The Daily Workshop Report
by Robert Sheard (TMF Sheard)

LEXINGTON, KY. (Mar. 7, 1997)

OK, Fools, get out your quirky calendars; it's the end of the month. What? The end of the month? Well, it's the end of our month in the Workshop, anyhow.

Today's the first Friday in March so the rankings at today's closing bell will determine the final results for our February screens and will comprise the opening values for our March screens.

Here's the process we use to update these screens' hypothetical results. The quarterly, semi-annual, and annual screens are unaffected, of course, and continue to plod along using the rankings that were current in January. The quarterly screens have one more month before we update them.

The monthly screens, however, get updated this weekend. Using today's issue of Value Line and Monday's Investor's Business Daily (which comes out tomorrow morning), we'll generate the new rankings and re-balance each of the monthly screens. To begin our March period, we assume that all the stocks begin with equal-dollar investments again, and the year-to-date returns are calculated as compounded returns. That is, if we assume a base amount of 100 and the screen earned 10% in January, it starts February with a base of 110 rather than 100. If in February, the screen dropped 7%, that loss comes from the new base (110). So the result after February would be a new base for March of 102.3.

By using this kind of simple base and the assumption of equal-dollar investments each month, we can track accurate returns (excluding trading costs) without having to calculate dollars and cents and share amounts.

The full database and updated rankings will be posted by noon on Sunday on our AOL site. For those of you reading on our Web site, our Web staff will post them on Monday. While I'm discussing the database, let me thank publicly my Workshop partner MF Tools. Jim Stevens has been doing a terrific job in our AOL message folder for the Workshop and has taken over the onerous task of compiling the raw data for our weekly database. If you "see" Jim roaming the halls of Fooldom, let him know how much you appreciate his work; I for one am thrilled he's on board.

Have a terrific weekend, and come Monday morning, we can all peel our eyes off of those NCAA brackets and talk investments again.

Monthly Growth Screens
     (Jan. 3 to present)
   9.56%  Relative Strength  
   8.59%  Low Price/Sales  
   8.08%  YPEG Potential  
   7.61%  S&P 500 Index  
  -4.91%  Investing for Growth  
 -12.52%  EPS Plus RS  
 -17.26%  Unemotional Growth  
 -18.29%  Formula 90  

Annual Value Screens
     (Jan. 1 to present)
   8.78%  Dogs of the Dow  
   8.57%  Dow Jones Ind Avg  
   4.92%  Beating the S&P  
   1.68%  Dow Combo  
   1.32%  Unemotional Value  
   1.32%  Beating the Dow  
  -2.37%  Foolish Four