Don't Blind Date. Get Smart and Have More Fun
When I first considered buying stocks, it was a lot like going out on a blind date. I had plenty of raw data, lots of information, but no idea what it all added up to. One peek at the person gives you a pretty good idea whether or not you want to go forward, but how do can you peek into corporations? And, as anyone who has ever been on a blind date knows, information can be very misleading. "He's got a great personality," usually means he's uglier than the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I had an abiding distrust of the stock market (and blind dates). Wasn't it just legalized gambling? Weren't corporations inherently corrupt? If the odds were against a novice investor like me making a profit, and I assumed they were, why waste even one spot of time on it?
Instead of burying my head in the sand, surrounding myself with cats and eating ice cream out of the container, I turned to something that humans have used to their advantage over the long road from cave dwellers to condo dwellers: I turned to my community of friends. Turns out that a few of my friends had started companies that were very successful. I have a good relationship . . . with numbers, and I know a few executives, but you'll rarely find me shopping for anything anywhere. My friend, Brigitte, on the other hand, loves shopping and hates math. Len understands market terminology. Jonathan serves on a lot of board of directors. Patti has a slew of market experience and information on the most obscure companies you've ever heard of. Diane knows real estate. Vicki, cars. Carol, entertainment.
You're getting the picture. If we could find a way to distill all of our collective experience and data into usable information, then we'd have a far more complete picture of the companies we were interested in investing in. In fact, if one considers all of the publicly available information, alongside macro trends, consumer observations and their own market experience, wouldn't that put an individual investor at a significant advantage in making informed investment decisions? The unique value proposition for NataliePace.com is that our subscribers will have access to all sorts of proprietary information that is completely legal because it comes from the observations of our subscribers. So, I encourage you to network and share information on our bulletin boards.
Forget about illegal insider trading. It's stupid, unethical, and frankly not that effective, as you can see from the queue of execs waiting for their day in court. With the wealth of company stock data available on-line and through the NataliePace.com ezine, the individual investor is actually poised, for perhaps the first time in the history of the stock market, to have a competitive advantage. Employees can anonymously share their employment experiences. Consumers, their buying and customer service experiences. It didn't take a genius to see that KMart was more frequently out of stock, with fewer customers and less employee satisfaction than its competitors before it declared bankruptcy. You can see problems in the numbers after the consumer spending drops off, or you can preview the problems firsthand in the shopping experience. It is perfectly legal to share observations like this, and it is perfectly proper to consider them before placing your buy or sell order.
Obviously, I didn't invent the Internet (Al Gore did). I didn't invent investment clubs or investigative reporting. However, NataliePace.com's unique idea is that that these are natural partners in informed investing.
Forget about blind dates, how many individual investors blindly trusted their brokers prior to the great crash of 2000! NataliePace.com isn't suggesting you throw out your broker, but there's a big difference in taking an active role in your future and blindly allowing someone half your age (in a lot of cases) to control your destiny. Peter Lynch, arguably the most successful stock picker of all time, always maintained that an individual investor could outperform the market, if she invested in things she really understood.
NataliePace.com's test market of 2002 was to be one bear of a test. At the October 2002 low, Nasdaq was down 75% from its March 2000 high. The DOW dipped over 15% that year. Meanwhile, using the investigative reporting strategies that I rely on for my stock picking, my personal portfolio gains were over 200% in 2001. Since NataliePace.com began publishing, in November of 2002, we have annualized gains of over 59% (according to TipsTraders.com), which puts NataliePace.com at the top of the all of the stock newsletters that are followed by Tipstraders (over 690 A-list pundits).
So, is an investment in the NataliePace.com ezine and educating yourself a better approach to investing than the Blind Date strategy? If my dating turns out as well as my investing, I'll be taking a few weeks off to sail into the sunset next year.
©2008 Natalie Pace
Author Bio
Natalie Pace, is adding a splash of green to Wall Street and transforming lives on Main Street. She is the founder and CEO of one of the most respected independently owned financial news organizations in the world. She has been ranked as a #1 stock picker from TipsTraders.com and has partnered with Forbes.com. She has repeat guest appearances on Fox News, Good Morning America, Time Magazine, More Magazine, USA Today, NPR and Kiplinger's Personal Finance. She currently lives in Southern California.
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For more information please visit, http://www.nataliepace.com/
