The Daily Workshop Report
by Robert Sheard (TMF Sheard)

LEXINGTON, KY. (Apr. 7, 1997)

Today marks the first day of our new "month" and "quarter" in the Workshop. The monthly and quarterly screens, then, will be identical for the next month, so don't be thrown by the duplication in holdings.

Also, since we're now moving into the second quarter, I've broken out the semi-annual (or bi-annual) holdings as well. These are the stocks held since the beginning of the year. ("Bi-annual" and "semi-annual" are equivalent, incidentally. It's "biennial" that means every two years.)

Keep in mind that at the beginning of each period, all of the screen holdings are theoretically rebalanced. That is, we assume an equal-dollar position in each stock within the portfolio at the beginning of the month. This accomplishes two things, one theoretical, one practical.

In theoretical terms, I feel it's good policy to spread the risk evenly among all of one's holdings at each updating. When a single stock grows to be too large a percentage of any portfolio, the risk of its collapsing and dragging down the whole portfolio increases dramatically.

In practical terms, it allows us to follow these models without regard to number of shares. We can simply take the average of the several stocks' gains/losses and get an accurate total portfolio return for that period. Then the successive period returns are compounded for an annual return that mimics an actual portfolio (excluding trading costs).

I've made one correction to the returns you should know about. I've been picking up the old quotation for SCI SYSTEMS <% if gsSubBrand = "aolsnapshot" then Response.Write("(NYSE: SCI)") else Response.Write("(NYSE: SCI)") end if %> instead of its new listing on the big board, so my returns for it have been off recently. That's corrected as of today.

On a regretful note, I will have to reduce the frequency of the rankings and database update to monthly instead of weekly. With the structural changes here at the Fool, time is more than ever at a premium. I hope we'll be able to offer the database weekly again in the future, but for now, I'll update it only on weekends when our monthly updates are due.

Monthly Growth Screens
(Jan. 3 to present)
 17.33%  Relative Strength  
  5.92%  YPEG Potential  
  1.88%  Low Price/Sales  
  1.88%  S&P 500 Index  
 -3.39%  Investing for Growth  
-13.20%  EPS Plus RS  
-20.42%  Formula 90  
-23.12%  Unemotional Growth  

Annual Value Screens
(Jan. 1 to present)
 4.30%  Dogs of the Dow  
 2.96%  Beating the S&P  
 1.67%  Dow Jones Ind Avg  
-3.09%  Dow Combo  
-3.68%  Unemotional Value  
-3.68%  Beating the Dow  
-6.76%  Foolish Four