Page 655 - How to Make Money in Stocks Trilogy

484 Success Stories

Oldies but Goodies

The third edition of How to Make Money in Stocks featured IBD readers
who achieved investing results or shared how they learned to use the IBD
and CAN SLIM system. We thought we should reprint a few of these com-
ments in hopes they might provide helpful insights for you.
Labor Day, 2001
Dear Mr. William O’Neil and Investor’s Business Daily,
As a huge enthusiast of Investor’s Business Daily and all of your written mater-
ial, I can’t write enough explaining how much your works have changed my life.
I first came across How to Make Money in Stocks in the fall of 1997
through reading reviews of it on Amazon.com. I was living and teaching in
Guatemala at the time, and was looking to get involved in investing and the
stock market. Consequently, I ordered How to Make Money in Stocks and a
few other books, but it was your book, based on historical research, that
intrigued me the most. I reasoned that you had seen both great times and
rough times in your over 40 years of trading, while most other books had
research based only from the 1990s. In addition to that, you used both tech-
nical and fundamental analysis rather than concentrating on just one
method. The other books I read advocated either one analysis or the other.
I was further convinced that your system of trading was for me when you
wrote how David Ryan and Lee Freestone had won U.S. Investing Champi-
onships using the CAN SLIM system.
What complements How to Make Money in Stocks perfectly is Investor’s
Business Daily. I had clipped out the coupon in the back of your book for a
free two-week subscription to IBD, and when I received the paper for the first
time, the whole system made sense to me. Finding the CAN SLIM stocks was
so much easier to do using IBD, and the paper had so many other great arti-
cles, including ‘Leaders & Success,’ ‘The New America,’ ‘Stocks in the News,’
and my favorite, ‘Investor’s Corner,’ that further enhanced my insights into
trading. I immediately subscribed to it, even though $180 was a lot for me at
the time. Then, even though the paper would arrive in Guatemala three days
late each day, I could still use its valuable information for research.
I read everything I could in the paper and decided to use it in my profes-
sion of teaching. That year, as I was teaching English as a Second Language
in Guatemala, I also taught one class of fifth-grade gifted and talented
students.
I introduced them to IBD, and they ate it up. These students, and my
other students later, especially loved the stock tables because each stock is
graded like they are graded, using 1–99 and A through E or F. Students were
always coming up to me and saying things like, ‘Look at this one! It’s got a 99,
99, and AAA.’ I have even taught my students to look for cups with handles,
and they have enjoyed the challenge of that, too.