Workshop Portfolio Launches
Today we announce the stock picks for the new Workshop Portfolio. The 19 stocks were selected using six mechanical investing strategies developed and selected by our Workshop Community. The old Foolish Four portfolio will be one of two value strategies in the new portfolio.
By Ann Coleman (TMF AnnC)
January 5, 2001
Today we kick off the real money Workshop Portfolio. What a week this has been! One of the risks in mechanical investing is timing. It's pretty safe to say that those of you who started or renewed your Mechanical Investing (MI) ports last week got better prices than someone who renewed on Wednesday or Thursday. What the market will be doing on Monday when we make our actual purchases is anyone's guess.
For a while there it looked like Mr. Greenspan's rally would drive the market up and our portfolio would be at a severe disadvantage. But the euphoria was short-lived and today has been pretty grim. We aren't out of the woods yet. But I'm sure those woods won't go on forever. And whenever we do emerge into a sustained rally, I hope I am fully invested with a healthy percentage of my portfolio in Workshop stocks.
The strategies we are using in the Workshop Portfolio were designed and tested by various members of our Workshop community. They are just a few among many of the strategies developed there. Our six strategies were selected with community input -- no, make that community leadership -- and the stocks were selected mechanically by screening the data in today's Value Line database according to the set rules of each strategy.
We have listed the stocks selected by each strategy below. Elan Caspi, who is far better suited to this than I, ran the screens and will be making the initial stock purchases on Monday. For the record, the Workshop portfolio is my money, so if you catch me hyping... uhh, what companies are we buying? In the Workshop the strategy is the stock.
Hey, Fools! Can I interest you in donating a few minutes of your time to a very important survey we have designed for Foolish Workshop readers only? As you have probably noticed, the dot-coms of the world (those that are still in business) are allocating resources very carefully these days. We want to serve our readers efficiently and this survey will help us do that. It's really important. Just click here and let us know what you think.
On a less coercive note, I just have to point out that the much beleaguered Foolish Four strategy has been holding up very well during this extremely volatile week. At close of business yesterday, the portfolio was up 12% for the year -- or for the week, or for three days, depending on how you want to look at it. Of course, today it gave back half of that, but it is still beating all of the indices by a hefty margin except for its benchmark, the Dow, and it is very close to the Dow.
Of course we are only talking about four days and as we all know only too well, four days (or even two years, really) don't mean much to a long-term investor. What excites me is that we are seeing the same thing that has happened several times this year -- when the Dow rallies, the Foolish Four rallies higher. We've slid back each time, but when we get a sustained rally I believe that the out-of-favor, old economy stocks will be out in front of the pack.
I feel good, very good, that the Foolish Four is one of the value strategies in our new portfolio.
We're coming to the end--the end of this year's Foolanthropy Drive. Our annual charity drive ends at midnight on Sunday. How about a few dollars donated in Alan Greenspan's honor? (He tried!) I'm going to share a bit more with the Heifer Project in anticipation of getting out of these woods safely.
Fool on and prosper!
