Page 896 - How to Make Money in Stocks Trilogy

152 HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN STOCKS SUCCESS STORIES

began reading it every day. Jim became such an avid fan of the paper that he
would wait till midnight for the truck to deliver the papers to a local distrib-
ution center. As part of the learning process, Jim cut out weekly charts from
the newspaper and glued them to the back of copier paper box lids. Then he
leaned the box lids against the wall and studied the charts over and over.
(These were big names in the market like Amgen and Cisco Systems.) He
also cut out the New High list from the paper. Looking at this list gave Jim
an indication of the overall market health. If leading stocks were continuing
to hit new price highs, the market was robust.
That same year, Jim attended his first IBD Seminar with Bill O’Neil and
David Ryan. Jim started really understanding the importance of fundamen-
tal criteria as well as technical buy and sell signals. He bought every cassette
tape that IBD produced and would listen to these educational tapes on the
way to and from work every day.
Jim realized that one of the biggest mistakes he had been making was a
lack of defined sell rules. The second major problem was that he didn’t have
the proper selection criteria for picking stocks. He also hadn’t learned to get
rid of the underperforming stocks in his portfolio and move more money
into the stocks that were working well. Once he began to implement a few
simple rules, his portfolio returns turned around almost overnight.
Jim has attended IBD Workshops once a year and sometimes three times
a year since 1990. He wanted to gain a thorough understanding of the
investing strategy and base pattern recognition in order to spot potential
leading stocks that were breaking out of sound patterns. He knew that buy-
ing stocks just as they are coming out of those areas of price consolidation
was crucial to making large gains. Jim went over and over his notes from the
workshops to cement the finer points of the system. He wanted to make
money, and his desire to succeed completely overshadowed his previous
challenges.

Learning from a Missed Opportunity
In 1993, Jim observed New Bridge Networks as it went up 600% in just
under a year. He saw that it was highlighted frequently in IBD and was upset
that he missed a big winner. But it gave Jim complete faith in the CAN SLIM
Investing System and made him ready to commit some serious capital.
In 1995, Ascend Communications appeared in the paper almost every day.
This was a true market leader with triple-digit earnings and sales growth. Jim
had bought the stock and was sitting on a nice gain when Ascend suddenly