Page 766 - How to Make Money in Stocks Trilogy

Breaking Boards: Successful Trades and Lessons Learned 59

• KEY POINTS •
• Use Leaderboard to save time and find IBD’s best per-
forming stocks.
• Learn more about base patterns from Leaderboard’s anno-
tated charts.

Look for Fashion Trends and Fads

“Surfer Pat” Reardon started his investing adventure by picking up an IBD
newspaper as an assignment for an Economics 101 class at a local commu-
nity college. Pat said he had no idea how this assignment would impact and
change his life.
His original goal was to take real estate and construction classes and
begin a career “buying some fixer uppers, remodeling, and selling them.”
Pat’s curiosity about the stock market led him to read several books: How
to Make Money in Stocks, by Bill O’Neil; How I Made $2 Million in the
Stock Market, by Nicolas Darvas; and Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, by
Edwin Lefevre. After reading these books, he completely changed his mind
about wanting to go into construction. Pat decided he wanted to learn how
to invest in stocks. And so he began investing.
“One of my early successes was with Skechers,” he says. “Their company
headquarters was in my hometown of Manhattan Beach. I saw moms and
kids wearing the fashionable athletic shoes, so I checked the IBD Research
Tables and saw that Skechers had top ratings. Then I looked at their chart
and waited until the stock broke out of an area of consolidation on big vol-
ume. At the time, I was trading a very small amount of money, but I made
20%, and that got my attention. From then on, I was very excited about the
possibilities to make money in the stock market.
“Another stock I found by paying attention to fads was Hansen’s Natural,
the makers of the Monster Energy Drink. The stock had big earnings and
sales and was written about in several IBD articles. I saw institutional
money with heavy volume on a chart going into the stock, and bought it.”
Pat says his learning curve has been steady and gradual: “Going through
several market cycles and gaining a better understanding of bull markets
and the winners that appear in each new cycle helped me make some great
profits in leading stocks.