shooting for a monster payday. Not between now and retirement in 40 years but immediately. Or sooner. They have zero interest in "hitting a lot of singles." They're swinging for a grand slam, game over, right this very inning.
The instant gratification style of investing made headlines on the business page and beyond in 2021. Hordes of market newcomers became obsessed with meme stocks. The shares of a few companies with a ton of social media buzz went to the moon-and back, in some cases.
Meme fans weren't thinking about funding their retirement or their yet unborn kids' college education. Fundamental analysis played no part in their "stonk"-picking. Some of these plungers even boasted that they knew absolutely nothing about the companies they were throwing money at. Nor did they care one iota about spreading risk. One influencer advised: When you decide on a YOLO (you only live once) trade, put 98% to 100% of your portfolio in it.1
Aiming for one colossal win isn't a new idea. In every market boom of the past few centuries, sudden and spectacular wealth creation dazzled people who'd never previously paid much attention to stock quotes. It's in the nature of news reporting that a story about a stock that went up by 1,000% attracts more eyeballs than one about an index that rose by 50%. Based on that sort of emphasis, many novice investors conclude that they can strike it rich by putting all of their modest savings into the next company that will fly off the charts. The only remaining detail is identifying that company.
This mindset sounds hopelessly naïve to longtime investors, who have seen countless past highfliers suddenly crash to earth. But the idea that some company will pay off in a huge and lasting way is not only plausible, but almost inevitable. Every so often, a spectacular technological breakthrough creates the potential for astronomical earnings growth at companies that successfully commercialize it.
In an earlier generation, "finding the next Xerox" was the aspiration of working stiffs with a dollar and a dream of joining the ranks of the idle rich. Xerox's patented photocopying process revolutionized office work. Its share price rose 15-fold from mid-1961, when Xerox listed on the New York Stock Exchange, through mid-1965. Even that gain paled next to the stock's appreciation during its pre-NYSE days. All told, from its 1949 low point to its all-time high in 1999, XRX's price increased 4,500-fold.
Many more superstar stocks have come down the pike since then. Reaping huge trading profits didn't always require patience. For example, Cisco's shares gained 195% in 1991. In 1999, Oracle's stock price advanced by 289%. In 1998, Amazon shares appreciated by a mind-boggling 967%.
Neither were sensational short-run price surges restricted to the high-tech sector. Tractor Supply shot up by 301% in 2001. Three years later, Monster Beverage racked up a one-year gain of 332%.
When I first started devoting $50 out of every paycheck to investing in stocks, I wasn't counting on such spectacular one-shot results. My business school education, my training as a trader, and my studies toward obtaining the Chartered Financial Analyst designation all emphasized grinding out steady but modest gains by closely studying a number of different securities.
Then, around 1983, I gained an insight into the bolder approach. At the time, I was serving as my alumni club's vice president for programs. I scheduled a presentation by a financial advisor who laid out a thoughtful plan for patiently building net worth over a lifetime. The key elements included diligently saving money, dollar-averaging into the market, limiting year-to-year swings by owning a balanced portfolio, and being conscious of taxes on income and capital gains.
At the conclusion, one club member expressed utter contempt for what he'd heard. "This sort of thing won't enable you to change your lifestyle," he sneered. To do that, he made clear to me, the attendees would have to invest in more speculative, private investments. He just so happened to deal in that sort of thing professionally.
That thumbs-down review of my speaker selection didn't trigger any radical change in my investment approach. In my personal investing and later, as a professional money manager, I continued to rely on a time-tested principle: Build your wealth over the long haul by owning a piece of the growing global economy.
The evidence is clear: By avoiding the mirage of trying to time the market and by staying away from fads, it's possible to accumulate a hefty nest egg for retirement. How big that nest egg will be depends largely on how much income you save and invest, year in and year out. If astute stock picks make that wealth grow at a somewhat higher rate than the market averages, so much the better.
But my fellow alum's concept of making a big enough bundle to fund a lifestyle change drove home an essential point: The security-minded middle-income couples portrayed on brokerage house and investment firms' commercials constitute only a portion of the investing public. A significant minority fantasizes about fifty-million-dollar houses and five-hundred-thousand-dollar cars. Immediately, if you please. Those speculators' hopes are smashed to smithereens every time the market pulls back from a delirious top. But come the next astronomic rise, another generation of newbies is there to chase the same get-rich-quick dream. And even some who got burned the last time around are convinced they'll make it work this time.
This is an aspect of human behavior that extends beyond stock market manias such as the 1990s dotcom frenzy. When home prices boomed in the 2000s, the dream of homeownership morphed into swiftly parlaying a small stake into a fortune in residential real estate. If this sounds about as feasible as becoming a centimillionaire by employing a "system" to beat the horseracing oddsmakers, that's no coincidence.
Think of the common phrase, "playing the market." That one was around long before self-appointed defenders of the public welfare began decrying the "gamification of investing." Concentrating your entire portfolio in a single stock, expecting that it will hit paydirt and change your lifestyle, doesn't differ in any important way from betting all your chips on a number on the roulette wheel. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had good reason, in 1999, to liken buying a red-hot Internet stock to hoping to hit the one-in-a-million lottery jackpot.
On the other hand, not all of those bettors you see in a casino are putting their lifesavings on the line. Many just find it entertaining to play blackjack or feed money into a slot machine for a few hours. They realize it'll probably cost them a couple of hundred bucks, but there's always a chance they'll get lucky.
The point is that not everybody is truly risk-averse, as financial textbooks generally assume. Some people get psychic pleasure from taking a chance. It's especially enticing if there's an intellectual challenge involved. When it comes to financial risk, the challenge is to find a way to channel the thrill-seeking into a harmless sort of activity. "Harmless" in this context means, "In the worst case, it's not going to cost you more than you might spend on some other form of excitement."
No less an authority than Wharton professor emeritus of finance Jeremy Siegel has said of the meme stocks, "I always recommend to young people, if you want to play with 10% or 15% of your portfolio in those games, fine. But, put the other 85% into some sort of an indexed long-term fund."2 In my judgment, 10% or 15% is much more than is necessary to satisfy the speculative urge. Neither are index funds the only responsible choice for the remaining 98% or 99%. But Siegel's comment acknowledges the reality that investors aren't emotionless automatons with computers for brains, as a lot of financial research depicts them.
No matter how many studies our universities pump out to demonstrate the improbability of outwitting the supposedly perfect equity market, some investors are going to have an occasional fling with a stock that just might turn out to be the Big One. If they're wise, they'll subdue any urge to bet the farm on the proposition. The question then becomes, how should they go about trying to identify that killer...
