Page 539 - How to Make Money in Stocks Trilogy

408 INVESTING LIKE A PROFESSIONAL

Today, the technology has advanced so far that we can generate the most
complex stock datagraphs with hardly a second thought, and the O’Neil
Database books became a mainstay at many leading mutual funds around the
globe. Initially, each Datagraph displayed price and volume information,
along with a few technical and fundamental data items. Today, each Data-
graph displays 96 fundamental and 26 technical items, and these are avail-
able for more than 8,000 stocks in 197 proprietary industry groups. This
means an analyst or portfolio manager can quickly compare any company to
any other, either in the same industry or in the entire database.
We still offer the O’Neil Database books, with their 600 pages of Data-
graphs, to our institutional clients as part of our overall institutional invest-
ment business. With the advent of the Internet and highly sophisticated
computer technology, however, these old-technology, hard-copy books are
being replaced by our most innovative flagship service, WONDA. WONDA
stands for William O’Neil Direct Access, and it provides institutional clients
with a direct interface to the O’Neil Database. The O’Neil Database now
contains more than 3,000 technical and fundamental data items on more
than 8,000 U.S. stocks, and WONDA allows users to screen and monitor the
database using any combination of these data items.
We originally developed WONDA as an in-house system to manage our
own money. In the 1990s, after years of real-time use and refinement, the ser-
vice was rolled out as the newest William O’Neil + Co. service, available to
the professional and institutional community.
Because WONDA was conceived and created by our in-house portfolio
managers and computer programmers, the service was designed with the
serious institutional money manager in mind. Institutional money managers
must frequently make rapid decisions while under pressure, and WONDA
offers a wide range of features that allows instantaneous access to and mon-
itoring of crucial stock data and related information as the market is moving.
Some of our institutional clients who use WONDA say they can “practi-
cally print money” with the system. These clients run the gamut from very
conservative value-type managers to hedge fund managers. Clearly, no com-
puter system can print money, but that type of comment from some of our
biggest and best institutional clients points out the functionality and effec-
tiveness of WONDA.

Interpreting Dome Petroleum’s Datagraph

The accompanying Datagraph of Dome Petroleum is marked up to high-
light a few of the ways we interpret and use this display of fundamanetal
and technical information. We suggested Dome to institutions in November