The Daily Workshop Report
by Robert Sheard (TMF Sheard)

LEXINGTON, KY. (July 15, 1997)  July's half over, so let's take a peek at the new Thoroughbred Fund. The Thoroughbred Fund is my personal and entirely experimental aggressive growth portfolio (not real money, mind you).

As you may know, I use my Sheard Blue Chip strategy for my real-money portfolio, but I enjoy playing with numbers and hypothetical portfolios. The Thoroughbred Fund is one such experiment. Each month I'll be selecting fifteen stocks based on a combination of fundamental factors (earnings growth, earnings surprises, etc.) and short-term momentum (how the stocks have performed in recent months).

To employ such a strategy in reality would require a lot of trading, of course, and therefore would require a lot of capital to keep trading costs from eating you alive. Nevertheless, using the fifteen stocks as a starting point for your own further research might be useful.

Here are the fifteen stocks for July:

Dell Computer DELL 20%
Unitrode UTR 18%
Navistar NAV 17%
Stratus Computer SRA 11%
Medtronic MDT 10%
Shopko Stores SKO 10%
Corrections Corp CXC 7%
Dekalb Genetics DKB 4%
Michael Foods MIKL 3%
Timberland TBL 2%
Core Inds CRI 0%
PACCAR PCAR -1%
CKE Restaurants CKR -2%
Frontier Ins Group FTR -3%
Smithfield Foods SFDS -17%

Thoroughbred Fund 5%
S&P 500 Index 5%

With the exception of SMITHFIELD FOODS <% if gsSubBrand = "aolsnapshot" then Response.Write("(Nasdaq: SFDS)") else Response.Write("(Nasdaq: SFDS)") end if %>, which has been getting hammered of late, the portfolio's doing fairly well, keeping pace with the S&P 500, but it's early days yet. As these are smaller stocks than my Blue Chip picks, and working partly on momentum, they will obviously be quite a bit more volatile. I'll keep you posted as the month closes out and I'll be posting the list for August sometime during the final days of July. Stay tuned.

Monthly Growth Screens
(Jan. 3 to present)
45.99%  Relative Strength  
23.76%  S&P 500 Index  
14.73%  Unemotional Growth  
13.56%  Investing for Growth  
12.97%  Low Price/Sales  
 3.03%  EPS Plus RS  
 2.86%  YPEG Potential  
-10.89%  Formula 90  

Annual Value Screens
(Jan. 1 to present)
23.69%  Dow Jones Ind Avg  
19.85%  Beating the S&P  
17.47%  Dogs of the Dow  
14.56%  Unemotional Value  
14.56%  Beating the Dow  
12.09%  Dow Combo  
 2.50%  Foolish Four