The Daily Workshop Report
by Robert Sheard (TMF Sheard)

LEXINGTON, KY. (October 21, 1997)

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

It's not surprising that my column yesterday generated a large response. And I'm glad for it, because I can't think of every possibility beforehand. I certainly overlooked one important aspect of our current database arrangement when I suggested we might discontinue (or at least greatly modify) our current schedule -- and that was the obvious (at least to everyone but me) fact that not everyone has access to the raw data with which to generate their own rankings. Duh! Well, strike one for a brain-dead Monday on my part.

Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that the time involved in preparing the current database and the multi-varied rankings we track is prohibitive. But I do have a possible compromise that might serve to make most of us happy.

What I can do, and do it quickly enough that I would even be able to re-instate this update on a weekly basis rather than monthly, is to post a table with something like the following statistics: The 100 top-ranked stocks and their symbols (as we do now), the current Price/Earnings Ratio, the current Price/Sales Ratio, the Earnings Per Share Growth Rate over the Past Year, the Total Stock Return over the Past Six Months (or one year -- I can do either), and the Projected EPS Growth Rate. With that information and the available resources on both AOL and the Web, you should be able to recreate virtually anything we've been doing without too much trouble.

I can generate that table electronically, so it would eliminate the laborious manual updating required by the current table linked to IBD's rankings. The compromise, of course, is that we would no longer be supplying the Relative Strength and Earnings Per Share rankings from IBD, only a proxy for them in the Total Return and Earnings Growth Rate statistics. I realize that won't satisfy everyone, so I'll try it informally for a little while as we approach the end of the year and make any fine-tuning adjustments I see are needed (and possible) while we finish out the current year using the system we've been using. I'll start such an update this Friday in the Workshop Data area, so be on the lookout for it.

If you're using the Investing for Growth screen or the Unemotional Growth screen, I'll still make sure these rankings are available regularly, even if the data the rankings are based on won't necessarily be posted online. I'll continue to post IFG every Friday in this column and I'll post a UG ranking every week, but I haven't figured out precisely when I can and should do that. My mail arrives very late in the day and to post it in Friday's column is sometimes impossible, even using Friday's paper. So I may have to post it using a day-old newspaper, or delay the posting until Monday's column. I still have to think this one through.

Fool on!

Monthly Growth Screens
(Jan. 3 to present)
94.20%  Relative Strength  
41.25%  Investing for Growth  
36.84%  EPS Plus RS  
29.98%  S&P 500 Index  
27.25%  YPEG Potential  
25.45%  Unemotional Growth  
24.80%  Formula 90  
20.16%  Low Price/Sales  

Annual Value Screens
(Jan. 1 to present)
32.15%  Dow Combo  
29.62%  Unemotional Value  
29.62%  Beating the Dow  
28.07%  Dogs of the Dow  
25.83%  Beating the S&P  
25.26%  Foolish Four  
25.00%  Dow Jones Ind Avg