How Bears Hibernate

The harsh February weather kept me inside where I did more than hibernate. I worked on investing research projects I postponed until I had my broadband internet connection at home. While at my parents’ Florida home in January, I waited until after 9 P.M. to use their Internet-phoneline connection to download the data from screens Investor’s Business Daily published only once during January and its weekly screens. When I returned to Ohio, I had data from 22 screens with 40-100 stocks per screen to research.

The task seemed daunting.

Yet, with all that data in one pile, I could see patterns evolving that I might have missed had I looked only at one day’s screen at a time. I could see the same stocks occurring time and again. If the stock was not going to meet my fundamental due diligence once, it was not going to meet it, even if it were in a different screen. I prepared a list of Stocks to Avoid to compare with screened data, and one step of my due diligence became a game of “which of these things is not like the other”. Failing my due diligence screen does not mean someone else can’t make money investing in those stocks; these are simply stocks that I don’t want to keep in my Universe watch-list.

Investor’s Business Daily screened 12,000 stocks down to 880-2200 stocks from which to choose and I chose 35 for my Universe watch-list. I researched those 35 in depth for both fundamental research and technical analysis.

I felt overwhelmed when I considered ways to keep my current notes straight for 35 stocks at a time. I was also stuck on other writing projects due to my inexperience. February 12, I found an e-book by Julie Hood and its website called The Organized Writer, and it has been useful to me for my writing project, Stock Analysis. I followed her suggestions for choosing simultaneous projects and setting up a filing system.

As is the way with so many first steps of an organizing project, both my office and our study looked worse before they looked better. I emptied my file drawers of all project files, discarded what was no longer relevant to the work I wanted to do, put some of my stuff into long-term storage in the garage, and aligned my computer files to match my research files.

I was half-way through The Organized Writer when the February 27 stock market correction occurred. The focus of my writing had to change. This new system helped me adapt when urgent changes and closer deadlines occurred. One priority for my daily writing changed from the project, Portfolio Maintenance, to Trade Evaluations, writing post analysis of the completed trade. Now I am “in cash” until the next market rally begins.