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2022 was an excellent year for me. OK, I didn’t make as much from my investments as I did in 2020 or 2021—who did?—but a 22% return isn't bad. But more important than how much I earned is how much I learned. Was this a better year than most? I…

2022 was an excellent year for me. OK, I didn’t make as much from my investments as I did in 2020 or 2021—who did?—but I made more than I made in 2019. I ended up making a cool million dollars, up 22%. But more important than how much I earned…

I recently performed a study of over fifty different value factors to see which performed the best. (Admittedly, a lot of them are similar.) The results surprised me. Method I conducted the study using a web-based stock research company called Portfolio123. Here’s my methodology. (This gets a bit technical; feel…

When we trade individual stocks, we incur transaction costs. The purpose of this article is to explain these costs, quantify them, and help you avoid them. First, I’ll classify them into four types: market impact costs; spread costs; getting bad fills; and commissions and taxes. Market Impact The market impact…

Did you know that European stocks are easier to profitably trade than North American ones? That seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Information about them seems hard to find. Most stock-oriented websites don’t cover them: European stocks are only listed if they have ADR tickers, and frequently there’s nothing written about them.…

When I invest in a company, I try to look at it from every angle I can. But obviously, some angles are more important than others. In this article I’ll discuss the factors that are most important to me. I’m not really a buy-and-hold investor. I like to buy companies…

This is the fourth and last article in a series; here is the first (on factor design); here is the second (on designing ranking systems); and here is the third (on principles of backtesting). I’ve been using a fundamentals- and ranking-based strategy for stock picking since 2015, and since then…

This is the third article in a series; here is the first and here is the second. I've been using a fundamentals- and ranking-based strategy for stock picking since 2015, and since then my compound average growth rate is 48%. So I can attest that a fundamentals-based strategy can really…

This is the second article in a series; here is the first. I’ve been using a fundamentals- and ranking-based strategy for stock picking since 2015, and since then my compound average growth rate is 47%. So I can attest that a fundamentals-based strategy can really work. My previous article in…

The Netflix Prize The Netflix Prize was a competition begun in 2006 to predict user ratings for films. Competitors were given ratings scrubbed of information about the users, and were challenged to find, using machine-learning methods, an algorithm based only on the raw data. Netflix provided each team with about…