The Daily Workshop Report
by Robert Sheard (TMF Sheard)

LEXINGTON, KY. (January 27)

Scroll to the bottom for year-to-date Growth and Value Screen results.

Have you ever looked up an Olympic ski-jumping ramp from the take-off point? It's an awesome experience, one that brings back vivid memories of watching Wide World of Sports as a kid and seeing that poor soul fall of the end of the jump ramp in every weekend's opening credits.

If you want a graphic reconstruction of it from another context, just check out the price chart for APPLIED MAGNETICS <% if gsSubBrand = "aolsnapshot" then Response.Write("(NYSE: APM)") else Response.Write("(NYSE: APM)") end if %> for the last six months.

Six months ago, the stock bottomed out at just under $9 a share. Today, it closed at $54. That's a whopping 500% gain since the end of July. Heck, even since the end of December, the stock's been on a rampage. When our Workshop opened with January 3 closing prices, the stock was at $30 3/4. In less than a month, the stock's rocketed to more than a 75% gain as technology stocks surged and the company reported terrific earnings last week.

The reason I bring it up, however, besides the enormous pleasure in watching one of the growth stocks we cover soar, is that with five-stock model screens like those we're tracking, this kind of stellar growth can grossly distort the affect of any single screen. So don't get too carried away with the fact that a couple of our screens are blowing the market away early in the year. The same volatility can work against them just as easily next month.

Remember that if you're using these screens to help you choose a growth component for your portfolio, it should be just that -- a component of a larger, balanced portfolio. Not too many buildings will stand for long without a foundation, and for us, that foundation is the high-yield, large-cap Dow (or Dow-like) stocks. Fool on!

For those of you playing the Thoroughbred Stock Challenge, the new entry form for February's game is up on the website and ready for your submissions. I will accept entries (based on the date and time-stamp provided by the server, so leave yourself some room for slow connections) up until the opening bell rings on Monday, February 3.

Monthly Growth Screens
(Jan. 3 to present)

25.35%         Relative Strength
18.54%        YPEG Potential
 8.64%          Low Price/Sales
 2.38%          Investing for Growth
 2.27%          S&P 500 Index
 0.28%         Unemotional Growth
-1.71%         EPS Plus RS

 Annual Value Screens
 (Jan. 1 to present)

 4.79%          Dogs of the Dow
 3.34%          Beating the S&P  
 3.29%          Dow Jones Ind Avg
 2.84%          Dow Combo  
 1.52%          Unemotional Value
 1.52%          Beating the Dow
-0.53%          Foolish Four